3d games on zune?

[Ricardo Dawkins]

I have a ray-casting based 3D game on my calculator, I'm sure the zune can handle it.

Can you tell me what type and model of calculator ?

Highly reduced ray casting though, the graphics would be pretty garbage, below Wolfenstein 3D engine quality.

why ? that is bad if we cant get at least Wolf 3D quality.

[RandomVictim]

Originally Posted by Ricardo Dawkins

Can you tell me what type and model of calculator ?


why ? that is bad if we cant get at least Wolf 3D quality.

I use a TI-89 Titanium, although i've seen it on a TI-83.
I don't know how powerful the zune is, but my guess is <= Wolf 3D quality.

[Khao]

I believe zune could support things like Mode 7 pretty well for racing games (Mode 7 is the technique used to make fake 3d in the first Super Mario Kart)

[Link9228]

i think that "3d" game made by the zune team was 2d graphics arranged to look 3d, not true 3d. That is possible, but from my experience it's highly annoying to code for

[Ricardo Dawkins]

Why the Zune can't do better graphics than Wolf 3D but some old PMP like iriver H1xx & H3xx series can play DOOM using Rockbox ?

[PopeHannibal]

Wolfenstein 3D had these requirements:

* 286 Computer (386+ Strongly Recommended)
* 528k of conventional memory (2Mb total memory recommended)
* 3 meg of Hard Drive Space (for shareware)
* 8 meg of Hard Drive Space (for registered)

I could be terribly wrong, but I expect the Zune FreeScale process exceeds a 386 in performance, and we know it has more memory than 2 megs So I think we should be able to do a little better than wolf3D actually.

[Spike!]

There needs to be a sticky for this, everyone keeps posting that Youtube video thinking it's 3D and saying "Look he has 3D on his zune I want 3D games!!"

[SimReality]

That video (I think you're referring to this one:

YouTube - MORE XNA ZUNE GOODNESS

) is 3D rendered using a software renderer as described above. It is possible to write one that works on the Zune (as you can see), but it is not easy. Software renderers have to be very efficient on that limited of a processor so you have to be a very skilled programmer to pull it off well.

[RandomVictim]

Originally Posted by PopeHannibal

Wolfenstein 3D had these requirements:

* 286 Computer (386+ Strongly Recommended)
* 528k of conventional memory (2Mb total memory recommended)
* 3 meg of Hard Drive Space (for shareware)
* 8 meg of Hard Drive Space (for registered)

I could be terribly wrong, but I expect the Zune FreeScale process exceeds a 386 in performance, and we know it has more memory than 2 megs So I think we should be able to do a little better than wolf3D actually.

Yeah the zune's specs are better, but it's also bloated as ****. XNA is a horrible system. We(myself, and sorry to disrespect any other programmers on this board) probably aren't capable of making a game as efficiently coded. If we were to build a lean firmware designed for running games on zune it could possibly exceed Wolf 3D graphics but I doubt it would be possible on the bloated XNA bull---- handed to us by M$.

I'm not saying it shouldn't be pursued, I am entirely confident that a ray-casting based engine could run smoothly on a zune, but our expectations shouldn't be that high.

edit after watching the video above: That's pretty impressive. It would be great if whoever wrote that would release the engine.

[Khao]

Yeah it'd be dope, we could adapt the core engine to make efficient fake 3d on the Zune. I couldn't do something with that kind of 3d on the zune that wouldn't lag like freaking hell hehe :P

[SimReality]

Originally Posted by RandomVictim

Yeah the zune's specs are better, but it's also bloated as ****. XNA is a horrible system. We(myself, and sorry to disrespect any other programmers on this board) probably aren't capable of making a game as efficiently coded. If we were to build a lean firmware designed for running games on zune it could possibly exceed Wolf 3D graphics but I doubt it would be possible on the bloated XNA bull---- handed to us by M$.

What makes XNA such a horrible system? I'm not just saying you are wrong, but if you a valid complaint I wish to hear it so that I can relay that to the team. They always want to hear what people think so they can make them better.

[Khao]

Well it's from C# which is by itself a very bloated up system. It's very powerful, very good, easy to code, has an awesome debugger so for the programmers it's the dream engine.. but it takes a faster machine to run things coded in C# because microsoft loves to bloat things up :P
A really simple app in C# takes like 4x more ram than it should because it is really bloated up so I guess it's the same with XNA.

[SimReality]

Originally Posted by Khao

Well it's from C# which is by itself a very bloated up system. It's very powerful, very good, easy to code, has an awesome debugger so for the programmers it's the dream engine.. but it takes a faster machine to run things coded in C# because microsoft loves to bloat things up :P
A really simple app in C# takes like 4x more ram than it should because it is really bloated up so I guess it's the same with XNA.

That's absolutely not true. Managed code runs at maybe 1-2% slower on Windows than native code at this point and takes very little extra memory to do.

[TheZMan]

You might want to take a look at this series from May 2005 where Rico (perf guy for .Net) and Raymond (serious old school C/C++ MS programmer guy) go head to head in a friendly competition.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/archive/2005/05.aspx

Of course the C++ guy was going to win eventually but when you see the hoops he has to jump through you might reconsider saying .Net is slower. This was also .Net 1.x

I will concede that there is certainly extra memory overhead in the .Net world but really we are way past the time when we had to worry about counting bytes. The .Net guys really do need to work on that more though so I am sure it will improve.

The other thing to note from the articles is that it really takes an expert to get the best out of any language. Telling a beginner that C++ is faster doesn't actually make their code go any faster because they don't get the concepts and can't generate efficient code or debug it because its just too hard. Most of the 2d games that people are going to make for the zune will be limited not my the technology or the runtime or language but by their own algorithmic limitations.

There is a place in the world for all the languages... having unsubstantiated arguments about what is better than what in forums usually doesn't go anywhere useful....

[cable729]

Originally Posted by LedZepp

Games that arent 3d are still going to be good, check out flash games (in essence thats the kind of games people will make) there is only a couple 3d flash games and everything else is 2d and their interesting/fun anyway.

One 3d game you speak of would be Boxhead, which would be extremely addictive on the zune, except that it would probably be like 100 mb of RAM...