We have the original Kinect and an old Xbox 360 permanently stationed in the living room of the house.
Being able to have Kinect Party or its prequel (Double Fine’s Happy Action Theater) on the TV out there is absolute magic when you need to entertain a group of kids.
Nah I loved it. Was great for watching videos
So, the Kinect got a last minute change from corporate MS that completely ruined the device.
The Kinect SDK is insanely fast, accurate, and fun to use. This is because all of the processing for the IR and depth sensors/etc. was done on the physical Kinect device itself. it has its own processor to handle all of that. And it was lightning fast for what it needed to be. Imagine a kinect that instantly tracks your movements with sub-ms latency/lag. That’s what the Kinect was supposed to be, and the SDK version of it was.
When they made the production/commercial version of it, someone high up without understanding the product thought that people would be able to hack into the Kinect and exploit it to steal MS’s trade secrets and code for how it works if they could get access to the onboard CPU and memory of the device.
So they moved the processing for all the sensors into the XBox mainboard/CPU. This was further limited by a paltry amount of CPU/RAM given to any peripheral device so the rest could remain reserved for the game itself.
This completely ruined the device. It couldn’t help but be laggy as fuck. it barely had any processing/compute time to handle the sensor data in a timely fashion.
Once again proving that corporate MBA fucks don’t know what they’re doing and shouldn’t ever be allowed to tell engineers what to do or how to do it.
Edit: Developed a few custom games and products with the Kinect SDK over Unity3D and it was blazingly fast. This is how I know all this after doing some digging/research as to why the SDK experience was so wildly different from the commercial version.
I always thought that the Kinect was great , extremely fun , with a few limited games
The wii was great too , a bit “clunky” ,
But from the get go the proposition isnt as universal as playing a game the normal way ,
I adored the Wii, it had all the charm of a new nintendo system, but was also basically a Gamecube, it was, for a short time, the perfect game system.
I only wish I wasn’t struggling with the destruction of my life and family when it was in its heyday.
Sorry to hear. Sounds intense.
playing skyrim with kinect was genuinely the best way to play the game
I only remember it allowed you to speak shouts. While interesting use, memorizing made up words was not on my list of fun.
magic sucks because I can’t remember the words.
what a barbarian thing to say.
/s
too immersive for some i guess. made me feel like the real dragonborn
So, the fact they could have done this with any mic you plug in but didn’t, is just too immersive? You’re totally right.
im not sure what youre trying to say
Any mic could have been used to allow us to voice shouts. But they chose to lock that behind an $80 device. By supporting that you support locking game mechanics behind dongles. That’s not immersion no matter how you spin it.
I’ll come back and add if Bethesda would have released that mechanic to all mics, we all would be speaking dovakin like trekies speak klingon. That would have added to the immersion by bringing the game language to life. As is, it was a marketing ploy that only worked on those that had already bought the device. It was not marketed well, by forcing purchase of a new peice of equipment instead of allowing all to access the program, it was never allowed into the actually gaming zeitgeist past a niche novelty.(again speaking of the language not the poorly conceived connect device) See, the actual device and the program that patches skyrim are actually not the same thing. They just locked the program to only slave for that one $80 device. Yes. Very immersive.
so…why havent they done it again?
only other games i even know of that utilize a mic in that way are guitar hero, rock band, and that alien game. but they just detect pitch and sound not specific words
Good question. I honestly have no clue. It’s ridiculous we can talk to NPC’s at this point with our actual voice.
I mean they have mods to add the Voice Activated Shouts to any nexus mod manager. Why is it that Bethesda relies on mods to correct their crap games?
They’re saying that you’re saying the input device was what made it immersive and not the language. What a silly thing for you to say, come on.
not at all what i said but okay. what a silly comment to make, come on
It wasn’t silly. You literally think the konict was the immersive part.
Sorry hit reply to the wrong person 😅 and yes, this☝️
I should’ve added a /s!
They should’ve stuck it out with it included in the xbone. Offering a cheaper version without one split the playerbase and made development of any kinect features in Xbox exclusives infeasible.
We could’ve had finger tracking by now instead of thumbsticks that break frequently.
That and the one thing I thought was awesome - split screen TV so I could play a game and have a live football match or something on part of the screen. That was amazing at the time, I was gutted when they killed it off to get more resources for games.
How did this work through the Xbox? I know a lot of newer TVs can do this but did you have to route your tv cable through the Xbox to get it to work that way?
Exactly that. The Xbox One came with HDMI in and HDMI out.
Lol PIP has been a thing since the mid 90’s
That’s kind of my point, why would you need that functionality in a console if your tv can already do it. Plus having to keep your cable box or whatever plugged into the console so it has to be on all the time.
That was part of Microsoft’s pitch - they wanted it to be the central device. I was in the minority that thought it was a great idea at the time, but then I’d been running a dedicated Windows Media Center PC under the TV for years until that point, so to me it was a shinier upgrade.
The Kinect is impressive for how high tech it is.
The Wiimote and sensor bar is impressive for how low tech it is.
PlayStation Move existed.
To be fair, the six-axis movement of the Move controllers was obviously impressive and a seemed to be a precursor to almost all VR controllers.
This incident made his decision to euthanise his wife far more easier
The Kinect was actually pretty sick, it had limited games though. It was also great for the hacker/maker space at the time, easy mass produced 3d scanners? Fuck yeah.
Are you me?
I loved tinkering with the camera and I also had just a few games.
Played the shit out of Fruit Ninja, though.
My kids were like 3 and 5 when Kinect was released and they bloody loved it. Also Dance Central was superb for drunken adults.
Plus if Alien Isolation wasn’t scary enough already, a Kinect would dial it up a notch.
Definitely limited appeal and the tracking wasn’t great on the 360 version, but for those first two scenarios (younger kids and late night dancing) it was a superb party game.
“If you make noise in real life, then the alien will hear you in game.”. As if A:I needed to be any more terrifying than it is.
Still - it’s a very expensive bit of hardware to implement the microphone feature that eg. the Famicom had, and the ‘tracking’ functionality only benefits a couple of games. Bizarre decision to make it mandatory as part of the console.
What are you talking about? It wasn’t mandatory for any console. They packaged it in with some, so you’d get it in the same box, but you never had to plug it in.
And all the voice functionality worked with headsets as well. Definitely watched old roommates do Skyrim shouts that way for around 10 minutes until the novelty wore off.
Besides, even though people love to riff on it, Kinect Star Wars was actually great if you ignored everything but the Galactic Dance-Off mode. A very competent rhythm game where half of the songs are Star Wars filk? Sign me up!
I love when games themselves are sort of meh, but there’s that one thing in them that keeps you hooked for hours and hours because it’s done surprisingly well for some reason.
When I played FFX I basically stopped playing the story when I found blitzball. I’m not sure if I ever actually finished the game. It was amazing use of 3-D space that actually played really well, at least compared to what else was around at the time.
Actually it is fantastic for 3D scanning: cheap and does the trick. If you want to gift me one, feel free.
This is why he spoiler spoiler right before the start of Silent Hill 2.
This must be a meme from deep down the nostalgia box
