*Game Development Issues*

Status
Not open for further replies.
A guy by the name of Charles talks about Assassin's Creed development in this thread. He is a UBI employee and he talks about the difficulties that the PS3 presented him

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=27891

These posts in particular:

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=1150952&postcount=359

Charles said:
it's obvious that Ubisoft did not devote enough resources to the PS3 edition
More resources were spent on the PS3 version.

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=1150963&postcount=362

Charles said:
Not to get in to any specifics, but there was a hell of a lot more effort put in to the PS3 version.

I am personally convinced (ie my opinion and not that of ubisoft) that "enough resources" approaches impossibility.

Our game drove our engine programmers batty, as the AI is most of the workload, and linear it is not. These new systems love programs that are just straight forward number crunching with as little branching as possible. That is the complete opposite of what is needed to make a game like ours.

Sounds like heavy reliance upon the PPU...
 
Sounds like heavy reliance upon the PPU...

Well the guy doesn't even seem to know details about the PS3 teams according to his statements.

Actually, wasn't there another (real) interview posted here stating numbers like 120 devs. working on the 360 version, where another 15 or so were responsible for PS3 and PC porting.
 
Well the guy doesn't even seem to know details about the PS3 teams according to his statements.

Actually, wasn't there another (real) interview posted here stating numbers like 120 devs. working on the 360 version, where another 15 or so were responsible for PS3 and PC porting.

i thought the title was announced as ps3 lead platform?
 
Well the guy doesn't even seem to know details about the PS3 teams according to his statements.

He didn't express details, that isn't necessarily the same as not knowing them.

I don't know what his responsibility is, but it looks like he is repeating the AI comments of Ubi Montreal developers that we hear quite often.

From reading the thread it seems 'Charles' was a programmer who worked on the combat system.
 
The question then becomes: What's better? Loosing that positive mindshare, that confidence you've build up over 2 generations, and perhaps lose a few early PS3 sales, or do you ditch it, taking away the choice for consumers at the expense that they may not adopt the new console as quickly as possible and may even move on to another console instead?

The advantage of offering a new fully B/C console to an already PlayStation 2 owner is not to be unterestimated. After 5-6 years, the old PS2 tend to get old and are close to breaking - a new PS3 that's able to play those games is immensly more attractive than one that can't play them (and the consumer may have to buy another cheap PS2 to still be able to play his games).

A PS3 consumer that doesn't buy games *yet* is still a consumer and potentially will buy new software down the road and is better than one, that hasn't bought one yet (perhaps because of lack of B/C the incentive to buy one is a lot lower).

I've had the same thoughts. Customers won't easily be forced into paying for (expensive) PS3 games when they'd rather be playing something for PS2 instead. They may well keep their PS2 along side the PS3, or just delay or even abandon purchasing the PS3 (where PS3 software sales for that customer will go from "low" to "none").

I would also like to add that assuming PS2 games are still attractive to PS3 owners (and why not, it has some excellent games) Sony are abandoning the opportunity to re-sell PS2 games to PS3 owners through downloads. This wouldn't just benefit Sony, but a lot of thrid parties too.

Removing BC for manufacturing cost savings I can understand (even if just for a few dollars per unit). Doing it to benefit the PS3 platform I just don't agree with (or maybe they were pressured by worried 3rd parties?). It'd be nice to see Euro sales data for the 60GB PS3 vs the 40GB PS3, but I doubt anyone would dare leak them.
 
Removing BC for manufacturing cost savings I can understand (even if just for a few dollars per unit). Doing it to benefit the PS3 platform I just don't agree with (or maybe they were pressured by worried 3rd parties?). It'd be nice to see Euro sales data for the 60GB PS3 vs the 40GB PS3, but I doubt anyone would dare leak them.

For the first week the 40gb unit was on sale in the UK, I believe the 80gb unit accounted for 89% of the sales.
 
If you didn't buy a 60gb v 40gb while stocks last then you could count yourself as one of the worlds biggest idiots.

It had nothing at all to do with BC, it had everything to do with it being a FAR better deal.

£299 for the 40gb and £349 for the 60gb with an extra controller and 2 Sony games thrown in.
 
You're right about the value proposition, but wrong about being an idiot if you didn't take it. If you don't want a second controller or any of the games on offer, spending more for better value is false economy.
 
I bet that the majority who got the 40GB version would have liked having an extra controller and probably two extra games too. It also has 20GB more. Getting these two games plus one extra controller with the 40GB version separately would cost a lot more.
 
Perhaps. But that doesn't make everyone who got the 40GB an idiot as DJ12 states. Case in point, I was looking for a new HDD a while back, and after reviewing prices, went for a 40GB. Why, when larger drives are so much better economy? A few £ more could have doubled my capacity?! Because I wasn't using half my previous 40GB drive and half of the data on that was backups anyhow. As I have no need for more capacity, that extra few pounds of better economy would have been a few pounds of capacity I'd never use, making it a waste of money.
 
Well calling everyone who got a 40GB PS3 an idiot is harsh. But many of the new PS3 owners have more time to play games than you or me, and despite my limited time, my PS3's 60GB HD is 1/3 filled in less than a month. I think that $50 more for two very good games+extra controller+20GB more+ BC would have definetely benefited them. Some right away, others in the long run. Some of these new oners probably paid more than $80 for one game and one extra controller. The HDD will be screaming for more room as PSN expands with more content and Home is introduced.
 
And as PS3 takes a standard 2.5" drive, when you really want space, you don't need to settle for 60GB, but instead save yourself £50 and put that towards a much bigger HDD. 160GB PS3 for the price of 60GB...
 
Well the guy doesn't even seem to know details about the PS3 teams according to his statements.

It sounds to me like he does...He also seems to be echoing what's been said in this thread:

Well, considering the ps3 guys have been working on it since the moment ps3 dev kits were available, you can't really chalk it up to 'lack of experience', as they had as much as anyone else at the time. Sony was also impressed at one point by how well we got it running early in development.

I don't know if it's a capable system or not. What I'm saying is that, in my opinion, to get the most out of it probably takes an unrealistic amount of resources and time.
 
You're right about the value proposition, but wrong about being an idiot if you didn't take it. If you don't want a second controller or any of the games on offer, spending more for better value is false economy.

Also, if you intend to use it a lot, then depending where you live, you could earn back the money on less electricity used alone probably in one year, and certainly over 5 years ;).
 
I don't know what his responsibility is, but it looks like he is repeating the AI comments of Ubi Montreal developers that we hear quite often.
This sort of makes sense, because AI often has a crapload of code that rarely gets executed (on a per-line basis), whereas SPU optimization makes most sense for small amounts of code run repeatedly with different parameters and inputs. Occasionally AI will fit into the latter, but often not for games of this scope.

Unless you're modelling behaviour for 10,000 stupid fish :)wink:) or identically behaving soldiers, it's going to be ridiculously hard to do parallelization in terms of code and data. It's easy to split the tasks among the different processors, but using them efficiently is really hard.

This seems to be a point that lots of posters in this thread are missing. Multithreading alone isn't the problem with Cell, nor is in-order processing. It's the memory model that is a pain in the ass, and that's what Barbarian, Gabe Newell, and others are pissed off about since it needs investment that won't pay off anywhere else.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top