*Game Development Issues*

[wco81]

Well the true test of whether multiplatform games on PS3 will have reached at least parity will be with higher-profile publishers, like EA and games like Madden.

We should get some initial product info. next month, at the NFL draft and in the weeks following.

If Midway can make those kinds of investments (yet to be demonstrated), there will be no excuse for a company with more resources like EA.

 

[bbot]

What about this article?

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/leve...-is-ps3-still-an-afterthought-among-devs.aspx


Titled: The Accidental Exclusive, Or, Some Not-So-Subtle Ways In Which the Playstation 3 Remains An Afterthought Among Third Party Developers

 

[Acert93]

I know many people want to talk about % sell through based on user-base, but at the end of the day, it is about being in the black.

True, and one thing people tend to miss on % sell through: as your install base grows and total sales tend to grow as well the penetration on a platform drops. So if a console had 10M units and you sold 1M titles (10%) on the platform at 20M units you may only sell 1.4M (14%). There are exceptions but it is a notable trend. There are many dynamics to a profitable title.

 

[betan]

True, and one thing people tend to miss on % sell through: as your install base grows and total sales tend to grow as well the penetration on a platform drops. So if a console had 10M units and you sold 1M titles (10%) on the platform at 20M units you may only sell 1.4M (14%). There are exceptions but it is a notable trend. There are many dynamics to a profitable title.

So?
I mean how are all those related to N'Gai's entry?

 

[joker454]

Well the true test of whether multiplatform games on PS3 will have reached at least parity will be with higher-profile publishers, like EA and games like Madden.

It definitely seems like many of the local shops here in LA are making a hard push at getting their PS3 versions to be at parity with their 360 counterpart. All the places I interviewed at were mostly seeking PS3 coders, especially those with rsx experience.

 

[Rangers]

That is really just about being "an afterthought" during a presentation, not during development. I know many people want to talk about % sell through based on user-base, but at the end of the day, it is about being in the black.

I see it as more many developers cater to the 360 on a personal level. I imagine this is mostly because it came out a year earlier, so all the hardcore gamers bought it then, and became familiar with it first. It's just another benefit of having a one year head start really.

 

[wco81]

OK, I don't recall if this was the main thread where we had the raging discussion about multiplatform games and inferior performance on the PS3.

One of the main subjects of this discussion was EA games, specifically Madden 08, which had 60 FPS on the X360 and only 30 FPS on the PS3.

Now, some early info. for Madden 09 has been released and EA is not only claiming both versions will be 60 FPS (as they promised), they're claiming better visuals on top of the higher framerate:

the next thing that really has me excited are the visuals. I believe this is the biggest graphical improvement we've ever had year-to-year in Madden. You could argue that the jump from PS1 to PS2 was a pretty big jump, but Madden 09 looks absolutely stunning. All new lighting models, all new player models -- we actually went in and did full body scans of real athletes. We have shadows over the field, we have field goal nets, and footprints in the snow. We actually have snow. Last year, the rain and particle effects were so expensive that we couldn't put too many on the screen at the same time without impacting the framerate, but this year we've actually upgraded our particle system and we can have lots and lots of snowflakes. The field is covered in snow. There are shoveled lines on the field.

Then again, there's some contradictory info. They rebuilt some assets to conserve RAM but yet claim better visuals overall.

GameTap: What about the PlayStation 3 version? Are we finally going to see a Madden that's equal on the 360 and PS3?

Phil Frazier: They are equal, and they're both running at 60 frames-per-second this year. An interesting thing to point out is not only are they both running at 60 fps, but we've also made a huge leap in terms of graphics. It was definitely a struggle. We had to go back and rebuild assets. We had to rebuild stadiums and players so they were a little more economical in terms of how much memory they took and how much space they took, but we finally found a way to get to 60 fps on both and the game looks better than ever. We're proud of that and I think our fans on PS3 this year should have no reason to feel disappointed.

http://www.gametap.com/articles/gamefeatur...erview-04252008

Madden hasn't really been a graphics showcase but I have a feeling there will be some comparisons when it comes out.

 

[AlNom]

Moved your post to the thread you were talking about.

 

[liolio]

it sounds like a downgrade under marketing disguise...

Bad news for MS if editors feel like they are losing potential buyers and want to leverage the whole market.
MS relies a lot on multi platform games, they really in need for some ninja dev team.

If it doesn't hurts now it will hurts soon.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Then again, there's some contradictory info. They rebuilt some assets to conserve RAM but yet claim better visuals overall.

Rebuilding assets to conserve RAM doesn't necessarily mean downgrading them. If they had an inefficient data structure for the assets originally, reworking them (eg. finding a way to combine two attributes into one texture instead of two) could save a notable percentage.

 

[liolio]

Rebuilding assets to conserve RAM doesn't necessarily mean downgrading them. If they had an inefficient data structure for the assets originally, reworking them (eg. finding a way to combine two attributes into one texture instead of two) could save a notable percentage.

I agree there are more than one way to achieve the same result.
But it sounds like the focus is to bring the ps3 version on parity, not makes the 360 version better.
If it makes sense for EA to offer an similar product on both machine it hurts more MS than Sony.
It's becoming more a marketing/business conversation than a technical one ie how dev teams manage the technical difficulties (good one paul ... ) and which effects this will have on machine perception.

If optimisations make the ps3 50% better and 360 version marginaly better then somebody didn't do its homeworks properly or EA has already maxed out the 360...
Again it makes sense from a business point of view seing the despair of ps3 lovers every time eurogamer comes with a new article on that matter.

My concern is not game should be better on this system and not this one, *** rules etc.

It's like GTA4, some stuff doesn't add up for me, ok rockstar have to make the game run on both the arcade and the pro SKU, ok.
GTA4 is rumored to have more pop up on the 360.
For me there is something wrong.
rockstar could have did some downgrades on the 360 to allow the game to run on the arcade sku BUT with the same downgrades the pop up issue should easy be improved on the pro sku (some shows that caching on the HDD is more than trivial on the 360) as the ps3 has no advantage against this sku.
From early in the development the game has mostly been shown on the 360, it's possible that they invest way more time on the ps3 rendition and at the end of the day some decisions that bring good result on the ps3 should have been adressed in a different way on the 360.
Once again the 'it's good enough on the 360" seems to have hurt.
I don't imply that the game has to be better on the 360. But in regard to pro sku and 360 memory architecture, if the game had to suffer from draw back on the 360 I wouldn't have putted my bet here (more pop up).

Anyway I won't cry or anything as I still don't own one of these systems, I still have the choice

But I feel that this hurts MS as the PS is still percieved as WAY more powerful than the ps3 and the top team MS owns doesn't seem anywhere near to achieve what Sony's ones are up to. The 360 will look more and more and as an already maxed out/non future proof system (add to this all the blabla going on about the optical format and it's easy to see what the average costumer could think).

 

[JPT]

It definitely seems like many of the local shops here in LA are making a hard push at getting their PS3 versions to be at parity with their 360 counterpart. All the places I interviewed at were mostly seeking PS3 coders, especially those with rsx experience.

I know its off topic, but just a curios question on how the dev business works.
Are people, like yourself, hired on project basis? Ie you do super crunch for a title and then 1 week after it ships your out of a job and need to find a new one?
How does R&R fit in there, do you have to "pay" for that yourself or was it just special in your case ie wanting to move on etc.

 

[trinibwoy]

They relied on old assumptions (next gen = the same old stuff, just faster) they used in the past and they were..emh..simply wrong, while they had all the information they needed to take better decisions.
This barely works for 360 and it doesn't work at all on PS3. I can't wait to see what will happen in 2-3 years when we will have 32 cores per CPU..

This pretty much sums it up for me. It is inevitable that developers will have to learn how to do things differently in the future. What's not surprising is the difficulty of working with something like the Cell architecture when they still aren't doing much with even common two and four core x86 CPUs. Maybe Cell is just too far ahead of its time. But if it is the way forward how come we still haven't we seen any PS3 exclusive content that justifies the steep learning curve? When will we see the advanced particle, animation and physics systems that were promised?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

How long did you have to wait for devs to get to grips with the Emotion Engine? You'd be looking at at least 2nd generation software, after devs have made their first attempt and had the shock to the system about how differently they need to think, and probably after a second title which is the first attempt at a properly SPU designed engine founded on correct thinking.

 

[patsu]

I agree there are more than one way to achieve the same result.
But it sounds like the focus is to bring the ps3 version on parity, not makes the 360 version better.
If it makes sense for EA to offer an similar product on both machine it hurts more MS than Sony.
It's becoming more a marketing/business conversation than a technical one ie how dev teams manage the technical difficulties (good one paul ... ) and which effects this will have on machine perception.

The OS memory should be on par on both platforms now. The only RSX limitation we know today is the slower vertex input rate. So they will have to work around it (e.g., implement better culling, find more efficient ways to store/read the assets).

We also know that when Cell programming principles are used, both Xenon and Cell will improve in performance. But Cell will demonstrate more improvement by design. It should have more spare capacity for stuff like decompression, audio processing., etc. when used correctly.

On the 360 side, I don't know if the GTA4 guys are using tiling to take full advantage of Xenos. For some reason, the Bungie guys didn't do it for 360. So Xenos performance may be limited by reasons not related to PS3 at all (Halo 3 is not ported to PS3).

If optimisations make the ps3 50% better and 360 version marginaly better then somebody didn't do its homeworks properly or EA has already maxed out the 360...

Not really. The PS3 can easily show the most improvement because by design it requires a more stringent set of run-time requirements. When these requirements are met, it will show significant speed up compared to the unoptimized version. This does not mean people are not doing their job. It means they are now taking advantage of Cell now.

Again it makes sense from a business point of view seing the despair of ps3 lovers every time eurogamer comes with a new article on that matter.

My concern is not game should be better on this system and not this one, *** rules etc.

It's like GTA4, some stuff doesn't add up for me, ok rockstar have to make the game run on both the arcade and the pro SKU, ok.
GTA4 is rumored to have more pop up on the 360.
For me there is something wrong.

Are they done by separate teams ? The 360 team may have more scope to implement because of the DLC extension. They may need to do extra work within the same time so that the DLCs can come soon after GTA4 is released ?

The PS3 team may have more time to optimize the GTA4 core experience (including taking full advantage of HDD streaming + Better layout on Blu-ray + combined bandwidth of XDR and GDDR3).

I don't see this venture as a "good enough" implementation for 360. MS paid good money for the game. It's a high profile game. Both sides will throw sufficient resources to make their versions look best given the time. Whether the pop-in rumor on 360 is true or not is a separate question.

 

[liolio]

The OS memory should be on par on both platforms now. The only RSX limitation we know today is the slower vertex input rate. So they will have to work around it (e.g., implement better culling, find more efficient ways to store/read the assets).

I don't speak of the OS size, but UMA vs NUMA, ie for that kind of games I feel like you have way more room for optimization with for the former.

We also know that when Cell programming principles are used, both Xenon and Cell will improve in performance. But Cell will demonstrate more improvement by design. It should have more spare capacity for stuff like decompression, audio processing., etc. when used correctly.
On the 360 side, I don't know if the GTA4 guys are using tiling to take full advantage of Xenos. For some reason, the Bungie guys didn't do it for 360. So Xenos performance may be limited by reasons not related to PS3 at all (Halo 3 is not ported to PS3).

Not the point, as I state if we speak about madden, it's clear that EA was doing a poor job on the ps3, so they had a lot of room. But the game were fine on the 360, so we will have wait to see the improvement on the 360, if they are marginal +> it's clear that they have spend most of their efforts n the ps3.
It's clear that ps3 owners are angry to get inferior renditions, EA and others gain more at making games the same than at making the 360 rendition really improves.
Ie if the ps3 is now really good (60 fps, etc.) but the 360 has improved less but is still on top, a part of the market could clearly chose to pass on the game.

Rockstar do use tiling as the game is 720p + AAx2

Not really. The PS3 can easily show the most improvement because by design it requires a more stringent set of run-time requirements. When these requirements are met, it will show significant speed up compared to the unoptimized version. This does not mean people are not doing their job. It means they are now taking advantage of Cell now.

As I say the problem is not how much the ps3 version improve but how much the 360 versiohn improve. Obviously there is more room on the ps3.
But marginal improvements on the wouldn't be a good news for MS.

Are they done by separate teams ? The 360 team may have more scope to implement because of the DLC extension. They may need to do extra work within the same time so that the DLCs can come soon after GTA4 is released ?

The PS3 team may have more time to optimize the GTA4 core experience (including taking full advantage of HDD streaming + Better layout on Blu-ray + combined bandwidth of XDR and GDDR3).

I don't see this venture as a "good enough" implementation for 360. MS paid good money for the game. It's a high profile game. Both sides will throw sufficient resources to make their versions look best given the time. Whether the pop-in rumor on 360 is true or not is a separate question.

In regard to all of this, by reading some comments on the games forum, it sounds like the issue is in fact widely exagerated and that it's clear that a lot of pro reviewers are really biased (cf dmc4, and clearer now...)

So We will know soon but it makes your comments and mines even more, anticipated

 

[Arwin]

The EA article very clearly indicates that they have spent a lot of time on making the game look better by making the polygons count more. And that, to me, suggests that they have spent particular attention to getting better art. Which is a good way of getting a game to look better without needing performance improvements.

 

[JPT]

This pretty much sums it up for me. It is inevitable that developers will have to learn how to do things differently in the future. What's not surprising is the difficulty of working with something like the Cell architecture when they still aren't doing much with even common two and four core x86 CPUs. Maybe Cell is just too far ahead of its time. But if it is the way forward how come we still haven't we seen any PS3 exclusive content that justifies the steep learning curve? When will we see the advanced particle, animation and physics systems that were promised?

Someone (Donald Knuth) much smarter than me says this:

Andrew: Vendors of multicore processors have expressed frustration at the difficulty of moving developers to this model. As a former professor, what thoughts do you have on this transition and how to make it happen? Is it a question of proper tools, such as better native support for concurrency in languages, or of execution frameworks? Or are there other solutions?

Donald: I don’t want to duck your question entirely. I might as well flame a bit about my personal unhappiness with the current trend toward multicore architecture. To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas, and that they’re trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore’s Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks! I won’t be surprised at all if the whole multithreading idea turns out to be a flop, worse than the "Titanium" approach that was supposed to be so terrific—until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write.

Let me put it this way: During the past 50 years, I’ve written well over a thousand programs, many of which have substantial size. I can’t think of even five of those programs that would have been enhanced noticeably by parallelism or multithreading. Surely, for example, multiple processors are no help to TeX.[1]

How many programmers do you know who are enthusiastic about these promised machines of the future? I hear almost nothing but grief from software people, although the hardware folks in our department assure me that I’m wrong.

I know that important applications for parallelism exist—rendering graphics, breaking codes, scanning images, simulating physical and biological processes, etc. But all these applications require dedicated code and special-purpose techniques, which will need to be changed substantially every few years.

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856

 

[Shifty Geezer]

But the game were fine on the 360, so we will have wait to see the improvement on the 360, if they are marginal +> it's clear that they have spend most of their efforts n the ps3.

Why do you assume lack of marked improvement in the 360 version would mean lack of effort with the 360, rather than having achieved greater utilisation in 360 with earlier versions and having less room to advance the game? eg. If XB360 usage was 80% of peak in Madden '07, and 50% on PS3, those changes in PS3 that shift it up to 80% utilisation wouldn't have a major gain for XB360.

It's clear that ps3 owners are angry to get inferior renditions, EA and others gain more at making games the same than at making the 360 rendition really improves.
Ie if the ps3 is now really good (60 fps, etc.) but the 360 has improved less but is still on top, a part of the market could clearly chose to pass on the game.

How many people refuse to buy a game because they don't feel it's improved as much in relation to a rival platform? That's very strange behaviour. "Madden '08 is the best football game ever, and looks fantastic on XB360, but because the PS3 saw a greater improvement over the last version, I flatly refuse to buy the XB360 version." I don't see any sense or popularity in that viewpoint.

But marginal improvements on the wouldn't be a good news for MS.

MS's whole point was easily accessible hardware that didn't require the developers to jump through hoops. If developers didn't jump through hoops and got good usage from the hardware, then they're going to get less improvements over time. You can't have it both ways! Huge improvements in PS3 are more a sign of a developer unfriendly system at launch that hampered efforts, than a focus on one platform over an other.

 

[Nesh]

How many people refuse to buy a game because they don't feel it's improved as much in relation to a rival platform? That's very strange behaviour. "Madden '08 is the best football game ever, and looks fantastic on XB360, but because the PS3 saw a greater improvement over the last version, I flatly refuse to buy the XB360 version." I don't see any sense or popularity in that viewpoint.

I dont think that happens.

What happens I think is that some people prefer to play games on a Playstation platform. When the versions are identical they see no reason to stay on 360 or buy a 360 to play it. They will shift towards the console they intended to from the beginning but didnt have good ports to justify it