archangelmorph
Veteran
It would be good if Sony got the basic stuff out there, like the APIs for Sixaxis and the various online functionality. I think this is happening, but of course they are being a bit slow.Similarly there should be demo code and best practices. If you look at the market then it definitely helps focussing on what tools are out there and are being used. A good result recently was Havok's announcement of having optimised its engine for the Cell processor, with some very good results (5-10x improvement in typical game scenarios). That's the kind of thing Sony needs, as it helps the cross-platform developers a lot (there are currently a lot of games that use Havok).
It's a nice point arwin but the bigger problem to me here stems from load balancing..
I hear individuals talking about "maybe the Xbox360 is this and really the PS3 is that.."
Why don't we all consider the biggest bottleneck relating to the situation..: RAM...
When you have a game like FEAR (obviously not the most amazing looking game and nowhere near what the PS3 can truely achieve in terms of visuals, hello motorstorm etc..) which was built from the ground up on PC you can bet you're right arse-cheek that when it comes to load balancing at run-time, a good 512MB+ (maybe even upwards of 1GB) of game data is sat lavishly in RAM throughout the time of play..
When you have to port such a game to a system which has much greater bandwidth but only 512MB unified memory (Xbox360) you have quite an easy job on your hands. You can compress a few textures here and there, setup data streaming on a seperate core and have it dynamically loading things in the back ground in and out and pretty soon you've got the game screaming just as fast, if not faster than it did on the PC.
Now when you have to port such a game to a system which has much greater bandwidth (PS3) but only 256MB of main memory (and another 256MB of VRAM which is usable as RAM but requires some think-work to make good use of it..) then you have a bloody big job on your hands.
You still have around the same time frame to get the game ported but alot more work to get it up to speed in terms of performance without completely re-working your codebase.
What do u do..?
Well that's an easy one!
Start by downscaling texture resolutions, rendering at sub-HD resolution and upscaling, reducing AI processing, cutting out a bit of this, cutting out a bit of that and before you know it you just about manange to get the game running but it looks like crap. Now you spend the rest of the time you have left optimising in sections and working out the load balancing to give you more room to crank up the enhancements bit by bit, all the while maintaining a feature-complete build (since, in the event that you run out of time/money, you can still ship..).
Granted it sucks that the PS3 version isn't the best port in the world but that's what you get when try to shift bloated (at run-time) resource-greedy code onto a platform that favours lean code and complex and sophisticated load-balancing to really shine..
If the Xbox360 wasn't so close to the PC in terms of hardware setup/interface then all my points would be moot...
