Gabe Nevell Next gen Console Video Interview

[onetimeposter]

Xbox 360 and Longhorn make my life harder, while playstation 3 makes my life virtually impossible:

http://valve.1up.com/flat/Themeweek/Valve/video6.html

its a 6 minute video

 

[inefficient]

Gabe seems pretty Steamed.

 

[doob]

The man spoke some raw truethful decisions made behind hidden doors of the industry's "little" market strategy's in part 2.
Part.1 just shows his perspective about how he will aproach (or has) about steam and other related software(games).

The reason sony decided to go with cell was not just of its performance in multimedia content. As i suspect, what made sony to go with cell despite what programmers would moan, cry out for help, is just based on the nature of code architecture, in what results in a very hard counter mesure against piracy, no more emulators to run on pc, even if such would come out, the performance would be terrible.

 

[clem64]

The man spoke some raw truethful decisions made behind hidden doors of the industry's "little" market strategy's in part 2.
Part.1 just shows his perspective about how he will aproach (or has) about steam and other related software(games).

The reason sony decided to go with cell was not just of its performance in multimedia content. As i suspect, what made sony to go with cell despite what programmers would moan, cry out for help, is just based on the nature of code architecture, in what results in a very hard counter mesure against piracy, no more emulators to run on pc, even if such would come out, the performance would be terrible.

That's crazy. Most of the piracy going on has nothing to do with emulators and mostly to do with modchips and burning CDs and DVDs.

 

[MfA]

Essentially what he said though is that while Sony isn't solving any of his problems their biggest headache is competing with games like WoW ... so it comes back to the HD.

 

[Guden Oden]

Epic says you don't need a HDD to do MMOs. I wish people would stop griping about that god damn harddrive... Jeez!

Besides, I am pretty goddamn certain Sony didn't go with cell to make emulators a royal pain in the behind, as PS2 emulators are anything BUT fast right now, and won't be for maybe a decade or more at the current rate. Considering you need a 400MHz-ish pentium class machine to do single-cycle emulation of the humble 8-bit 1MHz C64, just imagine what you'd need for the current class of consoles. The mind boggles.

 

[Rockster]

But, his arguement doesn't really hold much water, because consoles in general and XBox Live in particular solve many of the issues that "steam", the "wow" community, and his complaints about the customer experience; are designed to address. Especially if, as Microsoft has indicated, that Live will become ubiquitous, encompassing both the PC and Console environments.

 

[Inane_Dork]

Is Gabe Nevell related to Deano Cleaver?


Seriously, that was a rather odd interview. I'm not entirely sure how to take it. He's so Steam-centric in everything he's thinking it's kinda hard to take him seriously for non-PC platforms.

And how, exactly, does he know that you need to throw out all your code to go multithreaded if he's never made a multithreaded app before?

And while I'm on the topic, why the heck has he not done multithreading yet? For cripes' sake, even I have done that. I would expect that a company trying to make and support a world class game engine would see the writing on the wall. He's supposed to be on top of it, ahead of the curve, etc. Now he's basically telling the world he's no better off than anyone for this big shift, and he has no real plans for overcoming it. Isn't that the vote of confidence you want your potential market to hear?

 

[scooby_dooby]

---------------------------------
On the topic of Developing for the SPE's
So one of my junior programmers who's writing game code rather than system code, could slow things down by, in a real world case, by a factor of 80.

Because they're doing something out in the AI or in the game DLL, which used to be totally safe, and now all of a sudden the whole system just slows down. And then one of the real experienced programmers will have to go in and say "Oohh, you can't tell but, you ran out of registry space...and this other thing happened...and no there's no debugger that shows this to you..."

Writing for SPE's, writing in the PS3 environment, it's like there're incredibly few programmers who can safely write code in that environment. You make tiny little changes to code running on one of the SPE's, and the entire thing grinds to a halt. And you have no visibility into why that's happening. It's just sort of magically running really really slow...

And, it's incredibly hard to architect thingsat the beginning so that you can distribute all the functionality on al of these different processing units.
---------------------------------------------

sounds pretty rough

 

[_leech_]

sounds pretty rough

Sounds like a whiner with a no-talent team if you ask me. Seriously, you don't see competent teams from Konami or Capcom whining like Gabe and Valve.

 

[Rur0ni]

I doubt those teams would ever publically state something like that in the first place.

 

[pso]

Sounds like a whiner with a no-talent team if you ask me. Seriously, you don't see competent teams from Konami or Capcom whining like Gabe and Valve.

Probably because Konami and Capcom doesn't bite the hand that feeds them.

If I was a PS3/360 dev and was getting paid alot of money; I will praise the respective consoles attributes while saying absolutely nothing on its shortcomings.

 

[Vince]

While I really don't agree with the totality of his argument, I like Gabe. His argument (against PS3 & X360) is pretty justifiable for someone coming from a strictly PC development background; although I'd posit that this is to be expected as he's talking about the difference between what is ostensively an open platform and a discrete embedded system. Consoles aren't PCs and PCs are not Consoles, it would seem that the origional XBox sort of changed this paradigm and now that this appearent bridge has been formed people are expecting them to be isometric. It's just unfortunate that now, systems which have been designed with a clear set of goals, like Cell, are demeaned for not compling with the status quo of the PC when in fact they are pretty impressively designed and executed entities in their own right.

His comments on Steam-esque updating systems for device drivers is an excellent point and is something which a body like Microsoft, do to their dominant (monopolistic?!?) position in the PC market, have the capacity and ability to address.

 

[pso]

I doubt those teams would ever publically state something like that in the first place.

Exactly.

 

[MfA]

Epic says you don't need a HDD to do MMOs.

With large flash cards it isnt absolutely necessary, but needing to ship new discs to your customers every so often is a pain.

 

[dukmahsik]

i think he has a lot of good points

 

[Brimstone]

He wants to compete with World of Warcraft and thats great, but the creators of that game have nurtured a large fan base for many years. Look how long Battle.net has been up and running for free, with all of their releases supporting it. Blizzard patched War Craft 2 so it would work with Battle.net even after many years of it's release.

Valve is not on equal ground with Blizzard as far as a fan base goes. Blizzard has the Axis of Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft to their credit with several versions of Warcraft and Diablo released over the years. Valve is a great company like Blizzard, but in comparison Half-Life and Counter Strike are fairly young brands.

On the technical side of things Epic cleary is the market leader right now and has a good foundation to maintain it's edge into the near future. Unreal Engine technology eclipses Source. The creation of high-performance multi-threaded code challenge is a major problem to solve, but Tim Sweney stepped up to the challenge and forked out money to get the best talent he saw available, which resulted in Tim Johnson, creator of the Reality Engine, joining Epic.

 

[darkblu]

ok, lemme try some "socio-developers" arithmetic here:

from my observations, ~90% of the devs bitch and moan ~90% of the time, and in ~90% of the cases they do have some at least partially good reason to do so. this may have to do something with that fact that ~90% of the devs on this planet are desktop-lings, particularly of the wintel breed, who expect that computers just swallow everything one throws at them (especially said guys' own code), just imagine what happens when they face some harsher platform (luckily the majority of them dont). so here we have (a) ~90% of the active earth devs who would have troubles getting sane performance out of their code even on the general purpose monsters of a computer the modern desktops are, and (b) devs (especially the abovementioned ~90%) are damn vocal about it. so why the heck people on these boards keep omhphing and amphing when they hear about some dev or other grumble about some new tech? that's only _statistically_natural_ people, get your expectations straight!

and when the heck will the guy known as onetimeposter, previously known as hasanahmad, previously know as *can't remember anymore nor do i care* finally get an ip ban?

ps: yes, that was one bitchy post, with overblown use of the '90%' principle.

 

[Arty]

Sounds like a whiner with a no-talent team if you ask me. Seriously, you don't see competent teams from Konami or Capcom whining like Gabe and Valve.

Whiner with no-talent team produced games like Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Half-Life 2 ...

Didnt Carmack also didnt like multi-core development environments ?

 

[Apoc]

Whiner with no-talent team produced games like Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Half-Life 2 ...

Didnt Carmack also didnt like multi-core development environments ?

CS was a mod not made by valve. Half life 2.... don't get me started on it. All this waiting to get a boring and repetitive game.