Xbox Series X To Allow 'Suspend and Resume' For Multiple Games At Once (wccftech.com) 53
In an exclusive interview with Gamespot, Partner Director of Program Management for Team Xbox Jason Ronald revealed a new feature of the Xbox Series X: the ability to suspend and resume multiple games at once. Wccftech highlights what Ronald said: [From Gamespot]: "Today, we have the capability of instantly resuming the last game that you were playing. Why can't you do that for multiple games? Many players choose to play multiple games at the same time, being able to instantly jump right back where I was, those are things that we can do with the platform level to make the gaming experience better. It's really about ensuring there's less waiting and more time playing because that's ultimately what we all want to do with the consoles and with the services that we have."
For his part, Phil Spencer (Head of Gaming at Microsoft) wanted to highlight the goal to enhance the player's immersive factor thanks to the high refresh rate (the Xbox Series X supports up to 120 frames per second) and reduced input latency: "So when we talk about things like refresh rate and we talk about input latency, this is all about the most immersive experience game designers can create, where the visuals are stunning, my ability to get into the experience [is] very timely, it's as great as it's ever been with the I/O speeds and the load times we're going to see, and the input and the ability for just my control and activation of my character or of the game itself becomes a subconscious thing and not something that I think about."
For his part, Phil Spencer (Head of Gaming at Microsoft) wanted to highlight the goal to enhance the player's immersive factor thanks to the high refresh rate (the Xbox Series X supports up to 120 frames per second) and reduced input latency: "So when we talk about things like refresh rate and we talk about input latency, this is all about the most immersive experience game designers can create, where the visuals are stunning, my ability to get into the experience [is] very timely, it's as great as it's ever been with the I/O speeds and the load times we're going to see, and the input and the ability for just my control and activation of my character or of the game itself becomes a subconscious thing and not something that I think about."
F5=quicksave; F9=quickload. (Score:5, Interesting)
(Or was it the other way around? ;)
Anyone remember?
Before console-first.
Before pointlessly online games.
Before loot boxes.
Before addictive-by-design game "crack".
Wow... You can save games! MULTIPLE ones!
Is that like when your big advertised feature for Windows 10 was, literally-actually-on-billboards-for-real, that you brought *back* the start menu that you ruined in Windows 8?
Well, I guess remakeism had to come to software and hardware too some day...
I wonder when all of western society will completely stall in an ever-tightening loop of repetitivity, until "intellectual property" has eradicated all of inventive and creative behavior for all eternity.
Re: F5=quicksave; F9=quickload. (Score:3)
They are talking about different games, not different save states in the same game.
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Most PC games support quicksave and quickload and have done for decades.
This isn't saving the progress in the game and reloading it. This is more like the equivalent of task switching in Windows.
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This is even more like having multiple sleep files, and switching between them.
Which is what save states in emulator are: Full state images, so you can replug and resume them.
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you mean you can have a program running and then... start another program without exiting the first? no way, you're talking crazy
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Re: F5=quicksave; F9=quickload. (Score:1)
We went outside and played games in the yard. Even totally unstructured games not organized or directed by adults...
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That stopped working when the police started detaining minors for being unaccompanied in (or in transit to or from) public parks and arresting their parents for neglect on grounds of failing to accompany them.
Police interference with free-range kids (Score:3)
police started detaining minors for being unaccompanied [...] arresting their parents for neglect on grounds of failing to accompany them.
When and where did that actually happen?
I have collected links to news reporting and meta-reporting of police interference with free-range kids in the article "Stranger danger" on my personal website [pineight.com]. For your convenience, here are a sample:
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And you had shit like Monopoly and Sorry. The problem wasn't the physical dice, it is that the games were shit.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re: F5=quicksave; F9=quickload. (Score:2)
The difference is that you had to carry your money to the arcade and it was very damn apparent how much you were spending.
Arcade games were still designed (Score:2)
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I don't think this dumbass is barefoot by choice
Consoles could smooth scroll before IBM PCs (Score:2)
Anyone remember?
Before console-first.
I remember before 1991, when one couldn't expect even smooth 60 fps scrolling of a 2D plane on an IBM PC. Something like the first Sonic the Hedgehog for Genesis would have been unplayably choppy on the PCs of the time, as they relied on a dumb frame buffer, not one or two layers of colored text with sprites over them. It took Commander Keen to get anywhere close to workable scrolling.
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Of course, a few years later pcs would be more powerful than contemporary consoles and it's true that some console-to-pc ports (or games designed with consoles in mind) had limitations that wouldn't been there if they were pc exclusives.
Consoles also had couch multiplayer before IBM PCs (Score:2)
Even so, for a couple decades (1987 to 2007), consoles had a huge advantage over PCs in that consoles could output to a large monitor by default. At that time, large monitors for the home market were low-resolution living room TVs, and high-resolution monitors for the home market were small and made for a single viewer at a computer desk to read and edit large quantities of text. It was difficult to physically fit even two adult bodies around a 14" VIS monitor, let alone four. There were video cards and sca
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What about the shape of that box? (Score:1)
Re: What about the shape of that box? (Score:2)
Yeah, this forces the box out of the cabinet and onto the counter. I know they want their stuff to be seen but I donâ(TM)t. Well I personally donâ(TM)t care but my wife sure wonâ(TM)t be happy.
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Re: What about the shape of that box? (Score:1)
It's time for some out-of-the-box thinking.
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Re: What about the shape of that box? (Score:1)
Not a set-top box, because sets don't have tops anymore.
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They **ARE** PCs. All of the so-called "consoles" are nothing more than a PC configured specifically for video games.
That's why the U.S. Air Force was able to buy a few thousand Playstation 3s, put Linux on them and create a mini-supercomputer.
All of the consoles are now PCs in the sense that people think of, which is to say they have an x86 processor and a GPU lifted out of a desktop design and with only minor tweaks. But the PS3 was not a PC in that sense, because it had an extremely different architecture. That's why it was interesting to make supercomputer clusters out of it. And they were able to do it not because it was a typical PC, but because it shipped with the ability to run Linux.
So in short, not really.
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Consoles have fans for generations now. Even the original Wii had a fan. This new Xbox also has a vertical orientation with a vent in the top, like a square trashcan mac pro.
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Form is a turnoff. I want to sit it in my ventilated cabinet, safe from my kid's hands and their sticky PB&J hands. They'll be putting crayons down the vents for sure.
Forcing it on game devs (Score:2)
This is just something they are forcing on the game developers, to meet their licensing and certification on that platform. They probably provide an API in which to store game state information that makes it a little easier and gives the user some degree of control. However I can guarantee this isn't some "automagic" thing where the system handles this transparently. If that was the case they could have added it to XBox One with a system update (which would require imaging not just RAM, but all GPU RAM a
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This is just something they are forcing on the game developers, to meet their licensing and certification on that platform.
Yes because they don't want to have a half-assed feature that doesn't always work because devs decided they didn't want to implement it.
They probably provide an API in which to store game state information that makes it a little easier and gives the user some degree of control. However I can guarantee this isn't some "automagic" thing where the system handles this transparently.
It's just like what we have today on modern consoles where you can jump back into the system menus with the game suspended and then go back and resume the game, only now you can do it with multiple games. It's right there in the (quite short) article:
" Today, we have the capability of instantly resuming the last game that you were playing. Why can't you do that for multiple
"Please insert the disk" on 1980s Macs (Score:2)
Probably the same way it worked on Macintosh computers in the 1980s with frequent "Please insert the disk:" prompts. When you resume a disk game, I imagine it will ask you to reinsert that game's disc.
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Can you put multiple discs into the console at once?
Why would you want/need to do that? Install the game to the highspeed internal storage rather than using the horrendously slow spinning optical drive.
There's no way I'm buying digital when the prices don't reflect the savings on shipping, shelf space and displays, production costs, publishing costs, etc. It's a ripoff.
The whole thing is digital. Do you insert your operating system install media every time you boot up your computer? Or a disc for every program you run? I think it's pretty obvious they'll take the approach of installing a game to the internal storage and not requiring a disc.
I wonder if they learned their lesson (Score:2)
I mean, when I was a kid the NES launched with Mario, the Genesis had Altered Beast (not counting Japan's kind of crummy launch of Thunderblade/Space Harrier II), The PlayStation had Toshinden & Ridge Racer, the Saturn had Panzer Dragoon & Virtua Fighter, hell even the 32x ha
PC (Score:1)
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When was the last time you ran multiple games at the same time on your PC and then alt-tabbed between them? People usually don't do that, and that's not what this is.
This is about suspend-to-disk. Imagine you have a vmware setup where the host computer only has enough resources to run one child VM at a time, and you need to switch between them. You're going to suspend a VM and resume a different one, do some work, suspend that one, resume a different one.
This is about being able to switch between multiple g
Whoopdeedoo, save states (Score:2)