Who will rule the next generation of consoles?

Judging by what the PS4 is going to be like, it won't be Sony...


http://www.metro.co.uk/tech/games/894534-playstation-4-codenamed-orbis-due-christmas-2013-say-rumours

Nintendo. I'd like to see the ipad 3 try and compete with the Wii U.

Nintendo also caters for a very dedicated hardcore market of gamers, those who love Mario, Zelda and Metroid and know those brilliant games aren't available anywhere else.

Judging by what the PS4 is going to be like, it won't be Sony...

Sony's next generation console will be out at the end of next year, but will require a permanent online connection and won't be backwards compatible with the PlayStation 3 - or at least that's what the latest rumours from website Kotaku say.

Apart from the release date and codename the website's unnamed source also provides some very vague technical specifications: an AMD x64 CPU and an AMD Southern Islands graphics chip. The latter is implied to be a variant of AMD's high end PC graphics cards, with the PlayStation 4 capable of resolutions of up to 4096x2160 (far more than any HDTV can handle).

Perhaps because of the switch in graphics card manufacturers, from NVidia to AMD, the PlayStation 4 is apparently not backwards compatible with the PlayStation 3.

According to the source 'select developers' have had development kits since the beginning of the year, with new versions sent out earlier this month and more due at the end of the year.

The final titbit is that the PlayStation 4 will feature some kind of built-in deterrent to using second-hand games on the console. Games will come on either Blu-ray or as downloads but they then become locked to your PlayStation Network account and can't be played by anyone else.

That means you'll have to be logged in and online to play any game, no matter whether they have online features or not - effectively making it an online-only console.

You will apparently still be able to sell the game second-hand at retailers but anyone buying it will have to pay to unlock it, in an extension of the online passes concept of this generation of consoles. Otherwise you can only play a demo of the game.

The rest of the story is filled only with some very tenuous theories about the meaning of the codename (orbis is Latin for circle or orbit), but this is one of the first times anything substantial has been heard about the PlayStation 4.

Given how few rumours there've been, and yet how much has been said about the next generation Xbox, it was assumed that Sony's new console would be coming out at least a year later than Microsoft's.

Baring any surprise announcements at E3 the new Xbox isn't now expected until 2013, which means the two consoles will be going head-to-head a lot earlier than the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 did.

http://www.metro.co.uk/tech/games/894534-playstation-4-codenamed-orbis-due-christmas-2013-say-rumours

.....and to make a game to look like that would be faster than making a game today. Twice as fast in fact

I find that hard to believe. Of course Epic are going to say that, they're trying to sell their engine. Put it this way, if a developer is already using UE3, I doubt using UE4 to create games that look like that will be faster. Even if you have those features in the engine, you still need time to do all the artwork, tweak all the effects, etc. In the end it's still going to take more time in the average case.

No doubt UE4 will be awesome and easy to use. I'm sure it will offer lots of workflow improvements. I just don't think that will balance out the extra work needed to use those fancy new effects and add in all the extra detail people will expect from the next gen.

All that Epic have done is made physics and rules for lighting etc which previously did not exist. This means that what would have taken months to work to get lighting tricks to work (when chracter enters, turn these light on, these off, when explosion happens, turn this on, turn that off etc), now all it takes is for one light source to be placed and the Engine takes over.
This applies to a vast number of things now. Particles, all lighting, textures, AI/event scripting etc. Sure, if you were making a simple game, using Unreal 4 will not be faster, but as soon as you want something slightly complex then this engine is much quicker.
You also have the very basic change of how the engine renders and draws things which is now extremely fast thus you will save months of time by simply not having to wait for scenes to load etc.

You still have to make the artwork that works with those effects. It's not like you can make a relatively low detail model, with a basic texture and make it look awesome in UE4. You still need to give it the information to achieve those effects. Things like specular maps, normal maps, etc. You have to put more detail into these things to make it look better. If you took art assets from a current gen game, and put them in UE4, they would look better, but they probably wouldn't look to the same standard as most next gen games will be.

I don't doubt that making a next gen quality game in UE4 would be significantly easier and faster than making it in UE3. But I do doubt that making a next gen quality game in UE4 would be significantly easier and faster than making a current gen quality game in UE3. Of course for that extra effort, you get even more impressive effects.

Fully dynamic lighting will be nice. Generating static light maps does take quite a long time. So I think that will be a significant improvement, both in terms of how good it looks in motion and development time. But I still think overall, the greater amount of detail expected from a next gen game will outweigh the workflow improvements.

But this is the crazy thing about games, regardless of the graphics, the artwork is always outstanding and has incredible detail, thus no time would be lost with that. Also many games have fantastic textures, however the game engine is poor at rendering them thus again, no time lost there.
And many new features are only a few clicks away from being implemented such as tessellation, procedural water, or correct lighting. Just think about the time it would take to draw and texture a river in Skyrim, and now think that could be done in one click.
Plus as I said before, the actual loading and rendering time is almost zero, so that alone would save months of time.

This means that either games can be made quicker or made to look brilliant at the same cost as games now. Either way, the devs can't lose

Judging by what the PS4 is going to be like, it won't be Sony...

Sony's next generation console will be out at the end of next year, but will require a permanent online connection and won't be backwards compatible with the PlayStation 3 - or at least that's what the latest rumours from website Kotaku say.

Apart from the release date and codename the website's unnamed source also provides some very vague technical specifications: an AMD x64 CPU and an AMD Southern Islands graphics chip. The latter is implied to be a variant of AMD's high end PC graphics cards, with the PlayStation 4 capable of resolutions of up to 4096x2160 (far more than any HDTV can handle).

Perhaps because of the switch in graphics card manufacturers, from NVidia to AMD, the PlayStation 4 is apparently not backwards compatible with the PlayStation 3.

According to the source 'select developers' have had development kits since the beginning of the year, with new versions sent out earlier this month and more due at the end of the year.

The final titbit is that the PlayStation 4 will feature some kind of built-in deterrent to using second-hand games on the console. Games will come on either Blu-ray or as downloads but they then become locked to your PlayStation Network account and can't be played by anyone else.

That means you'll have to be logged in and online to play any game, no matter whether they have online features or not - effectively making it an online-only console.

You will apparently still be able to sell the game second-hand at retailers but anyone buying it will have to pay to unlock it, in an extension of the online passes concept of this generation of consoles. Otherwise you can only play a demo of the game.

The rest of the story is filled only with some very tenuous theories about the meaning of the codename (orbis is Latin for circle or orbit), but this is one of the first times anything substantial has been heard about the PlayStation 4.

Given how few rumours there've been, and yet how much has been said about the next generation Xbox, it was assumed that Sony's new console would be coming out at least a year later than Microsoft's.

Baring any surprise announcements at E3 the new Xbox isn't now expected until 2013, which means the two consoles will be going head-to-head a lot earlier than the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 did.

http://www.metro.co.uk/tech/games/894534-playstation-4-codenamed-orbis-due-christmas-2013-say-rumours

It doesn't sound like you really grasp the amount of work that goes into a game. Artists don't put more detail in the artwork than they need to to achieve what the engine and target hardware can manage. That would be a waste of time.

I'm sure UE4 will be great, but it's not going to be a silver bullet for reducing game budgets.

**** PS and Xbox if it's true, i would turn to PC gaming

The smartphone and tablet market is limited because most people like playing on a big screen with proper controls, they do not compete with the next Xbox or Playstation but with the PS Vita and the Nintendo DS.