11w ago - Sony Social Media Manager Sid Shuman is here with an interview and videos of Jim Ryan and Michael Denny discussing the upcoming PS4 / PlayStation 4 console.

To quote: After last week's big PS4 announcement, our intrepid Blog manager Fred Dutton conducted a fascinating interview with Sony Computer Entertainment Europe President and CEO Jim Ryan and Senior VP of Worldwide Studios Michael Denny.

Though PS4's price, release date and form factor haven't yet been revealed, Jim and Michael provide some valuable insight into the inspiration behind PS4 - as well as how European World Wide Studios teams like Guerrilla Games, Evolution Studios, and Media Molecule are leading the charge into the next generation of gaming.

PlayStation.Blog: Why did we settle on February 20th, 2013 to announce PlayStation 4?

Jim Ryan: Well, we fixed on the launch window - Holiday 2013. Once that decision was made you have to work back from there and really the main factor is the availability of some great games to share with the world. Once it became clear that we had large number of exciting games to share, this window around 20th February became...

227w ago - During a Nintendo Wii security discussion, Team Twiizers revealed an undocumented processor, Nintendo's ticket scheme, and that Nintendo apparently knew the Wii was capable of DVD playback but opted to disable the functionality.

To quote: One thing that they discovered was a previously undocumented processor in Nintendo's game player. This tiny processor, dubbed "Starlet" by the team of hackers, was embedded on the Hollywood graphics chipset and was described as a "full-fledged NEC ARM system-on-a-chip."

Not even licensed Wii developers knew of the chip's existence or of its role in the Wii's security scheme. Nintendo's secrecy about the existence of the processor successfully hindered attempts to hack into the Wii until its discovery.

In hacking the Wii system, Team Twiizers also came across Nintendo's ticket scheme, which lets Nintendo authenticate whether software is allowed to run on the Wii or not. They pointed out that the tickets allowed Nintendo to save costs and distribute their downloadable software through conventional networks, since it prevented users from simply copying their virtual console titles and playing them on another console.

Another thing they found was that these authorization tickets had an unused time-limit functionality. This functionality may...

237w ago - Sony's semi-official blog ThreeSpeech has posted an article that asks AI coders from a number of studios "how close are we to creating truly autonomous AI characters" in games. To quote:

Part one: autonomy

To kick off, we're looking at enemies who think for themselves. How close are we to creating truly autonomous AI characters, able to react in real-time to player actions and formulate their own responses? Some developers have been experimenting with techniques such as Goal-Orientated Action Planning (GOAP) for several years in order to create 'thinking' beings.

But is this desirable? And is there still a role for scripted AI, in which the baddies perform actions based on pre-programmed, pre-determined elements? We ask the makers of F.E.A.R, Prototype, Dead Space and Wheelman.

Participants:

Sergio Garces Casao, Lead AI Programmer, Prototype, Radical Entertainment
Chris Hecker: Independent game coder
Jeff Orkin: MIT Media Lab, Cognitive Machines Group. Previously Senior Software Engineer, Monolith Productions
Louis Gascoigne: Software Engineer, Dead Space, EA Redwood Shores
Nick Davies: AI Programmer, Wheelman, Midway Newcastle

Jeff Orkin: We shipped the first example of a GOAP system with F.E.A.R in 2005, and since then several...