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I got to thinking today about a reasonable scenario for a total cost of ownership (TCO) for the current generation of consoles, the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Wii.
Before I start with this article I want to explain that I am fairly hardcore gamer and I own, enjoy, and understand the merits of all three consoles. I wanted to write this article as a guide to those considering purchasing a new console or those who are interested in an overview of the money they are likely to spend on their consoles over a reasonable amount of time.
Right, with that let me introduce the scenario:
I’ve tried to keep the scenario fairly simple, it assumes you are a gamer who wants to play the console online with friends, offline with another friend or partner and you require wireless access. I figure this is a fairly common scenario for most people wanting to get the most out of a games console, which after all, is an expensive purchase. Additionally, since the cost of games is fairly universal, game purchases are not directly considered and do not factor into the monetary values.
Detailed ScenarioNote: Subscription costs for required network services (Xbox Live) are added each year.
Year 1:
Console is purchased. Wii + Wii Sports Console, Xbox Standard (Not Arcade), Playstation 3 Slim.
WiFi peripherals are purchased.
Year 2:
An extra controller is purchased.
Year 3:
Play and Charge kits are purchased for all controllers.
Year 4:
Video remotes are purchased for consoles with built in video playback.
Year 5:
Here we’ll assume the Wii has run out of memory, since it is the only console with very limited internal memory, and a few of the bigger purchases at the store can result in rapid reduction in space. A 2GB card is purchased.
The ResultsFirst of all, the results in pounds sterling, I'll post US charts later. Most of the individual item prices used in the amounts given on the chart are sourced from Argos and Play in the UK and were correct as of writing.
I actually think the results pretty shocking, and not what I initially expected.
Over a five year period you can observe the cost of Xbox Live really hit home. This is obviously where Microsoft are going to be making the majority of their money back on the Xbox over its lifespan.
Anyway, if you are in the market for a new console, maybe this chart is something you should think about before purchasing, will you still be playing it in 5 years time? Will you want to play games on your console online against other people? I can’t answer those questions, but if you do fall into (or close to) the scenario you can expect to pay something at least fairly close to the amount given in the chart irrespective of where you buy your console bits.
Also you probably aren’t going to purchase a console entirely based on its cost. I personally prefer the Xbox, I’m a XNA developer and would cite it as console of choice for many reasons. However, for me personally, the major pros and cons are as follows:
Xbox: CON: Most likely to fail - PRO: Best overall online experience.
PS3: CON: Limited online services, slower downloads - PRO: Bluray player.
Wii: CON: Standard Definition (No HD) - PRO: “Unique” controls (although also sometimes a con).
If you want to see a list of the item breakdown for the UK charts you can view that here.
Rob Hutchinson (Null City Dev and Admin)
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I've not worked on the engine a great deal recently, as I've been working quite heavily on the game I'm writing with the engine. However, after manually building a lot of the particle effects I wanted to use in the game, I finally knocked that on the head and started working on the main particle building editor for Kitae. I thought I'd share some of the early results. The particle builder is fully integrated into the Game Editor application and allows you to build and test complicated and often convoluted particle emitter effects on a design surface, rather than in code.
The particle system in Kitae is probably not as high performance as others out there, however it is incredibly powerful. Any kind of actor, be it sprite, animation, text, tile map can be used as a particle within the system and all particles have the same abilities and functionality as any other actor. This of course means you can perform collision detection and other actions against particles. Each particle has a set of controllers which can assist in giving it additional behavior elements, such as physics. Additionally, controllers are also used to manage the lifetime of particles, attaching a CameraCullController object to a particle will remove the particle when it leaves the visible camera area. There are plenty of controllers and that's the bit I've not finished yet.
Having said the performance is a bit squiff, the engine has no problem belting out 10s of thousands of particles in tests I've performed myself. It's easily performant enough for most games. You would have no problem building weather, fire, wind, or even some water effects with the system. Hopefully I'll be able to put up a lot more video demonstrations of different effects in the future.
Here's the editor in playback mode.
On my nearly 2 year old PC, the above effect, despite there being thousands of off-screen particles runs at way above 60fps without ever dropping a frame.
This effect is simply two particle types (essentially sprites), one sort of firey smudge, which provides the outer glow, and one thick white fire spark which is the white particles you can see the most of in the image. These are sprayed from the emitter at differing force, scale, direction, etc. All controlled from the editor. So you can play and test the effects as you build. The editor already supports zoom, pan and layer effects so you can look around as you watch and build your particle effect. Here's a video of me doing exactly that in the editor:
This effect was the first thing I've come up with, and did so in about five minutes, so the potential is there already to build some very impressive particle effects. Of course, once you're done with the designer, all you need do is drag and drop the emitter onto your scene and activate it in game, productivity WIN!
One quite important aspect of creating particles with Kitae is the 'spawn rate' - how and when after the emitter is activated should particles begin appearing. Because this is tricky thing to implement yourself and 'spawn one every X milliseconds' is not good enough, I've gone for the most robust approach I could think of - timeline curves! Each emitter either repeats or is one shot. The spawn rate is responsible for deciding when the emitter has completed, and of course you are alerted to this in the form of an event or simply by monitoring the state of the emitter in your game loop.
As you can see, over a set time period, you can adjust the rate at which particles are spawned, allowing you to, for example, launch an arrow every 3 seconds from a trap, or produce a dealy timed flame-thrower effect that the player must avoid. I'm hoping that this along with the diversity of the controller system will allow users to build just about any effect they can think of, and test it without ever having to launch their game.
That's enough jabber for now, I'll put up some more interesting effects once I've gotten a bit further with the editor.
Rob Hutchinson (Null City Dev and Admin)
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The Game Editor application has a fully integrated particle editor which allows you to build and test complicated and often convoluted particle emitter effects on a design surface, rather than in code. This particle system is incredibly powerful, Any kind of actor, be it sprite, animation, text, tile map a can be used as a particle within the system and all particles have the same abilities and functionality as any other actor. This of course means you can perform collision detection and other actions against particles. Each particle has a set of controllers which can assist in giving it additional behavior elements, such as physics. Additionally, controllers are also used to manage the lifetime of particles, attaching a CameraCullController object to a particle will remove the particle when it leaves the visible camera area and there are plenty of built-in controllers to choose from.
The engine has no problem producing 10s of thousands of particles and is quick enough for extreme real-time effects. The editor can be used to build weather, fire, wind, or even water effects.
Screenshots
Videos
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I've just polished off the forums I've been working on for the last few days. You should now see a new link at the top of the page for the new spangly Forums. I decided to write my own forums for a few reasons, firstly, because I've never done it before, and secondly because I really did not want to skin, customise and attempt to integrate any of the packaged forums with the already established members login page.
While I was at it, I also built a simple bug tracker for any issues that arise after Kitae goes live. Enjoy! and drop me a line on the Forums.
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I'm currently working quite hard on the particle engine at the moment. So I'm not going to write a lot here today, I just wanted to drop this video on the blog:
This fireworks particle effect was created entirely at design time using the Game Editor. Unfortunately the video codec obscures the nice detail of the effect, but you get the picture. The effect is simply a particle emitter which emits a spark particle. On despawn of the particle, another particle effect is spawned to create the explosion. There is absolutely no user code behind this effect what-so-ever. Nifty! Next I'll put up a blizzard effect.
One more thing, I'm currently re-thinking the pricing stategy for Kitae. Kitae may end up free for development use. More on that soon.
Update:So you can actually see what this is meant to look like before the codec filtered out all the details, here's a piccy:
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