nAo said:To LondonBoy: Domandare e' lecito, rispondere e' cortesia
Hello, long time no see!!It's like the movie Beetlejuice, say Beetlejuice 3 times in a row and he appears!!! Singing and dancing!!!
Developers Discontent With PS3 Development Tools
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Hello, long time no see!!It's like the movie Beetlejuice, say Beetlejuice 3 times in a row and he appears!!! Singing and dancing!!!
They're both Italian. Hence Mafia. Hence they're in cahoots. Stands to reason. Unfortunately Deano's not a mason so I can't lean on him...
Shifty Geezer said:
It's a family thing
Developers are unapphy with actual development environment because it's not so friendly as for example Microsoft environment and you must put more efforts to make the same thing, but this situation will change in a couple of months and everything will be ok.
It's not so easy to setup a decent environment with a completely new technology like the Cell microprocessor.
It's not so easy to setup a decent environment with a completely new technology like the Cell microprocessor.
They use Eclipse IDE from what I can gather. IBM is a major backer (once founder) of the project and Toshiba is giving it out with their reference boards. Also the guys at Mecury Systems are also issuing Eclipse as standard. I do recall a picture of a Cell prototype setup with the IDE clearly visible - not sure when.
It is quite a compotent IDE to work with (from a Java perspective) but is different from VS in numerous ways. This is probably why the same PC developers keep getting/focusing on the issue of 'radically different' and 'hard to develop for' - both a new chip architecture and a different IDE from the standard x86/VS. As for Xbox it still uses what could 'remotely' be an x86 chip and has the usual VS IDE people are used to.
Though Sony is obviously a seperate company I highly doubt they will reinvent an entire IDE when Toshiba and other partners on the project have already built one. And as for discontent I am certain it is once again the PC developers bitching because they don't have VS as they have done about everything. Empty ships make most noise I guess as PC games really are few and far between on consoles.
It is quite a compotent IDE to work with (from a Java perspective) but is different from VS in numerous ways. This is probably why the same PC developers keep getting/focusing on the issue of 'radically different' and 'hard to develop for' - both a new chip architecture and a different IDE from the standard x86/VS. As for Xbox it still uses what could 'remotely' be an x86 chip and has the usual VS IDE people are used to.
Though Sony is obviously a seperate company I highly doubt they will reinvent an entire IDE when Toshiba and other partners on the project have already built one. And as for discontent I am certain it is once again the PC developers bitching because they don't have VS as they have done about everything. Empty ships make most noise I guess as PC games really are few and far between on consoles.
SE also showcased a demo, of no game in particular. It was a sort of island palace, surrounded by water. I didn't rate it as anything amazing; certainly not as impressive to me as the FFVII I saw on PS3. But as to why it wasn't as impressive, I can't really say and it's been a long time since I saw it. Out of curiosity I might go looking for it again.avaya said:
Edit : Found a link to the tech demo : http://movies.teamxbox.com/xbox360/ffxi/squaredemo_516_1.wmv
Lots of geometry. Not bad really. Just...kinda dull I guess.
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It was said from the beginning that Sony would be providiing development tools. With the purchase of SN system or whoever they are, presumably this is the IDE that's now appearing.Kryton said:
Shifty Geezer said:
SN systems write optimizing targetted compilers and debug tools - not full fledged IDEs. These can be put into Eclipse in the same way that Eclipse supports Java, PHP, Ruby, C etc. as back ends. This is just the same as VS being able to compile C, VB, C# etc. (and I am not just talking about to .net code).
TheGuardian
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Actually, according to SN Systems's website, their compiler and tools integrate into Visual Studio.
From the PSP tools section :
"VSI will install a toolbar into Visual Studio to allow your ProDG build environment to be used by Visual Studio. Any feature natively available in Visual Studio is available to use in your "PSPâ„¢" project, for example, Source Safe controls."
From the PSP tools section :
"VSI will install a toolbar into Visual Studio to allow your ProDG build environment to be used by Visual Studio. Any feature natively available in Visual Studio is available to use in your "PSPâ„¢" project, for example, Source Safe controls."
I think we said a similar thing from a different perspective but you explained it in detailShifty Geezer said:Good for you. Mckmass - you are being quite rude at the moment. Not everyone who says something wrong is going out of their way to be awkward. Sometimes people don't know better and just need correcting. At the moment you seemt o throwing out quite a lot of rather negative attitude. Even to those that are spreading FUD we ought to be keeping polite.
Nesh : The dev kits need more to be akin in architecture than power to develop for. You could provide a supercomputer with the same power of XB360, with no GPU and all the graphics done in software, but developing for XB360 by writing for this supercomputer would be worthless. If the architecture is similar you can write the same code, and just aim a bit higher for performance. So if you want a 30 fps game, on the SDKs you might write for 20 fps knowing on the final kit it'll get a 50% boost in performance, sort of thing.
The PS3 SDKs (AFAIK, always. I don't nor have ever owned a PS3 kit so can only go by reports!) started with comparable architecture and performance-wise were quite comparable. The XB360 SDKs started of with maybe the same power differential, but a quite different architecture so using the power of the SKD efficiently wouldn't result in an efficient use of final hardware. MS's SDKs have undergone a long evolution. It's their policy to offer updates every month (including software, not just hardware) and they started early long before they had working XB360 components, so the first code on XB360 SDKs was pretty far removed on hardware platform to the final thing.
But that's what lends to my confusion, as PS3 dev kits with Cells have been out months and people have written working code for them, that looks pretty amazing, yet apparently without any development tools
So let me see if I got it right:
360 Alpha kits=completely different from the final architecture=code needs high optimization when converted from alpha to final.Final kit performance depends on the level of optimization of the original code.
PS3 Alpha kits=based on the same architecture as the final kit=code doesnt need optimization.Performance depends as the hardware is updated
My point was though that:
360 Alpha kits: If we assume similar performance(simulating partially final kit's performance) but completely different architecture from final kit the level of quality we get depends on the level of input put to the software work and code optimization to get the appropriate performance
PS3 Alpha kits: If we assume similar architecture but difference in performance due to unfinished hardware (simplistic example: a P4 1.2Ghz PC 128MB ram, 32MB Graphics card < a P4 3.2Ghz PC 512MB, 256 MB Graphics Card=both similar architecture performance difference) then improving that performance it depends on updating the hardware
My point is that they are two different situations.We cant know the difference in performance between the alpha to final 360 kits and alpha to final PS3 kits since they are different sitiuations.
I think its another case of comparing apples with oranges
Shifting to different and powerful more efficient architecture and code optimization(360) could prove marginally better performance than updating the same architecture(PS3), or the opposite could happen depending on the work, improvisation and input put to each situation (situation Apple:360, Situation Orange: PS3)
I wasnt implying earlier that the final PS3 kit will be much more powerful compared to its alpha kit than what the final 360 kit is compared to its 360 alpha kit.
Thanks for the info though.
Nesh said:
yes, that's how I see it pretty much. Of course both will have room for optimizations in the final hardware which isn't seen in earlier kits. eg. PS3 at the moment hasn't got 35 GB/s Cell<>GPU BW, nor any 'special sauce' that RSX might have. That's where there's room for improvement in later generations that would never happen on the earlier kits. But fundamentally the code written on the PS3 kit now will port to final kits and run faster, whereas the software written on XB360 kits for a while was crossed over onto near-final hardware and possibly ran a lot slower as the architecture ran differently.
Though that is true. From what we know of the first XB360 kit, it had an ATi 9800 GPU. That alone is a fraction of the GPU performance of Xenos. The CPU too didn't have the vector power of XeCPU, so was much weaker in that respect. PS3's kit, the earliest I know of, had 6800s (were these SLI'd?) which were much closer to final GPU performance than 9800 is to Xenos, and a Cell (2.4 GHz I think) that had the same level of performance, just underclocked.
Before that PS3 kit there may well hve been something else. Heavenly Sword was ported to Cell and used only the PPE to begin with. I'm sure development on PPC was going on before Cell kits were avilable. Whether these were official Sony or what I've no idea. Maybe they just grabbed a couple of PowerMacs and hoped the transition would work?!
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