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For those of you who are still following the Microsoft Xbox, and any plans for HDTV games, a serious blow from Infogrames. I found out today that Test Drive has lost it's HD support. The following is an email I got from Matthew Guzenda, producer of the game.
This was my email to him:
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And the response:
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Sigh, looks like we're on hold for HDTV gaming a little bit longer.
This was my email to him:
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Hi Matthew! Webke sent me, she said to say! J This is Mike Mullis from Next Level Gaming. She asked you about the HDTV support for Test Drive for the Xbox, and I wanted to follow up with you if you have a few moments. Originally, I thought the game was supposed to be in 1080i, which was a major selling point for me, being an HDTV owner. Now with it not being that I wanted to see what happened, or why the decision was made to just go Widescreen. Or did maybe someone at Infogrames jumped the gun and the game was really never slated to be 1080i. Any information you can give me would be excellent. It was a feature I was most looking forward too. Thanks! Mike Mullis Director, US Operations Next Level Gaming |
And the response:
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It's a little bit of both. Widescreen was always planned because it doesn't cost you anything in performance plus there are a ton of widescreen sets out on the market. You have to do some work because the viewing box is obviously different but it doesn't effect frame rate etc to run it. Running 1080i does cost you some performance and unfortunately it would have dropped us below 60fps. The hardware does do conversion however if you want to run 1080 you have to run in a high resolution. The normal resolution for the test drive is 640x480. When you run widescreen you're still running the same amount of pixels its just chopped differently. Running high res on x-box is just like uping the resolution on a pc game since we were right on the edge at 640x480 upping the resolution dropped the frame rate. In the end as with all projects you run out of time and you drop features from you're wish list. Since 1080i was a wish item but not a must have we ended up dropping support (it also saved us having to buy a hdtv set cheers Matthew |
Sigh, looks like we're on hold for HDTV gaming a little bit longer.