STUNLOCK THE PRESSES: combo breaking news (Part 1)

I will accept nothing short of full PS1 backcompat

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Selectbutton

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it’s probably idealistic/unreasonable, but i was hoping for some gesture towards either back compat for prior generations or a commitment to providing more expansive back catalogue availability like what was available on ps3 psn and radically cut back for ps4 (though it just might not have been the right time to talk about the latter?)

Fair enough, but that’s a microscopically small market; they stopped putting up PSN Classics games because almost no one was making back the $10k in QA it cost to launch it. Microsoft appears to have spun up its modern backwards-compatibility team out of a panic when they realized they had no more first-party developers; I wouldn’t be surprised if they spin them down this generation after they hit the long tail of custom game patches for unpopular games (the ones I actually want to see).

PC emulation remains the only plausible custodian.

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Propaganda Cycle

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Burma-Shave

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the news sucks…

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I just listened to this and I can see where the confusion comes from. Cerny does indeed start talking about how they’ve included the differences in logic between the current and old consoles so the system never loses the ability to play old games like what happened on the PS3 when it lost a physical chip to save costs. He goes on to say that boosting performance is great but that needs to be tested on a game per game basis because it’s just too fast for some games to maintain stability. Then he ends by saying they’ve looked at the top 100 played games and they expect almost all of them to be playable by the PS5 launch.

But did he mean playable in a boosted mode or playable in general? I can see people reading it either way. And this is what the PS Blog says, which also makes it sound like a general backwards compatability thing.

This kind of solutions sucks, even if I get understand why it happens, because no one is going to put in the work to port the weird games no one but five people bought.

@spacetown if you ever read up on any of this I’m curious if their audio stuff was actually compelling at all to you. The second half of the audio talk was focused on HRFT and surround sound virtualization, but the first half was going into their dedicated audio hardware. He even talked ambisonics for a bit, which you brought up the other day. Most press articles seem to be focused on the HRFT stuff though.

Whoops, that blog post really screws it up. The “Boost Mode” language is identical to how they talked about PS4 Pro features, which required specific testing and patching to work, while the rest of PS4 games were left at stock speeds.

It’d sure be poor to not whitelist the entire library at stock speeds if they already have a two-tier system in place.

So in case anyone is confused by Cerny’s borderline word salad on this matter, what this is saying is that, like how the early PS3 models contained PS2 chips, the PS5 contains a hardware copy of the PS4 chip. The difference here is that the PS4’s cpu architecture is built into the PS5’s cpu like a second head, whereas the PS3 just had a whole second chip on the board. When it came time to cut costs on the PS3, they just took that chip out.

If Sony wanted to remove PS4 back-compat from the PS5, they’d have to create a whole new cpu architecture.

boosting performance is great but that needs to be tested on a game per game basis because it’s just too fast for some games to maintain stability

Translator’s note: Some devs tied game performance to clock speed because apparently multiplying by delta is hard

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assuming, uh, this image is from Sony, there sure does look like space for PS3 PS2 and PS1 there

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PocketStation backwards compatibility or Sony is a bunch of cowards

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I nominate YO WE NEED A NEW KOP NEWS THREAD TITLE as the title.

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How many Playstation logos can they fit in that P though? Which consoles can make the cut? Do the legacy consoles have to drop onto an island and duke it in some sort of playstation all stars battle royale?

And yes, that image is from the presentation.

Amending this to

Huey Luigi and the Newsy

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I’m trying to come up with something involving “STOP THE PRESSES,” except substituting some well-known grappling move from KoF or SF, but I’m drawing a blank.

yeah, I mean, more processing power is great, having the processing power to run higher quality ambisonics would really help

we already have various ways to handle making rain a bunch of individual voices; in FMOD, there’s something called a scatterer instrument that essentially takes a list of sounds and will automatically place them in different areas of a sound designer-specified sound field for you, so that tech has always existed in various forms but I guess the increased processing power allows us to do it more often, which is nice, but it only solves that problem as far as ambiences go and as soon as anything else comes into the mix people won’t care about how realistic the rain sounds are

as far as I’m concerned good sound design is still mostly good game design, you’re trying to make it so that the player is paying attention to the thing that they’re supposed to be paying attention to, and there’s only so much tech that can help with that. you’re never going to use sound design to drive player attention spatially because the way players react to things in video game space is so fundamentally different than how people react to things in physical space. the proprioceptive response is just completely different and so trying to mash a framework of “hear a dog, see a dog” into video game spaces controlled by controllers (i.e. NOT VR) just doesn’t really feel like something worth exploring. the aesthetic explorations are way more interesting to me

all of this is different in VR, obviously, but in VR you’re limited by your output devices

and the whole HRTF thing is a sexy term to throw around but you’re never really going to get around the fact that HRTFs are specific to individual people

(for the curious: HRTF stands for Head Related Transfer Function. it’s something that allows you to perceive the direction of a sound source based on the very very tiny difference in time and character of sound entering your right ear vs. your left ear. because there’s a super tiny difference in timing and frequency as the sound travels through the air, your brain is able to take that difference and intuit the direction from that. but it’s tough because everyone’s ears and ear canals and all that are shaped differently, so taking one person’s HRTF and trying to transfer it to someone else doesn’t quite result in a perfect comprehension of directionality)

and even if you’re in an ideal situation where you have a 1-to-1 HRTF match for yourself, you’re still bound by the output device and the resolution of sound it can put out. and that’s not to mention that most output devices are still discrete sound sources that “fake” directionality based on how much signal from a sound source is pushed into a speaker, so the idea of being able to directly model the HRTF of a person without ALSO having one of those super advanced 360 directional sound setups is a little far out there because there’s only so much you can do with HRTF modelling when the sound sources remain in the same position

so yeah I only really care about sound design aesthetic at this point lol

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VR does seem like the best use case where positioning is critically important and they have a much tighter expectation of the user’s audio hardware, which bodes well for for Sony’s continued investment in a niche but it’s a bit surprising to dedicate space on every system for.

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I bought gamer headphones exclusively for Siege and have gotten a ton of mileage out of them (I wear earbuds for everything else including VR and have for 15 years) but that game has like industry leading sound design where it matters a ton to high level play

Y’all are already using this as the news thread. I should just move it to KOP already.

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