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new xbox game from Panzer Dragoon desginer
dnguyen800 - Oct 11, 2003
  dnguyen800 Oct 11, 2003
I thought some of you might be interested in this quote from the official xbox magazine:

"Phantom Dust is the brainchild of Yukio Futatsugi, the game designer for the original Panzer Dragoon on Sega Saturn. Futatsugi worked on Panzer Dragoon Zwei and the legendary RPG Panzer Dragoon Saga before working at Konami and Sony Computer Entertainment."

It supposed to be an action strategy game, you have 300 spells to mix and match to create your own strategies to defeat opponents. There's also fully destructible environments.

here's a cool video of the game here..., you'll be amazed.

 Des-ROW Oct 11, 2003

 M3d10n Oct 12, 2003
100% off topic, but am I the only one who is fed up with the overusage of streaming WMV in game footage videos?



I tought Real Video was the worse one could go, but WMV has quickly reached the top of my shit-list. Mostly when it's streaming. I don't see any fun in watching a game footage where I only hear the audio and see a blurry still every 10 or so seconds, or not seeing anything if I try to seek through the file.

What's so fundamentally wrong in having the video cache itself for smooth playing, isntead of trying to enforce a real-time stream, no matter how shitty, at all costs?

I am being forced to use WM Recorder to watch the videos, and I hope this one is *not* encoded in WMV9, because I refuse to install that POS WMP9 player.

WMP7 fucked up 'puter more than enough when I installed in my Windows's previous life (a media player that can't be uninstalled? WTF?).

 Resident_Lurker Oct 12, 2003
This reminded me of PN03 a little bit. But it also looked more interesting than that. Hope it turns out good.

By the way, the video played fine for me. What kind of connection are you on?

 sizone Oct 12, 2003
type of connection doesn't matter. anything less than t1 isn't really a big enough pipe to support streaming vidoe. the end result being shit video quality. the whole concept of streaming's a pretty poor idea to begin with. rember when you could download stuff and watch it at you leasure? for media that people intend to make money off of that's one thing, but a video game promo spot is somehting that was never meant to sell anyway so give us a link to a 10-20 meg avi file that looks and sound halfway decent. if yyou can afford the domain naem of x-box.com i'm sure the storage and bandwidth neccessary won't break the bank.

 dnguyen800 Oct 12, 2003
Yo, you don't need to install WMP9 to play videos encoded with WM9 now. Microsoft finally offers the downloadable codec of WM9 that works with everything, so it'll automatically d/l the new codec in media player 6.1. You should also try Media Player Classic at www.gabest.org..., it's very good. ALso get a file called "quicktime alternative" and "real alternative", it'll let you play .qt and .rm files on media player classic and IE, without the quicktime and realplayer installed.

 M3d10n Oct 12, 2003

  
	
	

		
		

			Originally posted by dnguyen800@Oct 12, 2003 @ 10:36 PM



 Yo, you don't need to install WMP9 to play videos encoded with WM9 now. Microsoft finally offers the downloadable codec of WM9 that works with everything, so it'll automatically d/l the new codec in media player 6.1.


Ah, that's good news. I remember posting some flame messages in their WMV9 beta forums when they said they were not going to provide a WMP6 compatible WMV9 codec, and I emphatized it would make the format rather impopular among non-broadband people, because they'd obiviously refuse to download a whooping 12MB player to watch a 1MB or so video, when the strumble upon one.

I'm on a 256kbps connection, and I have yet to find a single WMV file that doesn't flaws miserably while streaming, even the ones labeled as low-bandwidth. Even at uni, with a much broader connection, and during late night, when I can have all the bandwidth for me, streaming WMV fails to playback properly.

And if you try seeking... oh well, it'll be a whole minute before you see any image.

I'm not against streaming, but what I don't agree with is the method of streaming used in WMV. It emphatizes instant real time playback over playback quality by trying to lower the stream bitrate in real time. And the result is unbearable frameskipping under most connections, because the only way WM knows to reduce the bitrate is to send fewer frames per second.

Were it to work in the traditional way, buffer-based, I could click .ASX links without the hassle I'm forced to go through right now (save the ASX locally, open it in notepad, copy the stream link into WM Recorder, and save the stream locally).

(BTW, the Phantom Dust video is WMV8)