Thursday 12 March 2015

Assessment 1: Game platform types





BTEC National Diploma

Unit number and title Unit 20: Computer Game Platforms and Technologies.
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Xbox

The Xbox's GPU was co-developed by Microsoft and NVidia. It has a clock speed of 233 MHz, 932 megapixels/second and 485,416 triangles per frame at 60 frame/s, 970,833 triangles per frame at 30 frame/s. The Performance is similar to the GeForce 4 Ti4200 desktop GPU.

It is 4 inches in height, 12.5 inches in width and has a depth of 10.5 inches. The console weighs 3.86 pounds.

The Xbox has a 32 bit custom Pentium 3 CPU with a clock speed of 733 MHz’s The Xbox has 64 MB of DDR memory that runs at 200 MHz in dual-channel configuration giving a total of 6400 MB/the Xbox has 8 or 10 GB hard drive with an optional 32 MB memory card for transferring files or extra storage.

The Original Xbox is the first Xbox in its series.
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 Xbox 360
 
The Xbox 360 is 3.27 inches in height, 10.4 inches in width and has a depth of 12.15 inches. The console weigh 7.72 pounds.

The CPU is a Xenon and has 3 64 bit cores. Each CPU core is capable of simultaneous multi-threading and has a core clock of 3.2 GHz. The heat sink used to cool the CPU had aluminium fins with a copper base and a heat pipe. The later version of Xbox 360 which had a smaller core clock did not have a heat pipe and instead had two 70 mm fans at the rear of the case cooling the heat sink.

The Xbox 360 had 512 megabytes of GDDR3 RAM which ran at a clock speed of 700 MHz’s

The storage on the Xbox 360 varied as it had a removable hard drive allowing the consumer to buy bigger hard drives and install them. Available hard drive sizes were 4GB, 20GB, 60GB, 120GB, 250GB and the biggest being 320GB. The larger the hard drive, the more expensive it was to purchase.

There are currently 1,137 games (multiplatform: 936; exclusive: 187; console exclusive: 74) on the Xbox 360. This is Microsoft's 2nd console.
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Xbox One

The Xbox one has an APU which is a GPU and CPU combined, the GPU has a clock speed of 853 MHz and 768 shadier cores and the CPU is an AMD Jaguar which has 8 cores clocked at 1.75 GHz.

The console is 2.97 inches in height, 13.18 inches in width and has a depth of 10.86 inches. The console has 8GB of DDR3 that runs at 2133 MHz with a bit rate of 256. The Xbox one comes with a standard 500 GB hard drive, 362 GB of that storage is free space for the consumer to use and the remaining 138 GB is used to store the operating system and other Xbox one software.

There are currently 348 games (Microsoft exclusive: 15, exclusive: 39, multiplatform: 252, available to purchase: 171, timed: 29) on the Xbox one. The Xbox one is Microsoft's 3rd and most current console.
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Out of the 3 generation of Xbox my favourite is the second generation, Xbox 360 this is because when I was growing up the first big console I owned was an Xbox 360 and one of my favourite games Halo 3 which was an Xbox 360 exclusive. 
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PlayStation 1 
The PlayStation 1 has a 32 bit CPU with 5kb L1 cache, running at 33.8688 MHz’s It was manufactured by LSI Logic Corp. 90,000 with texture mapping, lighting and Gourmand shading [10] 180,000 with texture mapping 360,000 with flat shading. 

The console is 1.77 inches in height, 10.24 inches in width and has a depth of 7.28 inches.  2GB of DRAM. The PlayStation uses memory cards that the player would save the game to and the size of the memory card varies.

This is Sony's 1st console. 

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The PlayStation 2's graphics synthesizer is clocked at 147.456 MHz’s and 4MB of embedded DRAM with 48 gigabytes of bandwidth per second.

The console is 1.1 inches in height, 9.1 inches in width and has a depth of 6 inches.

The PlayStation 2 has a 64 bit R5900 clocked at 294.912 MHz,   It also has a 32 bit FPU clocked at 147.546, this deals with the game physics. 32 MB of RDRAM/VRAM. This is Sony's 2nd console. 
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PlayStation 3
 
The PlayStation 3's GPU is a RSX which is based on the NVidia G70 clocked at 500 MHZ. The PlayStation 3 has a cell microprocessor clocked at 3.2 GHz

The console is 3.86 inches in height, 12.75 in width and has a depth of 10.79 inches. The PlayStation 3 weighs approximately 10.6 pounds.

The PlayStation has 256 MB of GDDR3 RAM clocked at 650 MHz and comes with a 120 GB hard drive.  There are 812 games (multi-platform: 644; exclusive: 150; console exclusive: 11) on the PlayStation 3. This is Sony's 3rd console.

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PlayStation 4
 
The PlayStation 4 has the same APU as the Xbox one, the GPU has a clock speed of 853 MHz and 768 shadier cores and the CPU is an AMD Jaguar which has 8 cores clocked at 1.75 GHz. The console is 53 mm in height, 305mm in length and has a depth of 53mm. The total weight is 2.8 kg.  




The PlayStation 4 has 8GB of GDDR5 clocked at 2.75 GHz. The PlayStation has a standard 500GB hard drive. This is Sony's 4th and most current console.  

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Wii u console 
 
The Wii u console has an AMD Radeon GPU which is similar to the RV740. The dimensions are 1.8 inches in height, 6.75 inches in length and has a depth of 10.6 inches. It weighs Approximately 3.5 pounds. 

The Wii u console has an IBM power - multi core processor with a clock speed of 1.23 GHz. The console has 2 GB of RAM and 8GB of internal flash memory with the basic and 32GB with the deluxe.

A lot of popular games like Mario, Mario cart and super smashed bro’s brawl are Wii exclusive
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Nintendo 3DS 

The Nintendo 3DS is a handheld games console with a 3D depth. The handheld has a dual core CPU, one core is dedicated to games and applications and the other core is dedicated to the OS and background tasks. It has 128 MB of system memory. The handheld has 2 screens the top LCD screen has a resolution of 800 x 240 pixels  and the bottom screen has a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels and is touch.

The Nintendo 3DS has a lot games designed to use the 3D functionality like The legend of Zelda, monster hunter and Mario. 

























Wednesday 4 March 2015

Assessment 1: Understand the use Sound & Music in games.




BTEC Level 3 Games Design
Unit 73: Sound for Computer Games
Assessment 1: Understand the use Sound & Music in games.


The last of us uses calm high pitch and low base to create a dark and depressing atmosphere. During intense and scary parts of the game the music plays to create suspense and a unique feel to certain parts of the game. The title screen, opening of the game and the end credits  of the game feature a slow, string piece of music, which creates a dark mood.

The Last of Us

All instruments

The beginning of this piece feels barren and lonely as only few instruments are used as the piece develops more, more instruments are introduced and makes it feel like the plot is developing. This pieces is intended to give the player a feeling of what the characters are going through and how they are feeling.



This piece of musics starts of with a slow tempo and a soft acoustic guitar gradually getting louder. Then a high pitch sharp whine added from a Cello which the pitch fluctuates between high, sharp and quiet to low, load and drowns out the acoustic guitar. The main instrument playing is the acoustic guitar. A mouth harp makes the constant boink noise in the background. The Kazoo adds to the cellos low pitch drowning, the flute adds another high pitch layer and a drum beat from an African drum is introduced that adds base.


The creator of this piece uses stereo or surround sound as it is a complicated piece which benefits from the atmosphere that surround sound creates and lossless file format was used to keep the best sound quality.

All the music for the last of us was created by an orchestra in a studio. They did this to create good sound quality and add atmosphere and feeling to their game, if this was done using sampling or any other type of music creation, i think it would not  have as much as an impression, because of this all the music was specifically created for the last of us so there was no copyright issues there.

Ellen Paige was used in beyond two souls as the model for the character Jodie Holmes in the game, The last of us the character called Ellie had a resemblance to Ellen Paige, thought no legal action was taken against naughty dog this is one of the copyright issue they went through.

Little Big Planet 3


The beginning of this piece feels like you have been dumped into an intense part of the game,lots of base.The piece stay consist through speeding up the tempo a little half way through. This reminds me of mission impossible. Barry Adamson created and composed the piece Dead heat in 1993 for “The Negro inside me”. This means that this piece was not intended for this game.
The instruments that are used are drums, symbols and brass guitar. This piece can be compared to spy music such as the james bond theme tune as they both use similar sounds and feeling.


Comparing The last of us piece and Dead heat the little big planet peice is hard as they are both different styles and intended for different things. The last of us is intended to create suspension, tension and a feeling of what the characters are going through and the little big planet piece is intended as a background theme tune rarely changing except for slightly intenser parts. Also the music used in little big planet was from 1993 and with lesser editing software so the creators of the game would have to edit the quality to try and make it better. The developers of the game would have had to get permission from Barry Adamson or the company that own the piece.

RAM Random Access memory. RAM is short term storage for recently open programs, tabs and files. If you have limited RAM space the more programs, tabs and files your open and use the slower all your memory will run and the slower the programs will run. This can affect sound files and quality of the sound as it can buffer, skip parts and jumps.