New Sega Console Fhyzercast

[SegaNews]

That's what i am mainly talking about!

[GameTester]

I am going to Brazil to investigate this manner is more detail. I will hopefully be given access to enter the Sega building located there, if not i will see if i can get an inside source, lets see if their is 'secret' development going on! After this i will be gone for a period of time, for a business trip! So you can expect about a month till any newly gained information from me will be posted here!

[SegaNews]

I am going to Brazil to investigate this manner is more detail. I will hopefully be given access to enter the Sega building located there, if not i will see if i can get an inside source, lets see if their is 'secret' development going on! After this i will be gone for a period of time, for a business trip! So you can expect about a month till any newly gained information from me will be posted here!

We earned enough money for you to go?

[Hiryosuke]

Well that does make sense...I mean look at sony and freerealms...

[stu]

http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/42567/

Apr 16, 2005, 02:55am

Old news but interesting...

Sony Playstation 3 is expected to be released in 2006. The PS3 will feature an IBM processor based around IBM's 'Cell' architecture and a GPU from nVidia. The processor is expected to be based around a 0.10um, SOI, copper interconnect process giving teraflops of floating point performance and low power usage. Storage is expected to come in the form of BlueRay disks. The on-board graphics are based around a custom version of nVidia's NV5x GPU, offering around 50 times the performance of the Graphics Synthesizer in the PS2.

Microsoft X-Box 2 is expected to be released in 2006. The successor to the X-Box is expected to contain 3 x IBM PowerPC CPUs, ATI graphics hardware and a SiS chipset. The three 64-bit processors are based around the PowerPC 976 core. Each processor is a dual-core design based on IBM's POWER5 architecture and will be built using a 65nm process. The 3 Dual Core 64-bit processors will allow the X-Box 2 to simultaneously handle 6 threads. The ATI graphics hardware will be based around ATI's R500 core which will fully support DirectX 9 Pixel and Vertex Shader V.3 and probably DirectX 10. The graphics chip also contains embedded DRAM to allow an extremely high memory bandwidth. X-Box 2 is expected to feature 256Mb of memory.

Sega DreamCast 2 is expected to be released late 2006. The new machine will feature an 4 AMD processors based around the AMD64 Dual Core architecture & ATI's newer R580 graphic's core. The processor is expected to be based on the 65nm, SOI, copper interconnect process and a highly scalable HTT giving teraflops of floating point performance and low ultra power usage. The system will also house a built in 120GB hard drive with SATA2 technology. ATI's on-board graphics are based around a customized R580 GPU, offering around 80 times the performance of the Graphics Performance in the late DreamCast. Its chipset is also based on a modified version of ATI's RADEON® XPRESS 200 Series.Nintendo GameCube 2 is expected to be released in late 2005 or 2006. The physical hardware of the GameCube 2 currently appears to be similar to that of X-Box2 with the GameCube 2 featuring an IBM processor and ATI GPU.

If you read the whole thread from which this article was posted to it turns out that the "dreamcast 2" part was fabricated as a April Fools joke, it seems that some of these old jokes keep on giving laughs long after they become old and stale, which at 6 years old this one is pretty crusty.

As for this article mentioning the "Fhyzercast", in my opinion it looks a lot like another article that was doing the rounds last year in which Yuji Naka expressed a wish that Sega was still building consoles and that he would still be involved in their design, of course even back then the "New Sega Console" conspiracy wingnuts were all frothing at the mouth, convinced that Yuji Naka had just given them the confirmation they needed "under the radar". Of course it came to nothing and it was just Naka expressing a wish to be still a part of designing Sega consoles. Seems to me that this article is merely a badly translated version of that article from last year.

Here’s the original article:

http://www.1up.com/news/sonic-creator-d ... reamcast-2

[stu]

Where did you hear that they were changing their name back to "Sega Enterprises"?

Check user crazietrufis' posts, he has links in this topic showing that SEGA has renewed its "SEGA Enterprises" brand trademark. Here's the link:

http://www.trademarkia.com/sega-73742284.html

Jeez

How do you come to that conclusion? Huh?

Sega are simply renewing the trademark on their SEGA logo, thats all.

[MrSega]

I am going to Brazil to investigate this manner is more detail. I will hopefully be given access to enter the Sega building located there, if not i will see if i can get an inside source, lets see if their is 'secret' development going on! After this i will be gone for a period of time, for a business trip! So you can expect about a month till any newly gained information from me will be posted here!

We shall see if this report leads to anything.

[eduardo]

Article


Yu Suzuki on Virtua Fighter 4 Interview.


In 1993, legendary developer Yu Suzuki and his team at AM2 created the world's first 3D fighting game -- Virtua Fighter. This revolutionary game spawned a series that would become one of the most successful franchises in arcade history. And now, Suzuki and SEGA-AM2 have added to the legacy with Virtua Fighter 4. Prior to the domestic release of VF4 on PlayStation 2, Sega.com talked to Yu-san about the fourth installment, the evolution of the series, and his artistic side-projects.



Sega.com: What was your main goal with Virtua Fighter 4?

Yu Suzuki: Five years ago when VF3 was released, there was a huge group of people playing it. But five years later, most of the casual players had gone on to other games, and it was only a small hardcore market that was still playing it. With Virtua Fighter 4, we wanted to expand the Virtua Fighter community to at least as big as it was before, and to create a good solid community like there was with Virtua Fighter 2.

We've always been able to appeal to the hardcore market, so this time we concentrated on creating a bigger community and appealing to a wider base of people. And with the home version, VF4 should appeal to an even larger group of people. So we wanted to expand the user base to the place it was before with the arcade version, and then make it even bigger with the home version.

Sega.com: Virtua Fighter is a highly revered series throughout the world. Considering the large fan base of the previous games, how difficult was it to make a sequel?

Yu Suzuki: Part of my personality is that I always want to do new and original things. But as far as creating VF4, it wasn't just my ideas or the team's ideas, because the Virtua Figher series has been around for 10 years, and it has a fan base that is very hardcore and loyal. There are strong opinions from the users about the way Virtua Fighter has to be, and what they want to see in the game. So it's about half and half between what the team wants to do and what the users demand, because the Virtua Fighter series has basically taken on a life of its own. For example, a Ferrari has to be red, a Porsche has to be a 911, and VF has to be certain way -- that's the users' image.

Sega.com: With Virtua Fighter 4, do you think you struck a balance between appealing to hardcore and casual players?

Yu Suzuki: It makes it a little difficult if you try to say either "hardcore" or "casual" players, because if you have a million users, and 100,000 of them are hardcore, it's kind of hard to figure out where to draw the line. So rather than make that distinction, we've tried to appeal to as many people as possible, both hardcore and casual. So this way, we are not making a game for just that 10 percent.

With that said, the small group of people that has been playing this game for five years since VF3 are an extremely important group.

Sega.com: What was the most difficult part of developing VF4?

Yu Suzuki: The toughest part was the tight schedule. We added a lot of new features to the PS2 version, but we still had to make it in six or seven months -- and this was our first time working with the PS2. To include a bunch of new features on a platform that you've never worked with before, using tools that you're unfamiliar with, generally you would want a year. A year and a half would have made me very happy! But because we did it in half that time, I think my staff was under a lot of pressure. Because we had a fixed deadline and a feature set that we had to make, I think my staff had a much harder time than I did.

Sega.com: How many people were involved in making the home version?

Yu Suzuki: The number changed all the time depending on where we were in the project, but somewhere between 30 and 50.

Sega.com: What went into creating the new characters found in VF4? What kind of research did your team do?

Yu Suzuki: When you make brand new characters, they have to be distinctive and different from the other characters. This is true not only for the characters but for the moves and fighting styles they use. There has to be something different from anything else that has been in the series already. This helped determine the direction we were going.

We researched many martial arts styles -- kickboxing, Gracie jujutsu, a several different Chinese martial arts -- and we picked styles that matched the characters. Another thing we kept in mind is that the moves have to be kind of flashy, or otherwise they'd look boring on the screen! It has to be like a movie.

Sega.com: Which character is your personal favorite and why?

Yu Suzuki: Sarah. Then Lei Fei and Shun Di. I like Sarah because she is really easy to attack with. She fights aggressively, and you don't have to sit there and wait for an opening -- you can be proactive, and this matches my personality. You can put together your game plan based almost exclusively on attacking, so you can set up how you want to play in a match without depending too much on your opponent's tactics.

Since a lot of people know that I made Virtua Fighter, a lot of people want to play me. And the character that I can basically slack off with and still win is Lei Fei! So if you ever see me playing with Lei Fei, you know I'm not really trying! [laughs]

As for Shun, he doesn't really have any powerful moves, but you can string together a wide variety of moves and play in a very elegant kind of way. I think to win this way is the coolest way of winning! This is something I've thought since VF3. I'm still not very good at Shun, though.

Sega.com: I'd like to ask a little more about the history of the series. How did you first conceive of making a 3D fighting game?

Yu Suzuki: In college, I did my graduation thesis on 3D computer graphics. At the time, I was designing architecture with 3D graphics. Then in 1983, I joined Sega. The Sega hardware up until Virtua Racing was all 2D, but even with the 2D boards we could simulate 3D graphics, like in Hang-On. But with Virtua Racing, for the first time Sega made an arcade board that could do 3D. So at that point, I thought that the future was 3D.

At that particular point in time, the most difficult thing to do with 3D graphics was to show something soft. That had always been a challenge, and I wanted to work towards a way to show soft things in 3D, like an amoeba or a sea cucumber. When I was making Virtua Racing, it was difficult to make a sea cucumber, so we decided to go with something with an actual skeletal structure. If I had made a game concept based on a sea cucumber, Sega would not have allowed me to make it! [laughs] So I decided to do something related to animals with real skeletal structures. For me, a car is an animal, with four legs and bones.

So once I had done Virtua Racing, the next step was to take it beyond that and do humans, which would have applications to all different kinds of games. But I couldn't start with something like soccer, because you'd have 22 people on the field. So I wanted to start with two people, which logically would be boxing or fighting or something like that. Even while I was making Virtua Racing, I was thinking that the next step would be a game with two people. In Virtua Racing, you go into the pit and there's actually people who come out and service your car, which was the first test for showing people in a 3D environment. So even while I was still working on Virtua Racing, I was thinking about the next step.

Sega.com: The last topic I want to cover is not related to Virtua Fighter, but to your artwork that is displayed on the SEGA-AM2 website. I was wondering if you could tell us a little more about this art.

Yu Suzuki: What I really enjoy doing is making things. I really like the word "make" in English, because I think it fits more to what I like doing than the word "create." The process by which I get involved in something and change the outcome of the final product -- that is what I think of as "make." So when a surfer rides a wave, it's like he's "making" the wave. This works for art, for music, and for games.

It just so happens that my job right now is making games. But for me, it's not like I've always wanted to just make games -- if I only did that, it would stress me out! So with what I can't really do in games, I have to channel that into different things, and I found an outlet here.

Sega.com: And how did you create these works?

Yu Suzuki: You can tell by looking at them they are all different. They all have a different feel to them. This is because the way I make them is different every time. Ultimately I scan them into a computer and put all the pieces together. So I'll draw a building or something by hand, then I'll take a picture of leaves or some other texture, then map it onto the drawings. Sometimes I'll draw with paint or crayons or whatever, and then scan that. Sometimes I'll actually write a mathematical formula for a pattern, and add that pattern to an area. Generally, I just use the computer for putting the pieces together.

Apart from this, I've been working on some purely CG art as well. It's a different approach from this stuff -- it concentrates on formulas.

Sega.com would like to thank Osamu Shibamiya for his expert translation and Bryce Baer for setting up the interview.

--Marc Cellucci

http://web.archive.org/web/200302030626 ... _yusuzuki2



http://wayback.archive.org/web/

http://web.archive.org/web/199612192328 ... .sega.com/

[HowlingFear]

Article


Yu Suzuki on Virtua Fighter 4 Interview.

That's all very interesting but what does it have to do with the 'Fhyzercast' topic ? Is there a connection ?

[eduardo]

Article


Yu Suzuki on Virtua Fighter 4 Interview.

That's all very interesting but what does it have to do with the 'Fhyzercast' topic ? Is there a connection ?

I posted only because it is interesting, has no connection with the fhyzercast.