joker is devving on both systems so he would know and does not need to rely on rumors.
there is still more RAM available on 360 (+EDRAM)
Cross platform development and choice of 'Lead system' *Spinoff*
- Thread starter iceberg187
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joker is devving on both systems so he would know and does not need to rely on rumors.
there is still more RAM available on 360 (+EDRAM)
Yes but not ~50 mb less than 40 mb now. And I know _phil_ is a developer. Maybe, the 360 memory footprint decrease but I never heard anything about that.
EDRAM's working memory, not memory usable for storage. The framebuffers still need to be written out to RAM, the textures still need to sit in RAM, the models, the code, and everything else. That memory alleviates BW demands, but not storage requirements.
Edit : I'll add, without really paying attention to the thread, that some of Joker's points go both ways. Okay, so you don't want to lead on the most profitable platform with a product that can't compete with rivals on that same platform. But by that same token you'll be competing with the inferior product still on the other platform. If you can release a superior product to the second system, you'll gain an advantage versus your competition. Thus the ideal position is to design with both platforms in mind, and not one platform with a cheap and nasty copy/paste onto the other system. A cheap copy/paste should be expected to do poorly and fail to maximise returns on your investment. From that POV, designing for PS3 (which in some ways is really just designing for 'next-gen' consoles with extra efficiency in mind) and translating to XB360 provides a necessary codebase for the PS3 product to not be rubbish, and also provide a superior XB360 product to one produced using the Old Ways that PS3 doesn't like.
The suits will argue all they want, normally in favour of not spending money, but if you want both your products to be the best possible, you are more likely to get closer to that ideal by going PS3 >> XB360 than vice versa, and you'll hit that target is you haven't independent design teams for both systems creating the engines to run the same assets.
Edit : I'll add, without really paying attention to the thread, that some of Joker's points go both ways. Okay, so you don't want to lead on the most profitable platform with a product that can't compete with rivals on that same platform. But by that same token you'll be competing with the inferior product still on the other platform. If you can release a superior product to the second system, you'll gain an advantage versus your competition. Thus the ideal position is to design with both platforms in mind, and not one platform with a cheap and nasty copy/paste onto the other system. A cheap copy/paste should be expected to do poorly and fail to maximise returns on your investment. From that POV, designing for PS3 (which in some ways is really just designing for 'next-gen' consoles with extra efficiency in mind) and translating to XB360 provides a necessary codebase for the PS3 product to not be rubbish, and also provide a superior XB360 product to one produced using the Old Ways that PS3 doesn't like.
The suits will argue all they want, normally in favour of not spending money, but if you want both your products to be the best possible, you are more likely to get closer to that ideal by going PS3 >> XB360 than vice versa, and you'll hit that target is you haven't independent design teams for both systems creating the engines to run the same assets.
I'm in a hurry so I'll have to reply to the rest later, but edram does alleviate a bit of storage. With 2xmsaa you need a double size buffer somewhere in the ps3's 512mb of memory. On the 360 with edram and tiling there is no need, just regular size front/back buffers in the 512mb chunk because the edram->ram resolve step will downsize it.
Like I mentioned earlier, they were able to get away with it because Burnout doesn't really have any competition to it. What if it did though? Burnout has its fans and will sell well regardless, but what me and you don't know is what would have happened if there was an alternative title available that was a bit better because it had the 360 as it's native platform. Do you really think sales of Burnout would not take a hit on 360 if a better game was available? Is so then thats where you and me differ. Given the high volume of good games on 360 this year, competition is fierce and it's unlikely a typical family will buy two Burnout style games, they will likely pick just one. Given the availability of a better alternative I myself would go for the better game, but maybe thats just me.
Now the assumption here is that a 360->PS3 port is always crap. Let's just say for the sake of argument that the same is true and this fictional alternate burnout style title runs with frame rate drops on PS3. Sure, they will lose sales on the PS3 version. But realistically, at this point in time, who cares? Putting bias and all that aside, just look at the numbers. 360 titles sell far more. Even top tier PS3 games sell far less than the 360 best sellers. Which do you think would worry a publisher more, risk selling 300k less copies of their PS3 version, or risk selling 800k less copies of their 360 version?
All of the assumptions I read here allude to the fact that a 360 game that is a PS3 port should be good enough, and sales should be all peachy because 360 owners buy anything. I think that's a risky assumption. It's certainly not a risk I'd be willing to take if I were financing the project.
From this…I think the result speaks for itself, a pretty amazing game at 60hz in full 720p on BOTH platforms. We know how it often goes when it´s 360 game that is tweaked to the PS3
360=>PS3 weak port
PS3=>360 good port
So 360>PS3
I'm joking!
We can make different statement from all of this but IMHO one can take the up…
Muti-plateform engine
Or like Joker tells twin development, we go to a more or less 50/50 WW for the 360/PS3…
Just read a Top Spin preview where they said they have two separate teams working on the X360 and PS3 versions.
You wonder though, whether adverse publicity from bad PS3 ports is making publishers and developers say that, since IW got a lot of good will for first claiming they're doing parallel development.
The Top Spin developers are apparently in France. So maybe they're more attuned to PS3 needs because their market doesn't look like the NA market.
Plus a project can take well over a year right? So do you really want to allocate resources and plan your development strategy based on the current snapshot of the market?
I'm not saying the market will turn around in 18 months but it's a bit shortsighted to extrapolate current market conditions to that far out, no?
I mean based on the PS1 and PS2, people might have extrapolated that the PS3 would lead the market and obviously that wouldn't have been smart.
You wonder though, whether adverse publicity from bad PS3 ports is making publishers and developers say that, since IW got a lot of good will for first claiming they're doing parallel development.
The Top Spin developers are apparently in France. So maybe they're more attuned to PS3 needs because their market doesn't look like the NA market.
Plus a project can take well over a year right? So do you really want to allocate resources and plan your development strategy based on the current snapshot of the market?
I'm not saying the market will turn around in 18 months but it's a bit shortsighted to extrapolate current market conditions to that far out, no?
I mean based on the PS1 and PS2, people might have extrapolated that the PS3 would lead the market and obviously that wouldn't have been smart.
joker454 said:
Frankly, you're vastly overstating the dangers of the PS3 to 360. Really? You're going to lose 800K sales on the Xbox because, what, the Achievements aren't sufficiently integrated into the overall game? You say that like you can't have plan for an achievement-like system on your PS3 SKU. And a few tens of MBs of ram will go unused? Can't you just, I don't know, adjust some lod levels and up a few texture resolutions while you're polishing up your 360 version? You are being ridiculous. And if you don't know that, well, I'm not sure what to say.
You talk about these hypothetical games so similar to each other with minor polish differences, but you know what will be the greater difference in sales there? Branding. Marketing. Not tiny technical difference where you failed to get that last 2% of performance out of the Xbox. And if you find yourself releasing a clone of a competing product, you should probably do some design work to differentiate yourself, not agonize over EDRAM exploitation.
You know what we know now? A solid port of a solid multi-platform game will have really nice sales on the PS3. Looking at COD4 and Assassin's Creed we're talking 500K to a million pretty easy. That's a lot of money to leave on the table if your 360 to PS3 port is a dog. That's a real problem. You've constructed a fanciful straw man situation with no supporting evidence to argue that the risk of a PS3 to 360 port is worse. You are being silly.
Hazuki Ryu
Regular
I don't think its as little as 2% not at all, and i do care about the unused power on my 360 or ps3 (if i had one) because i payed quite well for the hardware and i want to see software using it like it should, last time i checked i payed well enough for software too its not that cheap.
Now on the burnout paradise i have played the ps3 demo and i think the game looks damn good on the ps3 i'm on vacation so my x360 is at home ill have to wait till jan to try it on the 360, do you guys know if the demo is available on live?
That's easy for you to say, you're not the one fronting the 20 million bucks needed to make a game. I think you have no idea how close many companies are to bankruptcy. It's all roses on forums like these, everyone has piles of money stashed in everyones office, 5 years to make a game and sales all but guaranteed. I guess the idea to you that many companies are just one missed sales target away from going under is an impossibility. Think again.
And no, you can't just suddenly at some point say "hey lets use this other chunk of memory, what the heck". It doesn't work that way. Well strictly speaking you can, but then you've totally wasted the chance to differentiate yourself on the platform with the crazy sales. Doing that when faced with a console with perhaps the highest attach rate in history is a ridiculous financial strategy. To stay alive means to minimize risk. Leading with PS3 and hence resulting in a 360 game with less than it's full potential is risk. Worded another way, the sales gained from a better PS3 version do not outweigh the potential risk of losing 360 sales, not at this time.
Branding and marketing are strong. Word of mouth is stronger. You don't think people talk about games? Which ones they buy, which they think are best? You honestly don't think the conversation of "hey this game is good, but this one is a bit better" never happens? You don't think history is littered with games that had huge marketing budgets yet still didn't turn a profit? FYI, the difference between a port and a native game is not 2%, but I think you know that very well.
"really nice sales" was great....back when one programmer and two artists used to make games. "really nice sales" today is simply not good enough. Many studios have to account for the very real fact that most of their games will likely not turn a profit. They are counting on one maybe two exceptional sellers to keep things going.
In any case your sales logic is totally wrong. You assume that a PS3 lead game that sells 500k units will suddenly sell zero if it were a port. Very unlikely. Do you think Orange Box on PS3 will sell < 10k copies because its a dog port?
In the end, just because a company that are self proclaimed Sony fanboys says that leading with PS3 is the way to go doesn't make it fact anymore than if Ford said that all car makers should build their cars off the Ford Fusion platform. If you want the correct financial answer then just look around at the game dev situation today and what most companies are doing. You may think they are all "silly" for doing business the way they are doing, but I'd wager their cfo and bean counters disagree with you.
EDIT: Ok, totally the wrong forum for this I know
Maybe the mods should yank these posts and put them elsewhere.
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archangelmorph
Veteran
The fact that he's a dev doesn't give his oppinion weight..
The fact that he's a dev working on multiplatform games development for current gen consoles sure does though..
archangelmorph
Veteran
I'm actually intrigued though joker..
I'm not sure the correlation between potential sales on one platform of a game & the quality of the port of that said game are that strong..?
AC & COD4 for example, are unique considering they are practically the first MP titles to hit the market with strong advertising, strong critical reception allround, strong mass market appeal & strong port quality onto the non-lead platform.. All other MP titles released prior have had at least one of those factors missing & thus haven't sold particularly well enough to make clear deductions between the sales potnetial of one versino over the other, taking into account the size of the install base & version quality over the other..
IMO I'm still attached to the notion that most consumers don't look at MP titles on the merit of the quality of the title with respect to another version on a separate platform they may or may not own.. It seems that most PS3 consumers probably only own one system & therefore as such would likely judge the buy potential of the title against other games on that platform as opposed to how much better it is on another.. Afterall, the average joe isn't going to be able to tell the difference between two versions of a game anyway if the only differences are a few framerate issues & slightly reduced image quality..
Also if your arguement is more the case of a competing product on the platform with the lesser port creating the risk factor then I would have to say that such an arguement seems slightly strange considering, surely such a competing product would *always* provide risk factor even if the higher quality port on the separate platform (PS3) never actually existed..
Also wouldn't the strongest factors which contribute to this risk be more in the realm of features and overall product appeal over performance & IQ?
If the competing game has better graphics then no amount of resources put into doing a better job of porting the title could have made enough of a difference without a complete renderer overhaul, & even this may not have been considered at an early enough stage to have been feasible due to the fact that even the existence of the competing title may not have even been known back then..
If the competing game has more depth & better gameplay then these are a factor of the design & again aren't strictly tied to port quality..
I would suspect both these factors would weigh in far greater when it comes to the risk imposed by the competing product & it seems like an almost impossible situation to have two products compete in the same space whereby the biggest differentiating factor between them (in the eyes of the consumer) is IQ & relative performance..? Save for outright plagiarism, there's bound to be enough difference with respect to gameplay, story, artistic theme etc to set the two titles apart irrespective of how much juice they suck out of ther hardware?
Even something as superficial as the artistic design choice of the protagonist (bald space marine for example..) can have a much greater effect on consumer appeal of your product than even whether the game runs at 60 or 30 fps..
Not all consumers are the b3d creed..
In any case i'm interested to hear your thoughts joker..
EDIT: mods you probably will need to make a new thread for this.. pretty please..
Yeah but you can turn it around.
Do you really think Madden or any sports game on the X360 would sell fewer copies if the X360 version was a port which didn't optimize for the X360 to the nth degree?
Do you really think the "highest attach rate ever" for the X360, which has high sales of multiplatform games as well as exclusives like Halo3, GeOW, Bioshock, would see lower sales of Madden, COD5, etc. because these and other multiplatform games are perceived as not delivering the highest performance on the X360?
People don't expect multiplatform games to deliver as high a performance as exclusives. For years, Xbox got ports of EA Sports and other multiplatform games and some hardcore gamers resented the PS2 for it. But they still bought the games in good numbers (or else would third party publishers have been as eager to jump on the X360 at the start?).
Only exception was 2K Sports did lead on the Xbox, even when it wasn't the market leader. Their PS2 versions didn't seem to sell as well. But they seemed content with the sales numbers they got from giving the console with the monster installed base a port.
Still, multiplatform games, especially multiplatform sports games, sold well overall as a genre despite the fact that the common perception is, other genres like FPS and especially first-party exclusives set the bar for graphics, performance, optimization.
So it's hard to see the argument that multiplatform games have to be optimized to the nth degree.
We're not talking about giving short shrift to one platform (although you can say the PS3 has been so far by many multiplatform games so far). We're talking about real 720 games with AA and 60 FPS, not some sub-720p with no AA and under 30 FPS for the X360 version while the PS3 gets the headline metrics.
MazingerDUDE
Regular
Well, Orange Box PS3 indeed is doing very poorly :smile:
When I look at the Amazon.com sales charts, PS3 version is ranked well below already 2 month old 360 AND PC version.
VGChartz (I know they're untrustworthy) says OB PS3 in first week sold only 3K.
I think the fact that a lot of this games are coming out way way later on Ps3 is not helping much
For the CoD4 I think that not only the ps3 version is far from optimal.
Overall it looks like CoD4
And have missed time to make the most out of each
Devs
could have use 2 tiles, render @720p +2xAA, lock the frame rate @30fps, and if they add some resources left improve textures filtering or add some effects (depending of what resources are available if any).Devs
could also have leverage the extra few MB available in the 360 ram to implement fr10 hdr which is free on the computational side but augment frame buffer size.Overall it looks like CoD4
devs
have made compromise on both versions to make both versions really close.And have missed time to make the most out of each
machine.EDIT
even if it 's more obvious on the ps3 version
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BTW, I'm not trying to downplay sports games because of the project joker worked on.
In fact, my last 3 game purchases have been HS, Madden 08 and NHL 08.
I'm primarily a sports gamer and I've come to accept that sports games as a group do not push the technological or artistic envelope like other genres.
EA hitting 60 fps on the X360 was a surprise because they'd never done it with their console games. Still, nobody would consider Madden or any of the EA Sports games to be among the top games for graphics and performance.
In fact, my last 3 game purchases have been HS, Madden 08 and NHL 08.
I'm primarily a sports gamer and I've come to accept that sports games as a group do not push the technological or artistic envelope like other genres.
EA hitting 60 fps on the X360 was a surprise because they'd never done it with their console games. Still, nobody would consider Madden or any of the EA Sports games to be among the top games for graphics and performance.
I think that now thois port discussion need its own thread, So if some mods have some time
I think it could to clean this thread and focus more on gameplay, sreenshots etc... discussion about the game in fact.
For the CoD4 I think that not only the ps3 version is far from optimal.
Devs could have use 2 tiles, render @720p +2xAA, lock the frame rate @30fps locked, and if they add some ressource left improve textures filtering or add some effect (depending of what ressource are available if any).
Devs could also have leverage the extra few MB available in the 360 ram to implement fr10 hdr which is free on the computational side but augment frame buffer size.
Overall it looks like CoD4 devs have made compromise on both versions to make both versions really close.
And have missed time to make the most out of each machine.
Even if that is true, has COD4 sales suffered, even though graphics and performance is one of the selling-points for COD4 and FPS games in general?
No even on the ps3 as if you factor the installed base CoD4 didn't bomb on the ps3.
More CoD have enjoyed clever marketting Beta, impressive marketing push.
And hte more important part, the gameplay seems really solid.
It's just that make the ps3 the lead platform wouldn't have helps devs to make the 360 better
It seems it was already too late for them when Ms has made available the proper tools for tiling, and they didn't fell like using the fp10 and leveraging the extra MB available in the 360 for improve the lighning was worse it (I think they were wrong).
Overall, I think they miss time and/or money as their have been quiet some marketting push for this game (=$$$), overall on a business point of view it was a good choice it seems lol
