Natal lag issues will hurt game development

[zarx]

nightsurge said:

zarx said:
the real kicker is that as Natal stands now more complex the game the more lag there will be, so most of the games are going to be simple mini-games like the ones everyone hates on the Wii. the time that it takes to process the image data and then convert the results into onscreen actions for a game is always going to be slower than button 1 pressed so execute action, no matter how good the software is. not to mention the perceived lag generated by the difference in time it takes to perform a physical action with your body like punching vs pressing a button.

But in saying that Natal does have a lot of potential to bring a lot of new ideas into gaming, but since the eyetoy/PlayStation eye the Wii and all the other motion controllers over the years haven't really changed much I doubt we will see much more for Natal no matter how much more advanced it is.

Underlined is just plain wrong.  They already said no matter what the game, it will use ~10-15% of the resources.  The software and data used from Natal will always use about that amount.  It doesn't matter if you are overlaying the skeleton with say a Gears of War character or if it is just an Avatar, the "lag" will be the same as all the processing related to Natal and it's data will always have that amount of dedicated resources to use.

Also, if it really is faster than pressing a button, then why does it have less input lag than many games using controllers?  Killzone 2 and Halo 3  both have worse input lag than Natal at this point.

I think you missed the point of what I was saying, so I will use an example. Lets say that Halo Reach without natal uses 85-100% of the CPU (for physics, AI, Decompression etc) if you use 10-15% of that processing power for natal that means that the other processing will have to be done later causing the game (or the input) to lag. And as for the other comment about the Natal lag processing the image into game readable input takes time as illustrated by it using 10-15% of the CPU, a button press wouldn't even use 0.0001% of the CPU so Natal will be slower, the reason for the controller lag in games is because of the nature of wireless the frame rate of the game because of the way the lag is measured the game waiting for the last frame to be rendered before reacting to the input, any lag Natal adds will be ontop of the existing input lag.