Just to follow up on Catherine’s posting. Here are some pictures from the event.

As many of you undoubtedly know, today was the first day of Blizzard’s Blizzcon convention in Anaheim, California. At this conference, gamers from around the globe are taking part in developer panels, battles, and other entertainment. The company is also using this venue as a launching pad for new games.

The big announcement of the day was upcoming World of Warcraft expansion set, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade. According to Blizzcon, “Users can join the Horde as one of the power-driven Blood Elves, or aid the Alliance as a yet-unrevealed new race! Explore the scarred Orcish homeland of Draenor! Delve into mysterious new dungeons, engage your enemies on new battlegrounds, and acquire wondrous new items! Take up dangerous and rewarding new quests for your faction! Train in an all-new profession! Increase your might as an adventurer up to the new level cap of 70, with new spells, abilities, and talents, and meet head on the plethora of new challenges awaiting you!”

Also today, Blizzard, allowed conference attendees to be the first players anywhere to play the newly released Starcraft Ghost. The product premier was kicked off with a competition. Achieving first place and winning the competition was my son, Michael Hoffman!

The conference runs through tomorrow. I will be posting some pictures tonight.

Anyone else attending this event? Post your reactions here.

Tags: Blizzcon

I was the Chief Engineer for the development of the XBOX 360 CPU chip and Tuesday, October 25 I presented details about the chip and how we developed it to Microprocessor Report’s Fall Processor Forum. Here’s some of what I presented. (more…)

IBM today released the specifications of the chip that’s at the heart of the new XBox 360 at the Fall Processor Forum in San Jose.

The chip is a customized version of IBM’s industry leading 64-bit PowerPC core. Some highlights include:

– 3 identical multi-threaded PowerPC-based CPU cores operating at 3.2 GHz enhanced with specialized function VMX acceleration for gaming applications and a high speed 128-bit vector unit

– 1 MByte Shared L2 Cache with custom logic for high-speed data streaming for graphics and system applications

– 5.4 Gb/s per-pin Front Side Bus (with an aggregated bandwidth of 21.6 GBs)

– Highly configurable and programmable utilizing eFUSE technology

The chips are being made at IBM’s fab in East Fishkill, NY, and at a plant in Singapore owned by Chartered Semiconductor, who was a partner in the chip’s development.

Dean Takahashi writes a great post that explains the significance of this announcement to IBM and the technology industry as a whole. Pay attention to his discussion of the close collaboration between Microsoft and IBM that occurred throught the development.

This was a remarkable development cycle. Microsoft was absolutely determined to get the XBox 360 on the shelves globally before Sony could do so with PlayStation 3. As a result, IBM had to accelerate the development process, shaving as much as 30% - 35% off the “normal” development time while holding to Microsoft’s exacting quality and performance standards.

For IBM, this chip - along with the forthcoming Cell processor for PS3 and the chip we’re building for Nintendo’s forthcoming Revolution console - is physical validation of its microelectronics strategy. The kind of computing power used by the NextGen consoles strongly foreshadows where IBM believes computing is headed. A whole generation of developers, raised on the intense visual interface offered by computer games, will look to harness these capabilities to solve real-world problems.

As Takahashi notes of the Microsoft-IBM partnership at the end of his blog, “Talk about strange bedfellows. It’s like the PC wars never happened. And there’s new enemies to fight.”

Indeed.

Tags: IBM, xbox, Microsoft

The second day of the NetGames workshop was a bit more relaxed for participants as the program consisted of just technical sessions (see the preview and impressions of the first day here). But the impact of industry participation on the first day was clear — several speakers (and questioners) referred back to some of the comments by the panelists and keynote speaker in their presentations. Day 2 focused on networking, which is the general research area of much of the NetGames community.

Each year NetGames has a session devoted to how network effects impact gameplay in different types of games and this year’s papers studied the effect of latency on MMORPG and racing games. In addition, there was a session on network measurements of games in which the goal is generally to develop a traffic characterization of a certain type of game in order to develop models or just to gain some understanding of the network behavior of games. This work is a bit controversial in that some folks don’t find much use in just measuring network behavior without some ideas about how to improve that behavior, or identifying the implications. I disagree with this view a little (I’m also biased in favor of network measurement work in general) — it takes quite a bit of effort to do a solid traffic characterization. And though it would be nice if these papers could go further, this first step is a necessary one that, if well done, is enough for a full technical paper (in my opinion).

General feedback on the workshop was very positive. As we hoped, the inclusion of significant industry participation was appreciated by the researchers who are very interested in understanding the prospects of their work actually having an impact in real games. For their part, the participants on the industry panel were also very encouraging. One thing that stayed with me was the comment by Grantley Day that one reason why the gaming industry is overtaking the movie industry is that it has a research community contributing to it.

At CEATEC Japan 2005 Toshiba showed a digital mirror demonstration powered by Cell. The video of the demo shows the Cell processor capturing hi-resolution video images, running a depth extraction to reconstruct the 3D surface using stereo image pairs, rendering the 3D surface with texture overlays, blending the rendered image with the video image, and then redisplaying the finished composite all in real-time. If you examine the Toshiba system performing these operations you will notice that only two chips are used to perform this complex compositing pipeline, the Cell processor and a South bridge I/O companion chip that performs video capture and display. Imagine what the next generation Sony EyeToy will be capable of.

Should the government be able to limit what citizen be able to pay? California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has just signed in a bill that says so.

Terminator bans himself

Should gaming consoles be hackable? Apparently Austrialia thinks so.

Modding PlayStation 2 ok Down Under

Imagine the day when games will use/reflect content in the real world. May be possible soon.

Yahoo jumps on the library bandwagon

Mercury Computer Systems just announced the first-ever Cell microprocessor-based product for non-gaming uses. It’s a Cell-based blade (for IBM BladeCenter servers), designed for use in graphics-intensive environments, like the medical, aerospace and semiconductor industries.

The blade software environment will run on Linux, and Mercury will provide the Eclipse-based open source software framework necessary to harness the Cell BE processor architecture – integrating the compilers, debuggers, math libraries, utilities and middleware in a seamless fashion.

Mercury expects to ship the product in early 2006. You can check out the specs here.

IBM Research is hosting the 2005 NetGames workshop next week at the TJ Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY. The NetGames workshop is primarily attended by computer science researchers from academia who share an interest in understanding networked games and in enabling the next generation of online games. Despite the proliferation of games-related courses in university curricula, gaming is still developing as computer systems research area (this is the 4th incarnation of the workshop). The participation, however, is worldwide with about 80% of this year’s accepted papers from institutions in Europe and Asia-Pacific. The explosion in online gaming in Asia, for example, has resulted in govt. funding for games research which I think is largely responsible for the growing research participation from that region.

This year’s sessions continue some of the research trends of past workshops, and also reflect some new emerging areas. There are several presentations on mobile gaming, for example, describing work in modeling gamer mobility, programming mobile games, and measuring game traffic on handhelds. A new research area that has emerged over the last couple of years is providing auxiliary services for online games. In that context, we’ll have presentations this year on ranking services, intelligent server selection, and content distribution.

Perhaps the most exciting part of the program this year is direct participation from folks in the gaming industry. In the past, the workshop has been light on industry participation which makes it hard to judge which research areas are really useful or important for games publishers or developers . Greg Costikyan’s keynote on the future of mobile games should be very interesting — I’m hoping to hear what he thinks the big problems are in mobile gaming, especially since we have quite a bit of interest in mobile/handheld games in the research community. Also, given the business model for wireless access in the US (i.e., high priced data access), I’m curious if he thinks connected mobile games will ever materialize here. Greg just finished a stint working for Nokia research advising them on mobile games. The panel session should also be very useful for the attendees, as we’ll have varied points of view from the gaming industry including online game development, production, technology, and marketing. This is where I’d like to see the industry give it’s feedback to the researchers as to what work they find useful (or useless), and where they think things are going in the areas of networking, security, voice, and others. Finally, we have a lunchtime talk from David Brandt, one of the lead network programmers on EVE Online, the MMORPG from CCP Games. David will describe the design decisions that went into the networking architecture of EVE, as well as how they addressed scalability challenges. Overall, I’m looking forward to a great workshop this year.

I’ve posted this in the link section as well. It’s an online periodical that focuses on the business side of gaming instead of just the games themselves.

http://gamesindustry.biz/

Gaming has moved from the hobby to an actual career choice for the select few, it seems. I consider myself a semi-pro gamer. Without getting into the boring details of my gaming career, I have a couple questions for you. How does a person who works a nine to five make the decision to change careers to professional gaming? Similar to real life sporting events, “cyberathletes” have paying spectators, coaches, teams, corporate sponsors, salaries and even six figure payouts in tournaments. Most pro-gamers also work as consultants to hardware and software manufacturers in some fashion.

Do you think pro-gaming is a valid career choice or is it a passing fad?

Microsoft’s Jeffrey Young on the topic: Click here.

The CPL world tour, where number one takes home $150,000.00:
www.cplworldtour.com

In most developing nations, broadband infrastructures are relatively immature in reach, capability and reliability. Their problems are magnified by related infrastructure issues such as power, billing and collection. These are particularly true in India.

However, India is expected to leap ahead in advancements as rapid improvements occur across the country. This is driven in part by the Telcos and ISPs who are racing to upgrade and expand their basic services, as well as enable advanced capabilities like online gaming, VOIP and VOD. India will continue to evolve in offering choices for on-demand services in Voice, Video, and Interactive Entertainment.

Gaming is not only about play, it also includes education, social networking, and new business models. For example, universities and e-learning institutions are working together to use casual games to make learning fun (“Edutainment”). There is a natural trend towards convergence of business interests.

Further, games are becoming the most effective way to achieve business and company results by attracting, retaining, and supporting the needs of consumers, most of the development shops are developeing local content for mobile gaming and causal gaming in Flash.

The mobile subscriber base is exponentially larger than the ISP/Broadband consumers (approx: 100Million versus 500K). Mobile penetration in India have given rise to the first wave of mobile gaming,

There has the steady increase in PC penetration due to a number of factors, including: the reduction of PC prices, the reduction in import taxes on PC parts, and an increase in ISP competition providing internet access. Thus, internet access is increasingly less expensive as can be seen by the fall in broadband monthly access charges from USD $100 to USD $20 over the last 18 months. As the broadband penetration increases, India will be one of the key players in online games.