I'm not sure we'd be complaining so much if Sony hadn't announced the Vita.
Can the 3DS be improved? Sure. Is it still a significant upgrade over the DSi? Definitely. And that's the way Nintendo should be marketing it. Non-gamers are confused by the S3D thing, especially since they can't see the 3D on television or in magazines. Even if S3D's the real selling point, back seat it and market it as a DSi on steroids instead. That's how most gamers will be using it anyway.
Right now, as long as Nintendo tapers off production of the DSi in the next 12 months, the drop to $170 for the 3DS makes sense. However, if Nintendo also drops the DSi price to $100 then nothings has been accomplished.
The problem more than just a lack of a killer app, delays, the looming threat of the Vita, or whatever you all perceive to be 3DS' shortcomings. The real problem is that Nintendo's competing against itself in the same market. It's the same problem that Microsoft had Win7 vs XP. Why buy a new Win7 machine when you could get a new machine that had your favorite flavor of XP? By actively supporting 2 OSes, they fragmented the market and impeded early adoption.
Gamers aren't loyal to Nintendo because of their hardware. Nintendo hardware is always underpowered, or at least has been since the mid-90s. Fanboys are loyal because of the system exclusive franchises. Nintendo has to formulate a real plan to kill the DSi. They'll flock to the 3DS by default, especially now that it's at the same price point.
As an upgrade over the DSi and the original DS, the 3DS is superb. Every system could be better. Soon, we'll be bitching about the Vita too. For what it actually is, $170 is a solid price point. I paid the full $249 for it and don't regret it. I wish it had more games, but I didn't expect the system to launch any better than any other Nintendo system. I got pretty much what I expected and maybe a little more since I skipped the DSi in favor of hanging onto my DS Lite.
I'd considered most of those possibilities, but some of the most worthwhile are also the most drastic. Regular DS games have a hard enough time looking decent on a 3DS screen as it is. What's increasing our screen resolution even more going to do to that?
I felt mainly that doing too much with the size/resolution of the screens means potentially removing backwards compatibility with DS games (lest we get even blurrier/smaller) and even messing with current 3DS titles.
The camera functionality and allowing for 3D AA are just about the only things I think are viable without fucking with the games\compatability we've currently got.
Also, Nintendo's recent history these past few years doesn't say to me that they'll actually take large strides to bridge the gap between their handheld and the Vita. Look how long it took them to catch up in the console department with the Wii-U.
The 3DS right now would be great if it just had a decent game library. Once we get some more games rolling in, I'll be a pretty happy camper. I thought Zelda looked great and I'm looking forward to several other announced titles.
Faster processor, that allows for 3D AA, and 3D video capture (currently its limited to 'photos').
Decent cameras. The current ones are very bad, especially the outside 3D ones.
Higher resolution screen to kill off a few more jaggies.
Same size screens like the DS. Maybe they could even meet in the middle, and both be touchscreen 3D screens to one-up the Vita and become a 3D movie screen.
The stylus could be moved back to a decent position on the unit.
Just some of the improvements that could be made. The 3DS feels as unfinished as the original DS in my opinion.
The design is an iteration pretty close to the DS-lite design, a design that they've come to end up with and not change much. Even the dsi wasn't a big change from that.
They will never change the specs, but they can and will improve battery-life( much needed) on any new hardware-iteration. You will never see any antialiasing going on in 3d unless a title has it activated on purpose.
The'll never change resolution or change aspect-ratios, it's going to stay this way until the next console.
They considered having the top screen be touchscreen back in the ds-days, but it just didn't work out or was a good idea in practice.
The gpu would do the anti-aliasing, but once again, it CAN do it in 3d, but game-developers will be chosing performance before antialiasing.
The 3ds is capable enough to film in 3d, they just haven't added that feature yet.
The design is an iteration pretty close to the DS-lite design, a design that they've come to end up with and not change much. Even the dsi wasn't a big change from that.
They will never change the specs, but they can and will improve battery-life( much needed) on any new hardware-iteration. You will never see any antialiasing going on in 3d unless a title has it activated on purpose.The'll never change resolution or change aspect-ratios, it's going to stay this way until the next console.
I'm having no problem with the battery so far, but I guess thats cause I am keeping it in 2D the whole time.
The design wouldnt have to change at all, apart from the screens extending to meet in the middle. If anything, it would be closer to the original DS-Lite because the screens would be the same size.
You say 'never' a lot, do you have Iwate-san on Skype? I would put money on the next model of the 3DS having a higher resolution screen up top. Part of the jaggies I see are definitely down to the screen. They wouldnt have to change aspect ratios (except on the bottom screen if it was enlarged to the size of the top one for the big screen, black bars might do); the big screen would be just for movies, not games, cause most of the buttons would be out of reach for gaming. Again, this was just an idea on how the next model might be improved.
I would also put money on the 3DSi getting a faster processor. The 360, iphone, even the PS3 I think have received better processors in partial updates over a models life time (faster nm etc). I would say developers are also nagging Nintendo for this, so they can get AA working in 3D without a big performance hit.
The 3ds is capable enough to film in 3d, they just haven't added that feature yet.
.....nah. I really don't think it has decent (or any) 3d-video capture capability yet. If you can't play effectively in 3D, how is someone going to shoot at at least 24FPS in 3D? I reckon a faster processor would be neccesary. Having said that, we are both as misinformed as each other on this one. We simply cannot know if it is capable or not, but I don't think we are going to see it on this model. I think they would have announced something if that were the case, to spur on some sales, take some wind out of Vita's sales. I think we will see it on the next iteration though.
The design wouldnt have to change at all, apart from the screens extending to meet in the middle. If anything, it would be closer to the original DS-Lite because the screens would be the same size.
You say 'never' a lot, do you have Iwate-san on Skype? I would put money on the next model of the 3DS having a higher resolution screen up top. Part of the jaggies I see are definitely down to the screen. They wouldnt have to change aspect ratios (except on the bottom screen if it was enlarged to the size of the top one for the big screen, black bars might do); the big screen would be just for movies, not games, cause most of the buttons would be out of reach for gaming. Again, this was just an idea on how the next model might be improved.
Additional extended hardware largely go completely unsupported, just look at the dsi (which had a faster cpu and more memory) and then look at how few dsi games were actually released.
Additional hardware is a nightmare, that's exactly what game developers avoided when going for the console market.
I would also put money on the 3DSi getting a faster processor. The 360, iphone, even the PS3 I think have received better processors in partial updates over a models life time (faster nm etc). I would say developers are also nagging Nintendo for this, so they can get AA working in 3D without a big performance hit.
The iphone receives updates, that's true.
The 360 and ps3 processors have got upgrades, but their capabilities stay exactly the same, they will just consume less power.
Developers will first and foremost always ask for just ONE platform, not having to support several of them.
.....nah. I really don't think it has decent (or any) 3d-video capture capability yet. If you can't play effectively in 3D, how is someone going to shoot at at least 24FPS in 3D? I reckon a faster processor would be neccesary. Having said that, we are both as misinformed as each other on this one. We simply cannot know if it is capable or not, but I don't think we are going to see it on this model. I think they would have announced something if that were the case, to spur on some sales, take some wind out of Vita's sales. I think we will see it on the next iteration though.
You forgot the fact that there is already built in software, and augmented-reality games on the 3ds that does in fact capture in 3d, and on top of that runs algorithms on the input for positioning, and all this in realtime.
The CPU power has little to do with the actual capturing process, especially when it's in raw format, the speed of which you can write the data to storage has more to do with it.
But except for that, there's very little reason to beg for a CPU upgrade on the 3ds where the CPU is already quite powerful (vastly more so than the ds/dsi)
Additional extended hardware largely go completely unsupported, just look at the dsi (which had a faster cpu and more memory) and then look at how few dsi games were actually released.
I thought you said Nintendo would never upgrade the processor. Now you're telling me they did it in the last two years? :poly142: The DSi was released very late in the products life-time... that's probably why the updates were unused. Games studios already had an engine and pipeline working, and their games worked fine. Why waste production time messing with that? I never had any performance issues even with the Zelda games, which I imagine were the most processor intensive. But with the 3DS, even in its current early stages, there is an issue that should concern developers, that being the nasty jaggies.
You forgot the fact that there is already built in software, and augmented-reality games on the 3ds that does in fact capture in 3d, and on top of that runs algorithms on the input for positioning, and all this in realtime.
Exactly, its a real-time run-time environment. Its not spitting out at least 48 raster images to the SD card at something around 450X300px per second. Write speed will have to be improved too, I'd bet thats why it wasnt a launch feature.
I thought you said Nintendo would never upgrade the processor. Now you're telling me they did it in the last two years? :poly142: The DSi was released very late in the products life-time... that's probably why the updates were unused. Games studios already had an engine and pipeline working, and their games worked fine. Why waste production time messing with that? I never had any performance issues even with the Zelda games, which I imagine were the most processor intensive. But with the 3DS, even in its current early stages, there is an issue that should concern developers, that being the nasty jaggies.
Even the gameboy color came at a slightly higher clockspeed than the gameboy, but it was there for the gameboy color only games, it became an entirely new sku.
And as I said, nothing stops developers from using antialiasing, the 3ds fully supports it, but they choose visuals before antialiasing, had the platform have been stronger they still would've gone for visuals before antialiasing.
jaggies aren't as big of an issue for developers as it is personally for you.
And the irony in it all is that the 3d works in your favor, it means that due to the fact that every game has to support 3d, it also means that when in 2d mode, there will be enough horsepower left to do antialiasing.
Exactly, its a real-time run-time environment. Its not spitting out at least 48 raster images to the SD card at something around 450X300px per second. Write speed will have to be improved too, I'd bet thats why it wasnt a launch feature.
Which is all up to the write-speed of the SD card (which is well enough for the 800x240 required) Web-browser, app-store, netflix, all features that aren't a part of the initial launch, yet it is capable of it, 3d videos aren't any different.
Even the gameboy color came at a slightly higher clockspeed than the gameboy,
There was almost 10 years in the difference, course it came with a higher clockspeed :P Bit of a difference between the GBA and DS too! :P
For me, 'AA' definitely falls under the banner of 'visuals'. Doesn't matter if you have the sexiest handpainted texture in the world, if its projecting off a model with hideous jag on its silhouette...
I see what you mean about the battery now, after today; but I think its because I had the wireless on the whole time. Does that have to be on for street-pass?
The only thing I care about are the games. Give me a decent library and I'll be happy. I don't mind that the 3DS is less powerful than the Vita or not as powerful as it could be. It's a nice step up from the DSi and, as a longtime Nintendo hardware owner, that's all that matters to me. Bring on the games and people will follow.
For me, 'AA' definitely falls under the banner of 'visuals'. Doesn't matter if you have the sexiest handpainted texture in the world, if its projecting off a model with hideous jag on its silhouette...
it does, but consider how many people here will be turning off filtering, and posting incredible things in the low poly thread, without any anti-aliasing.
You'll find the games on the console market vastly dominated by non anti-aliased, because developers will always pick other things before anti-aliasing when they have to make the choice.
But once again, look back at what I said about the 2d mode on 3ds, you wont get that on any other console, consider 2d mode an "anti-aliasing" mode JUST for you!
I see what you mean about the battery now, after today; but I think its because I had the wireless on the whole time. Does that have to be on for street-pass?
Yeah, it's a collection of things that will affect batterylife, wireless is one of them, turning it off can save you battery, but street-pass wont functino without it.
the 3ds has around a 3-h5 batterylife (depending on how you manage different settings)
the DS does 6-10h.
This is a pretty stupid question but does the 3D effect work on DS titles too?
You know, I can actually see this happening but it wont be as you think.
The DS uses a 4 layer system when rendering text over video or sprites on a background and so on and so on, each have their own rendering priority. If they do plan on doing 3d for regular ds games then it would probably exploit this and allow for a more planer 3d effect.
You know, I can actually see this happening but it wont be as you think.
The DS uses a 4 layer system when rendering text over video or sprites on a background and so on and so on, each have their own rendering priority. If they do plan on doing 3d for regular ds games then it would probably exploit this and allow for a more planer 3d effect.
That's true for games using the 2D engine but what about games rendered in pure 3D? There's no such thing like a layer system in 3D games. The DS games I worked on used dual 3D for everything (not optimal but we were tied to engine restrictions), so we didn't even touch the layer system other than using it for rendering the hud and texts. A lot of games that I played also employed dual 3D, even for rendering pure 2D screens.
I wonder what kind of preparations (if at all) are needed to render games in stereoscopic 3D... If it's indeed possible that would be a nice feature to attract current DS owners.
That's true for games using the 2D engine but what about games rendered in pure 3D? There's no such thing like a layer system in 3D games. The DS games I worked on used dual 3D for everything (not optimal but we were tied to engine restrictions), so we didn't even touch the layer system other than using it for rendering the hud and texts. A lot of games that I played also employed dual 3D, even for rendering pure 2D screens.
I wonder what kind of preparations (if at all) are needed to render games in stereoscopic 3D... If it's indeed possible that would be a nice feature to attract current DS owners.
Technically it is possible, but they're not going to do anything that risk breaking games, so they go for an almost exact emulation.
I believe some games do tricks like rendering a scene on to a buffer and then rendering a new scene on top of that to gain more triangles than the hard-limit.
PSA: Nintendo 3DS available at Walmart for $170 today (get your 20 free games!)
Walmart has indeed kicked off the massive price cut on the Nintendo 3DS a few days before the competition, bringing the price of the handheld to a cool, crisp $170. Not only is this good for the obscenely impatient among you, but it also means that early purchasers will be able to get the lower price and the 20 free downloadable games which were meant to be reserved for the console's earlier adopters.
Most of the Walmart locations we called to check on the cut confirmed the lower price, though some seemed to have not gotten the memo quite yet. Make sure you call ahead to your location before you make the drive to avoid wasting all your precious time and even-more-precious gasoline.
Replies
Can the 3DS be improved? Sure. Is it still a significant upgrade over the DSi? Definitely. And that's the way Nintendo should be marketing it. Non-gamers are confused by the S3D thing, especially since they can't see the 3D on television or in magazines. Even if S3D's the real selling point, back seat it and market it as a DSi on steroids instead. That's how most gamers will be using it anyway.
Right now, as long as Nintendo tapers off production of the DSi in the next 12 months, the drop to $170 for the 3DS makes sense. However, if Nintendo also drops the DSi price to $100 then nothings has been accomplished.
The problem more than just a lack of a killer app, delays, the looming threat of the Vita, or whatever you all perceive to be 3DS' shortcomings. The real problem is that Nintendo's competing against itself in the same market. It's the same problem that Microsoft had Win7 vs XP. Why buy a new Win7 machine when you could get a new machine that had your favorite flavor of XP? By actively supporting 2 OSes, they fragmented the market and impeded early adoption.
Gamers aren't loyal to Nintendo because of their hardware. Nintendo hardware is always underpowered, or at least has been since the mid-90s. Fanboys are loyal because of the system exclusive franchises. Nintendo has to formulate a real plan to kill the DSi. They'll flock to the 3DS by default, especially now that it's at the same price point.
As an upgrade over the DSi and the original DS, the 3DS is superb. Every system could be better. Soon, we'll be bitching about the Vita too. For what it actually is, $170 is a solid price point. I paid the full $249 for it and don't regret it. I wish it had more games, but I didn't expect the system to launch any better than any other Nintendo system. I got pretty much what I expected and maybe a little more since I skipped the DSi in favor of hanging onto my DS Lite.
I felt mainly that doing too much with the size/resolution of the screens means potentially removing backwards compatibility with DS games (lest we get even blurrier/smaller) and even messing with current 3DS titles.
The camera functionality and allowing for 3D AA are just about the only things I think are viable without fucking with the games\compatability we've currently got.
Also, Nintendo's recent history these past few years doesn't say to me that they'll actually take large strides to bridge the gap between their handheld and the Vita. Look how long it took them to catch up in the console department with the Wii-U.
The 3DS right now would be great if it just had a decent game library. Once we get some more games rolling in, I'll be a pretty happy camper. I thought Zelda looked great and I'm looking forward to several other announced titles.
The design is an iteration pretty close to the DS-lite design, a design that they've come to end up with and not change much. Even the dsi wasn't a big change from that.
They will never change the specs, but they can and will improve battery-life( much needed) on any new hardware-iteration. You will never see any antialiasing going on in 3d unless a title has it activated on purpose.
The'll never change resolution or change aspect-ratios, it's going to stay this way until the next console.
They considered having the top screen be touchscreen back in the ds-days, but it just didn't work out or was a good idea in practice.
The gpu would do the anti-aliasing, but once again, it CAN do it in 3d, but game-developers will be chosing performance before antialiasing.
The 3ds is capable enough to film in 3d, they just haven't added that feature yet.
I'm having no problem with the battery so far, but I guess thats cause I am keeping it in 2D the whole time.
The design wouldnt have to change at all, apart from the screens extending to meet in the middle. If anything, it would be closer to the original DS-Lite because the screens would be the same size.
You say 'never' a lot, do you have Iwate-san on Skype?
I would also put money on the 3DSi getting a faster processor. The 360, iphone, even the PS3 I think have received better processors in partial updates over a models life time (faster nm etc). I would say developers are also nagging Nintendo for this, so they can get AA working in 3D without a big performance hit.
.....nah. I really don't think it has decent (or any) 3d-video capture capability yet. If you can't play effectively in 3D, how is someone going to shoot at at least 24FPS in 3D? I reckon a faster processor would be neccesary. Having said that, we are both as misinformed as each other on this one. We simply cannot know if it is capable or not, but I don't think we are going to see it on this model. I think they would have announced something if that were the case, to spur on some sales, take some wind out of Vita's sales. I think we will see it on the next iteration though.
It's roughly half the running-time of the ds, it's the only thing that got worse, but somehow expected with the new hardware and screens.
Additional extended hardware largely go completely unsupported, just look at the dsi (which had a faster cpu and more memory) and then look at how few dsi games were actually released.
Additional hardware is a nightmare, that's exactly what game developers avoided when going for the console market.
The iphone receives updates, that's true.
The 360 and ps3 processors have got upgrades, but their capabilities stay exactly the same, they will just consume less power.
Developers will first and foremost always ask for just ONE platform, not having to support several of them.
You forgot the fact that there is already built in software, and augmented-reality games on the 3ds that does in fact capture in 3d, and on top of that runs algorithms on the input for positioning, and all this in realtime.
The CPU power has little to do with the actual capturing process, especially when it's in raw format, the speed of which you can write the data to storage has more to do with it.
But except for that, there's very little reason to beg for a CPU upgrade on the 3ds where the CPU is already quite powerful (vastly more so than the ds/dsi)
But still twice the battery time of the PSP probably
I thought you said Nintendo would never upgrade the processor. Now you're telling me they did it in the last two years? :poly142: The DSi was released very late in the products life-time... that's probably why the updates were unused. Games studios already had an engine and pipeline working, and their games worked fine. Why waste production time messing with that? I never had any performance issues even with the Zelda games, which I imagine were the most processor intensive. But with the 3DS, even in its current early stages, there is an issue that should concern developers, that being the nasty jaggies.
Exactly, its a real-time run-time environment. Its not spitting out at least 48 raster images to the SD card at something around 450X300px per second. Write speed will have to be improved too, I'd bet thats why it wasnt a launch feature.
Most likely.
Even the gameboy color came at a slightly higher clockspeed than the gameboy, but it was there for the gameboy color only games, it became an entirely new sku.
And as I said, nothing stops developers from using antialiasing, the 3ds fully supports it, but they choose visuals before antialiasing, had the platform have been stronger they still would've gone for visuals before antialiasing.
jaggies aren't as big of an issue for developers as it is personally for you.
And the irony in it all is that the 3d works in your favor, it means that due to the fact that every game has to support 3d, it also means that when in 2d mode, there will be enough horsepower left to do antialiasing.
Which is all up to the write-speed of the SD card (which is well enough for the 800x240 required) Web-browser, app-store, netflix, all features that aren't a part of the initial launch, yet it is capable of it, 3d videos aren't any different.
There was almost 10 years in the difference, course it came with a higher clockspeed :P Bit of a difference between the GBA and DS too! :P
For me, 'AA' definitely falls under the banner of 'visuals'. Doesn't matter if you have the sexiest handpainted texture in the world, if its projecting off a model with hideous jag on its silhouette...
I see what you mean about the battery now, after today; but I think its because I had the wireless on the whole time. Does that have to be on for street-pass?
And the difference between the DS and 3DS even vastly more, consider the fact that the 3ds is able to emulate the DS games for backwardscompatibility.
it does, but consider how many people here will be turning off filtering, and posting incredible things in the low poly thread, without any anti-aliasing.
You'll find the games on the console market vastly dominated by non anti-aliased, because developers will always pick other things before anti-aliasing when they have to make the choice.
But once again, look back at what I said about the 2d mode on 3ds, you wont get that on any other console, consider 2d mode an "anti-aliasing" mode JUST for you!
Yeah, it's a collection of things that will affect batterylife, wireless is one of them, turning it off can save you battery, but street-pass wont functino without it.
the 3ds has around a 3-h5 batterylife (depending on how you manage different settings)
the DS does 6-10h.
Also:
http://www.joystiq.com/2011/03/02/3d-video-recording-coming-to-3ds/
The DS uses a 4 layer system when rendering text over video or sprites on a background and so on and so on, each have their own rendering priority. If they do plan on doing 3d for regular ds games then it would probably exploit this and allow for a more planer 3d effect.
Also, if nds sales dont pick up in 4 months, then the nds is getting discontinued.
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/library/events/110729/index.html
That's true for games using the 2D engine but what about games rendered in pure 3D? There's no such thing like a layer system in 3D games. The DS games I worked on used dual 3D for everything (not optimal but we were tied to engine restrictions), so we didn't even touch the layer system other than using it for rendering the hud and texts. A lot of games that I played also employed dual 3D, even for rendering pure 2D screens.
I wonder what kind of preparations (if at all) are needed to render games in stereoscopic 3D... If it's indeed possible that would be a nice feature to attract current DS owners.
Technically it is possible, but they're not going to do anything that risk breaking games, so they go for an almost exact emulation.
I believe some games do tricks like rendering a scene on to a buffer and then rendering a new scene on top of that to gain more triangles than the hard-limit.
PSA: Nintendo 3DS available at Walmart for $170 today (get your 20 free games!)
Walmart has indeed kicked off the massive price cut on the Nintendo 3DS a few days before the competition, bringing the price of the handheld to a cool, crisp $170. Not only is this good for the obscenely impatient among you, but it also means that early purchasers will be able to get the lower price and the 20 free downloadable games which were meant to be reserved for the console's earlier adopters.
Most of the Walmart locations we called to check on the cut confirmed the lower price, though some seemed to have not gotten the memo quite yet. Make sure you call ahead to your location before you make the drive to avoid wasting all your precious time and even-more-precious gasoline.
I think he might actually be the biggest wanker in games. What an ugly mouth.
Where are my 10 free GBA games HMMMMMM??
You know what reggie, apparently the lack of games is not an issue at all.
Screw this, I'm gonna drop this 3ds in the toilet and get a vita.
I don't have buyers remorse, I have siding-with-nintendo remorse..
^ I'm going to second this.