Surfing with streaming media, faster voice recognition, enhanced PhotoShop even anti-aliased word docs all are applications worthy of SSE attention. A big favorite was NURBS for shopping. Downloading a polygon-based model of that little convertible you've been lusting after takes quite a bit more time than the NURBS version will. After it arrives, you can rotate it in real time with a flick of the mouse. Dandy, we think. Way better than Interactive Barney.
June saw us 'gracing' (…ehem) the Microsoft Meltdown '99 conference in Seattle with our presence. The industry 'get together' revealed little in terms of 'publishable' (yes it's those NDAs again!) material but gave us a good insight into some of the directions the industry is likely to head in the next 12months- especially with DirectX7 & 8 in mind. It seems as though Creative has won round 'two' with the recent announcement that Direct X8 will feature some liscensed EAX
sound effects, leaving Aureal somewhere out in the cold. Aureal's official response to this can be found here. Aureal had this to say,
The integration of EAX sound effects into DirectX 8.0 is a positive
development for Aureal and the gaming industry in general because it means
that developers and consumers will now have two clear API choices depending
upon their needs: Microsoft's DirectX for baseline 3D positional audio and
reverb and Aureal's A3D for 3D positional audio and advanced audio modeling,
such as Wavetracing.
Aureal's A3D will continue to provide support for all DirectSound
functionality (including reverb and the new EAX sound effects) to provide
developers with a single, unified interface to the features available via
important industry APIs. Aureal will continue to develop audio engine
functionality and performance, through A3D, to foster and deliver
enhancements available through DirectX 8.0 and beyond.
We spoke to several developers (they obviously requested that their names be withheld) who were slightly taken aback by the announcement. Although they felt that Aureal currently has the better technology, the necessary coding involved when implementing Aureal 2.0 when developing a game was, at best, 'laborious' in comparison to coding for EAX. Much is also expected of EAX 2.0 in conjunction with DirectX8…
ADSL becomes a standard! That's right, thanks to The International Telecommunications Union, who agreed upon a full set of standards for ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line), the next-generation Internet access technology for speeding data over standard copper phone lines will be more accessible. In the past, one had to rely on a local phone company (such as Pacific Bell) to support a proprietary ADSL standard (and there weren't many telco's that did). This agreement also happens to be world-wide and thus foreign telcos like British Telecom, have endorsed the approved ADSL recommendations as the national standard. By the end of 1999, any end-user should, in theory, be able to purchase an internal/external ADSL modem and then get speed data rates into homes at up to 1.5 megabits per second. New PC systems from the likes of Dell and Compaq will also start shipping with Internal ADSL modems in the near future as well. Did anyone mention Cable Modems then?