PS.. is it 5? I think we're on 5 now. PS5

ah that's interesting and totally makes sense. it's a funny kind of AR in that it's not really 'R' - it's 'videogame'. you're not turning your head, you're turning your character's head inside an imaginary world. but that world is complicated too and full of audio sources! something like these bose headphones/sunglasses have dedicated hardware to take advantage of the (very few) AR audio experiences there are: https://www.bose.co.uk/en_gb/products/frames.html

mh's got it, that's basically my understanding of the thing

xp to josh: yeah they did patch BB to perfectly acceptable levels and i did play it, it's just the perfect example of crossing the threshold of annoyance: i paid 400€ specifically to play one game only to immediately put it down and find something else to play because it was just that unbearable

so for once, a generation change actually has at least one thing to genuinely look forward to, potentially two if 3d audio turns out decent

tangentially, I wonder how well this works if someone is deaf in one ear. do you get any spatial sense with headphones?

a lot of the early VR tricks (shutter glasses, old school red/blue 3d glasses, etc) had a lot of accessibility issues in that a lot of technologies straight-up didn’t work for some people. now that we’re just strapping screens to our faces it’s maybe a bit better

well before we get too excited, i mean.. game developers have been using binaural and stereo panning to create the sensation of real space in their games for awhile. as i understand your post mh, this is just sony doing some of the heavy lifting on developers' behalfs in terms of processing. developers will still need to either record and mix binaurally, or use plug-ins to fake it (some of which have gotten quite good). so - not something really new, just an easier route to get there.

for instance, in Last Of Us 2, i wore headphones exclusively because it was EXTREMELY helpful in knowing where the baddies were.

> developers will still need to either record and mix binaurally

they don't, the game knows where the sounds are coming from, it's the audio hardware that then translates that to the appropriate mix for your speaker setup. sony is focusing on stereo headphones at first with surround speakers to maybe become supported eventually, microsoft as usual have been less boisterous in their claims but they also have dedicated audio hardware in their system

stereo audio is not 3d audio because stereo output is the same on all headphones, what these things are doing is adapting each stereo channel to the person who is listening based on the hrtf. given the exact same game, the signal sent to the speakers from the console will vary depending on the listener in order to better simulate the 3d effect

man i don’t think i get it. the actual player’s actual head doesn’t have anything to do with it, surely?

yes it does, how the brain perceives positioning depends on the microseconds delay between sound reaching one ear and the other, phase differences, volume differences, etc. if a glass breaks to your right, sound reaches your right ear earlier than the left, that's one of the ways you know where it happened. how much longer it taks to reach the left ear depends on your head size

sure, there's nothing stopping game developers from doing that now but they'd have to implement it themselves and divert cpu (gpu?) resources from the game to do it. having it be done automatically by the hardware (supposedly the audio processor in the ps5 is as powerful as the entire ps4 cpu) makes it ubiquitous

to be fair the entire ps4 cpu is a piece of shit laptop cpu that was the best thing available cheap at scale in 2013

another point in favour of the upcoming gen, for once the consoles have actually good cpus

but you don’t turn your head in the game! you turn your character’s head!

and your character might be, say, a bandicoot

it might also be a car, which can't hear, yet the game still has sound?

not trying to be flippant, i'm just not understanding the objection, sorry

let’s say i turn lara croft’s head in tomb raider. if the audio sources have been recorded binaurally - i.e. crackling fire, wind, water drops, gunfire etc - it’s possible for the game to feed that information to my headphones in a dynamic mix that responds to the left stick when i turn lara’s head. my own head has nothing to do with it and the technology exists today. what i took mh’s post to mean was that “3-d audio” will provide a sort of turnkey solution to that dynamic mixing and possibly a suite of plug-ins to use if developers didn’t record binaurally.

i mean simple stereo can also provide a level of spatiality but as you know, proper binaural really is something else and sounds amazing.

Assuming Elden Ring ever comes out, I kind of dread it being released on PS4 and PS5 concurrently. Like, it would be nice not to have to buy a new console of course (and I don't care about graphics very much). But it's going to split the player base, and then I assume someday I'll buy a PS5 for some other game and have to buy ER twice. I almost hope it's PS5-only so I don't have to decide.

Is it the kind of game that can share a multiplayer base? Thankfully developers are moving more in that direction, feel like we're finally starting to live in a world with cross-PC/Xbox/Sony/Nintendo/mobile games slowly

That would be cool, I suppose it's possible? I guess today there are people playing Dark Souls 3 together with different frame-rates (PS4 vs PS4 Pro), so hopefully that's the case.

there's some small-time fighting games that have crossplay between ps3 and ps4 so i assume its easy to do via psn

the fact that the cpus are the biggest upgrade this gen but you can't really scale cpu requirements like you can gpu requirements means we probably won't see the full potential of the new boxes for a few years. i assume stuff like better AI and open world simulation is on the table, but only after the ps4 gets jettisoned

> i mean simple stereo can also provide a level of spatiality but as you know, proper binaural really is something else and sounds amazing.

actually i don't know, i've never experienced it, which is part of why i'm honestly curious about the new audio trickery in the consoles

rather than continue to fail horribly at explaining this (if nothing else because i barely understand it myself), i'll suggest watching the last minutes of cerny's ps5 presentation, despite being essentially a PR piece i think it conveys the basics of what they're trying to achieve rather well

The only person I've ever read go on and on about binaural stuff is Tchad Blake. This is a pretty cool demonstration, even through computer speakers:

https://vimeo.com/143727933

no xbox thread so

BREAKING: Microsoft is planning to buy Zenimax/Bethesda, an industry-shaking acquisition that will give Xbox ownership of Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, Doom, Wolfenstein, Dishonored, and more. Story hitting Bloomberg shortly

— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) September 21, 2020

$7.5 billion

Some fun facts:
- This is 3x what Microsoft paid for Minecraft/Mojang
- Bethesda and Obsidian are now sister studios. Fallout New Vegas 2 is now actually a possibility
- Microsoft is now releasing two timed PS5 exclusives lol

— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) September 21, 2020

so Elder Scrolls 6, Starfield, next Fallout, Doom, Wolfenstein, Dishonored etc would be all day one on Gamepass?
that's a pretty big card to play just before the consoles launch ngl

if they went exclusive, that might force me to three consoles by 2023.

yes, the main fallout of this is that bethesda games won't be on ps5 beyond the ones that are already announced for it, just xbox and pc

i guess i don't mind so much when microsoft buys a decent but failing studio like obsidian but mega acquisitions like this one are certainly bad for consumers

yeh feels like a big move towards market consolidation.
was trying to think who Sony could even possibly buy to counter it.
the likes of Ubisoft are too big, Square outside of FF too niche. Capcom maybe with MH and RE?

Ugh, you're right. There will probably be a counter response of some sort.

don't think anything sony could do would have the same degree of impact. jp devs and jp game fans already favor their platform so they don't gain much there. i hope this ends up just being a one off thing

they should buy microsoft. checkmate

shouldn't apple buy sony?

the ps4 library could be cleanly folded into the apple arcade

apple does not care about video games

oh, i was just kidding, heh

i think they do sort of care about games (they managed to get me to pay $5 a month to them for it), but not in the same way that sony does

I'm still kinda scratching my head about Apple Arcade and their long-term visions for gaming that never last. Hopefully AA lasts even three years

its just there to add some value to their hardware & existing services, they have no plans to fully enter games and no interest in the Core Gamer audience that microsoft and sony compete over

Even if they only managed to fund 100 indie games and collapse, I suppose it's a net good

I kinda shrugged at this news, tbh. I didn't even buy or want to buy the most recent Doom and Wolfenstein installments (Eternal and ... Youngblood?), never played any Fallouts, don't even know what Elder Scrolls or Dishonored is. Though I'm sure some of these things must be absolute juggernauts or something, since I *am* constantly impressed at the dollar amounts of this industry. It sometimes seems like a bunch of parallel shadow mainstreams. That is, it was remarkable that, say, Red Dead Redemption 2 reportedly was the highest grossing "opening weekend" release of all time or whatever, and yet the game is nowhere near as pop-culture prominent as a big blockbuster summer event movie, as far as I can tell. Then again, per dollars, I think I saw that Microsoft has more cash on hand than the entire value of Sony, so I guess there are just always varying scales of massive success visible to anyone curious enough to seek the numbers out.

You haven't played any Fallout in the last 25 years?? Sadness.
Skyrim was a massive pop phenonemon, they're still porting that shit 9 years later. That said my copy is still unopened

Oh, wait, Skyrim is Elder Scrolls? I know that one, though I've never played it. Otherwise, I've never played any PC/computer games post Apple IIGS, and aside from early Atari/Coleco systems I've never had any non-Nintendo systems until my PS4. And I've never played anything online. So no Fallout for me.

ooh. ok now i understand your Switch lack-of-release bitterness

RDR2 did seem pretty massive when it came out, but it sounds like it didn't leave a lasting impression. It's weird because a lot of money and time is put into the single player adventure of these games (GTA IV/V too) but if there isn't a successful forever-multiplayer component it's forgotten so fast

Skyrim was amazing. Sank 200+ hours into that game (and similar with F3) but won't be that bothered if future iterations are XBox exclusive as don't have that kind of time these days anyway

And it was only the recent Fallout that was online Josh xps

Also was it this thread where people were on about the combat in Spider-man vs that of Batman?

Been playing Spider-man and the combat is superb and definitely doesn't feel like button mashing to me - my 10 year old has played it even more than me and he's pulling off these beautiful, varied, flowing combos

I do love that a large segment of people I follow on twitter picked, as the one redeeming possibility here, that this could mean a Fallout New Vegas sequel

Re: Batman v Spiderman (allonethread), I think you're sorta right. Batman felt like random button mashing to me, but Spiderman (like God of War) has tons of specific combos. However, in both cases I chose to just button mash, because it was a lot easier than remembering all those combos.

However, in both cases I chose to just button mash, because it was a lot easier than remembering all those combos.

Same here, which is why I don't much like either game (though I actually bothered to finish GOW) (or any Platinum titles that I've tried).

i can't even

Batman’s combo system is less forgiving iirc, so I did a lot more button mashing because my timing is shit

Spider-Man lets you do things a lot more loosely and isn’t based on hitting the buttons at the exact right time