Rumour: Project Phoenix (Xbox 720) and the X-Engine
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Yesterday we brought you the rumour that Microsoft had not only sent out a new Xbox 360 development kit to developers, but had also included a new X-Engine to make the most out of the system.
Despite our source being adamant that Microsoft had put together an engine for Xbox 360 developers, we are personally under the opinion that it is instead a collection of powerful development tools. This would make the relation to Sony's PlayStation 3 Edge Tools more relevant, since an engine can in fact be more restrictive, which is something Sony caters for with their PhyreEngine.
The significance of development tools are still the same (if not more so) and we'll continue to refer to the initiative as Microsoft's X-Engine, since this appears to be what developers refer to it as.
Today we bring you a little bit of speculation on Microsoft's Project Phoenix, or what many of you might have called the Xbox 720. The project's early technical specs have been sent out to select developers (who are then matching them on PC) and an interesting feature has been tested.
We're told that developer's have booted Xbox 360 games from the Phoenix Project and upscaled them with increased AA (anti-aliasing), AF (anastropic filtering) and generally improved performance. The potential is that the next Xbox will not only run Xbox 360 games, it will improve their performance and graphics (think the PS3's smoothing and filtering of PS2 games).
We're also told that the X-Engine (or what we believe to be a selection of powerful development tools) will also be used on Project Phoenix, meaning that developers will be able to start working on games for the next-generation Xbox much earlier and will achieve earlier gains.
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You may not know it, but Microsoft shipped a new Xbox 360 development kit to studios earlier in the year. One striking difference was the inclusion of one-gigabytes of RAM. No, this does not mean that Microsoft will be releasing a new Xbox 360 with more memory; the new kit instead makes development a little easier.
Like the PlayStation 3 1GB development kits, the extra memory can be used to properly test your game. This was a problem for Xbox 360 developers before now, since extra memory from the 512MB pool would have to be put aside to test their game engine. Developers could of course disable these test features in order to use this spare memory, but that would mean that they wouldn't easily be able to test their game.
Therefore, a certain amount of memory would be sacrificed for their retail Xbox 360 game; this could amount to anything from 20MB's to as much as 100MB's. However, with the new Xbox 360 kit, this is no longer problem, giving that memory back to developers for the first time since the Xbox 360's launch in 2005.
So that's Microsoft's first initiative. Something else might have surprised developers when they received their new Xbox 360 development kit; a new set of tools, and supposedly a new engine. According to our insider source, Microsoft has been working on a new internal Xbox 360 engine, which has been nick-named the X-Engine.
You see, the most common engine used for Xbox 360 development was Epic's Unreal Engine 3. It might look great in Gears of War, but the engine does not shine in every developer's hands and it also doesn't have key features to take true advantage of the Xbox 360 quirks.
Our source explains that Sony's PlayStation 3 tools (named Edge) have been picking up steam, and are now taking true advantage of the platform's make-up, especially the consoles CPU, Kutaragi-san's infamous Cell. As for the Xbox 360, it was lacking an engine that took advantage of it in the same way; a hole Microsoft hopes to plug with their new X-Engine. We're told that the engine isn't just a new set of special effects; it's actually a whole new way to develop for the system: a new first party engine design.
We'll bring you more on Microsoft's X-Engine by the end of the week, but hopefully you can see the significance. Microsoft is hoping to give a boost to its games with extra memory, a new first party engine that takes direct advantage of the console's quirks, and a new way to play with Project Natal. So no there won't be a new Xbox 360 in 2010. Instead the current Xbox 360 will be getting a re-birth that'll hopefully fuel the platform to survive until 2015.
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Xbox 360 - IV, It's good to play together
