mikemariano

Nintendo 3DS

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Is this Wired article for real?

Nintendo’s next portable game machine will be called “Nintendo 3DS” and feature 3-D graphics, the company said Tuesday morning.

Kohler mentions that this will be a glasses-less 3D, which...I actually don't know how that works.

I guess Wario will be throwing things at us?

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I'm glad I stuck with my 1st gen NDS now. Hahaha! Sounds interesting. I'll wait on a price point.

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I want it!

It would have to have a beefy hardware to attract the kind of games that's best presented in 3D. Not to mention that stereo render needs twice the fillrate...

Somehow seems a bit at odds with Nintendo's whole "low-power, low-cost" strategy thing.

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I'll admit, I'm one of those chaps that has scoffed at the idea that 3D is the next big thing. But this, I like this, a lot!

3D gaming on a personal device just seems so much more plausible than on something that you gather round in your living room. Hey, and no glasses!

Just hope its not this:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/62553512@N00/

For example, you'd turn the DS sideways and cross your eyes to see a single 3D display in the middle.

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It does appear to be a parallax barrier type of thing, like what baconian linked to.

I ordered a DSi XL yesterday, but I canceled it when I heard about this. (I may still get it, because it'll probably be a while before the 3DS actually materializes, but I wanted to think about it for a bit.)

I'm a total sucker for stereoscopic 3D. I wish Gunpei Yokoi could see this shit.

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You're all going about this wrong. "DS" stands for dual screens, right? So a 3DS must obviously have 6 screens. You'll wrap it around your head, thus creating the 3D effect.

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Huh. So the DSi XL is obsolete before it even comes out.

Depends on your definition of obsolete. I'm honestly not even going to consider getting the 3DS for quite a damn while considering the DS catalog is robust enough for now, so a device with bigger screens in this generation still serves some purpose.

It remains to be seen that the 3DS will do anything worthwhile until developers really dig into what it's offering. Since Nintendo is stressing that the 3DS will be backwards compatible right from the start, I predict a slow adoption rate by devs.

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Seems like it wouldn't be cost effective to be going through the trouble of making 3D content for DS games. Unless making 3D games is actually easy and cheap or something. I bet there will be a 3D mario game and a 3D Zelda, and then third party support will be iffy. It'd be nice if they'd combine the size of the XL with the 3D capabilities.

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Seems like it wouldn't be cost effective to be going through the trouble of making 3D content for DS games.

For anything already in 3D, it's just a camera hack, surely? No special assets, just an extra camera horizontally displaced.

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Yep. If you get a pair of those bulky horrible 3d goggles, you can use them with a bunch of existing games because it's easy to do. The problem is that you need twice the FPS to get smooth gameplay.

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Yep. If you get a pair of those bulky horrible 3d goggles, you can use them with a bunch of existing games because it's easy to do. The problem is that you need twice the FPS to get smooth gameplay.

That's not really true. There are a bunch of methods for rendering the double image, and there's generally a performance hit, but you don't actually need twice the framerate.

For things to look good with shutter glasses it's helpful to use a 120hz display, but that doesn't mean that the game itself must run at 120 frames per second for it to look smooth. Also, using the shutter method, it's only ever rendering one view or the other at a given moment.

Actual head-mounted displays can generally get away with using fairly low resolutions, or they can flip back and forth between each side or use interlacing so you're not actually rendering two full screens at a time.

(Yes, I'm one of the idiot early adopters who has a bunch of this crap. I have a 3D monitor that uses polarized glasses, an HMD and two kinds of shutter glasses.)

Using the parallax barrier method, the 3DS will only be devoting half the pixels on the screen to each image, which will buy back a lot of performance.

And yeah, it's not that big a big deal to make a game play nice with stereoscopic 3D. You just have to avoid a few tricks that don't hold up when you can see things from two angles at once. Nintendo can publish some simple guidelines for developers to make their games look good.

Whether or not it will be widely supported is still a valid question, though.

Edited by tentaclesex

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Seems like it wouldn't be cost effective to be going through the trouble of making 3D content for DS games.

It seems like you think this is a side step like the DSi, but it appears to be more like a DS2.

This announcement rocketed my in nintendo gaming from 5 to 88/100

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It seems like you think this is a side step like the DSi, but it appears to be more like a DS2.

This announcement rocketed my in nintendo gaming from 5 to 88/100

I think what he was getting at is that it appears that Nintendo is attempting to make the DS2, but it may end up being more like a side-step if third party developers don't support it.

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I think what he was getting at is that it appears that Nintendo is attempting to make the DS2, but it may end up being more like a side-step if third party developers don't support it.

Well, perhaps they won't force devs to implement 3D or have some tools that make the process from normal to 3d easier.

IDK, i simply can't imagine poor third party support for a handheld nintendo system.

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Well, perhaps they won't force devs to implement 3D or have some tools that make the process from normal to 3d easier.

IDK, i simply can't imagine poor third party support for a handheld nintendo system.

I honestly don't think you're reading this right. Since the 3DS is backwards compatible, third parties may simply hedge their bets and invest in the 125 million DS userbase and ride backwards compatibility for a couple years.

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Though there's no reason to do that unless Nintendo thoroughly cocks up the 3D implementation, since it's not difficult to do for developers if the tech is there.

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BOLD PREDICTIONS

  • Professor Layton will point at you in 3D.
  • Phoenix Wright will point at you in 3D.
  • The Elite Beat Agents will point at you in 3D.
  • Bald Bull will charge at you in 3D.
  • There will be no Starfox game.

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It seems like you think this is a side step like the DSi,

Were you wearing a tweed jacket when you typed this?

"What my colleague fails to understand..."

"My colleague clearly makes these assertions based on his insufficient knowledge of..."

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BOLD PREDICTIONS

  • Professor Layton will point at you in 3D.
  • Phoenix Wright will point at you in 3D.
  • The Elite Beat Agents will point at you in 3D.
  • Bald Bull will charge at you in 3D.
  • There will be no Starfox game.

:tup::tup::tup:

On a sidenote, Bruce Everiss:

Another game platform destroyed as a viable target to publish on because of the thieves is the Nintendo DS.

:fart: Things aren't really looking that way...

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You're all going about this wrong. "DS" stands for dual screens, right? So a 3DS must obviously have 6 screens. You'll wrap it around your head, thus creating the 3D effect.

I lawled!

I feel like a gamer cliche now that it's all over the news, but I really WAS going to get a DSiXL, (I have huge hands!) and now I'm probably just going to stick with my DSlite until more details about this new one emerge... With slightly better timing you'd make more money over here, Nintendo! Consumers have already proven their willingness to buy a new, slightly improved iteration of the DS EVERY YEAR god damn it... you might as well milk it properly by playing things closer to the vest.

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