Assassins Creed GAMEPLAY Trailer

[scooby_dooby]

That's what I mean, you need better programmers for PS3 for now. If using the "supercomputer" word is agitating, I should have used "RPC" or "the object-messaging model in Smalltalk" or whatever.

But whether this difficulty is inherent or not is unclear, it may be just because there are less experiences with this kind of hardwares.

Sortof in this vein, carmack stated last week it was roughly 2x's the development costs for designing for a multi-core CPU like 360, as compared to a single threaded CPU. And designing for CELL was about 5x's more expensive.

I don't know if you need 'better' programmers, as much as you need more programming time, it just takes longer and is harder, at least that's what I'm gathering.

 

[Carl B]

One means programmers with a specialized skillset, not 'better' programmmers per se...

That said of course, those programmers that prefer these sorts of challenges do tend to be a little more hardcore, and a little more willing to look past the compiler to get down and dirty. And the results yielded can be worth it, when such programmers do apply themselves.

(At this point, consider me as plugging the Mike Acton interview once more, because it truly is a window into the world of Cell.)

I remember reading that Carmack interview as well, and I will say these things:

Carmack's team is PC-based originally, so I can imagine that their costs (Cell relative to PC) will be a fair bit higher than say Naughty Dog's costs, x86 vs Cell.

Secondly, although those increased costs do factor into engine development, art assets remain the largest cost by far in terms of total project outlay, and these are not affected by which architecture gets used.

 

[Tap In]

(At this point, consider me as plugging the Mike Acton interview once more, because it truly is a window into the world of Cell.)

well deserved

 

[one]

I don't know if you need 'better' programmers, as much as you need more programming time, it just takes longer and is harder, at least that's what I'm gathering.

The "better" is strictly in terms of the labor market and personnel cost, they are rarer resources hence better salary. There are ways to reduce this disadvantage of the PS3 such as middleware.

 

[scooby_dooby]

The "better" is strictly in terms of the labor market and personnel cost, they are rarer resources hence better salary. There are ways to reduce this disadvantage of the PS3 such as middleware.

Sure, my point was simply, put the same programmer on both jobs, he's going to have to spend more time to get teh same result on PS3. On the other hand there's presumably more headroom with CELL.

So in some cases, you'll probably see CELL truly exploited, in others Xenon will be more powerful as the team had only finite time/resources to dedicate to CELL's unique architecture.

 

[patsu]

MS is concentrating on making it increasingly easy to develop cross platform 360/PC games, which means many cross platform games for PS3 and 360 will also be on PC, and you can probably expect many of them not to take full advantage of the PS3's CPU architecture and take fuller advantage of the 360's more PC like model.

In other words, I wouldn't be too surprised if the 360 CPU ends up being stronger than CELL in many cross platform games. This is, imo, an example of MS leveraging their software advantage.

I think you mean... leveraging on:
* Software advantage (The SDK and dev tools)
* Architectural advantage(s) due to more similarity between Xbox CPU and traditional CPU
* PC + Xbox 360 combined user base

Sure, my point was simply, put the same programmer on both jobs, he's going to have to spend more time to get teh same result on PS3.

Depends on what job you're refering to, it could be easier to extract performance out of PS3 than Xbox 360, or the other way round.

 

[scooby_dooby]

I think you mean... leveraging on:
* Software advantage (The SDK and dev tools)
* Architectural advantage(s) due to more similarity between Xbox CPU and traditional CPU
* PC + Xbox 360 combined user base

Ya, well said.

 

[-=P3tRaN=-]

so by using pure mathematics, that makes two high-profile games that where supposed to be better on ps3, to ..not be. (darkness is the other)

Sortof in this vein, carmack stated last week...

scooby do you have a link for that new interview? It seems I've missed it.

 

[wco81]

I don't know about AI other than Ubisoft seem to be more PC-centric developers who did more on the Xbox than the PS2. So maybe to be expected that they won't try to to much with the PS3, at least in this first gen title.

They need to feature Jade in the trailer.:smile:

 

[Carl B]

scooby do you have a link for that new interview? It seems I've missed it.

Here it is, but actually me and Scooby both got it wrong by refering to Carmack - it was actually Sweeny.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=10974

 

[archangelmorph]

Sortof in this vein, carmack stated last week it was roughly 2x's the development costs for designing for a multi-core CPU like 360, as compared to a single threaded CPU. And designing for CELL was about 5x's more expensive.

I don't know if you need 'better' programmers, as much as you need more programming time, it just takes longer and is harder, at least that's what I'm gathering.

What world is he coming from??

Those sound like extremely exaggerated figures to me.. Considering the fact that the bulk of the costs in games development are attributed to content creation (3d modellers, texturers, concept artwork, animators, mo-cap, game design & pre-production etc etc..), AND considering these figures are even moreso this generation with the average 3D asset containing greater levels of geometry detail, more & higher res textures (& if normal mapped, means two sets of models need to be developed; high poly & low poly, per model..) means that when he says "development costs" I assume he's talking about code/engine development rather than "overall development costs" as it's inplied by your post (I havn't read the interview so I don't know what context carmack originally intended it..)

Also this fact is reflected in the fact that the average development team of around 60 people will probably have only around 15 programmers for engine, sound, graphics, gameplay, tools and AI/physics.. Not to mention the fact that in any company code is re-useable from one franchise/IP to the next whereas artistic content definitely doesn't have that luxury..

Maybe he assumes code development to be so much more expensive for multi-core because he's considering the costs of training and developing the skills required to develop high-performance, highly multi-threaded apps for an unfamiliar platform such as PS3 or Xbox360.. At least with Xbox360 your still using general purpose-cores, DirectX and probably microsoft-based development IDEs which i'm sure will allow for a much greater deal of code re-use even from the PC platform as opposed to programming on PS3 which would probably require much more specialised code in all areas of the game engine architecture to be built from the ground up..

*Shrug*

 

[PiNkY]

AI is rather branchy code, I'd say. That just doesn't fly too well on SPEs.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

What world is he coming from??

Those sound like extremely exaggerated figures to me.. Considering the fact that the bulk of the costs in games development are attributed to content creation (3d modellers, texturers, concept artwork, animators, mo-cap, game design & pre-production etc etc..)

I presume he just meant writing the software rather than creating the game. eg. If a game costs $5 million in content and $100,000 on code for XB360, it'd cost $5 million for content and $500,000 for code on PS3, sort of thing. Depending on how pricey your code is relative to content, that might be a big deal or not.

 

[Jesus2006]

so by using pure mathematics, that makes two high-profile games that where supposed to be better on ps3, to ..not be. (darkness is the other)

What's about The DarknesS? didn't hear anything about it except for that PS3 thing having more TV set standing around or so...

 

[StefanS]

I presume he just meant writing the software rather than creating the game. eg. If a game costs $5 million in content and $100,000 on code for XB360, it'd cost $5 million for content and $500,000 for code on PS3, sort of thing. Depending on how pricey your code is relative to content, that might be a big deal or not.

I agree, he surely didn't presume that content would be pre default more expensive on PS3.

 

[Love_In_Rio]

What's about The DarknesS? didn't hear anything about it except for that PS3 thing having more TV set standing around or so...

also was said 360 would have a little better textures due to the edram.

 

[scooby_dooby]

I presume he just meant writing the software rather than creating the game. eg. If a game costs $5 million in content and $100,000 on code for XB360, it'd cost $5 million for content and $500,000 for code on PS3, sort of thing. Depending on how pricey your code is relative to content, that might be a big deal or not.

I would look at it in terms of man hours. You can't simply stick 5x's as many programmers on the problem, maybe you add a few more guys, but you need to give the skill guys time to do their thing I presume.

 

[scooby_dooby]

Here it is, but actually me and Scooby both got it wrong by refering to Carmack - it was actually Sweeny.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=10974

DOH! I always get those two mixed up, thx for the linkage.

 

[mrboo]

also was said 360 would have a little better textures due to the edram.

The EDRAM has nothing to due with the texture's, its because 360's 512mb RAM is unified so deve's can just take and section off what they need for texture memory. But on PS3 developers have to create there engine to read/write textures from PS3's XDR system memory. I bet the engine that powers the darkness does'nt support XDR texture read/writeing.

 

[PiNkY]

The gpu can address the main memory so there should not be anything fancy involved in their engine for making this work. However textures in mainmem probably come with quite a heavy latency penalty and thus are more likely to stall the gpu then stuff in vram.