Interpretation of ND Job Posting *ad nauseam*

[Shifty Geezer]

thx for being annoying. Stop harping on the same thing.

https://jackofallcontrollers.com/20...-knowledge-to-work-on-the-last-of-us-part-ii/

In polite addition to the others, the story here states some 'truth', but when you look at the evidence, you are getting the author's interpretation. And that's much of the internet, so when you look something up, you get the same 'fact' repeated such that it looks like it must be true - I mean, everyone says it is, so it must be, right? The proverbial 'echo chamber'. Search "Naughty Dog nVidia Last of us" and get lots of people repeating the idea without questioning the logic of the source material...



That's why it's important to go to the source. Here, we have a generic job listing, someone's run wild with it, and a bunch of people are parroting it. When you look at the job listing it's obviously nothing specially hinting at a PC port. This is why when discussing XBSX's hardware raytracing solution, I asked for the source, because all I could find was a a bunch of articles making the claim and as such, I couldn't be sure they were correct or jumping to conclusions.

 

[JPT]

To me all it says, is that ND is looking for new GFX programmers and if you have these skills and / or experience you can be the one ND are looking for.
If you have it, then you now what GFX programming is about and you can learn/evolve in what ever way ND needs.
PS4 / PS5 / PSP337 / XBox / PC / Switch / Game & Watch or whatever ND needs.

 

[iroboto]

If anyone here today goes for a job interview at a AAA studio, they will ask if you have other coding experience other than C++ (if you don't have it) in hopes that you will eventually be capable of it. Like, Ubisoft tossed me for CPP, they also wrecked me on the whiteboard interview (honestly, I got most answers to about 75%), but they wanted to move me into tools development using C# instead. Which is fine, since I'm more familiar with C#, but it's also goes to show that because the pickings are slim they are looking for other ways to get the required experience into the studio and hope you build up the skills over time.

I see this as a nature of just expanding their hiring pool. When you are first party studio, and you are looking for first party experience. You're just going to more or less end up poaching from related studios. Add a couple more areas of expertise and you can start to pull from a variety of other industries.

 

[MrFox]

If anyone here today goes for a job interview at a AAA studio, they will ask if you have other coding experience other than C++ (if you don't have it) in hopes that you will eventually be capable of it. Like, Ubisoft tossed me for CPP, they also wrecked me on the whiteboard interview (honestly, I got most answers to about 75%), but they wanted to move me into tools development using C# instead. Which is fine, since I'm more familiar with C#, but it's also goes to show that because the pickings are slim they are looking for other ways to get the required experience into the studio and hope you build up the skills over time.

I see this as a nature of just expanding their hiring pool. When you are first party studio, and you are looking for first party experience. You're just going to more or less end up poaching from related studios. Add a couple more areas of expertise and you can start to pull from a variety of other industries.

I knew a programmer who went to work for a major studio, back in the early PS360 days. Requirements were generic C++ and x86...

"Okay now you're going to work exclusively in Lua on the Cell Processor". The what in what???

 

[iroboto]

I knew a programmer who went to work for a major studio, back in the early PS360 days. Requirements were generic C++ and x86...

"Okay now you're going to work exclusively in Lua on the Cell Processor". The what in what???

haha.Yea lua on cell was not fun. And I had no way to optimize my code there either. The most performance i got out of it was to ensure I wasn't creating or destroying objects. I couldn't figure out how to multi-thread or use GPU commands in that environment. No debugger, fun times.

 

[Nesh]

haha.Yea lua on cell was not fun. And I had no way to optimize my code there either. The most performance i got out of it was to ensure I wasn't creating or destroying objects. I couldn't figure out how to multi-thread or use GPU commands in that environment. No debugger, fun times.

I suppose this was at the beginning. How was this issue taken care of later on?

 

[iroboto]

I suppose this was at the beginning. How was this issue taken care of later on?

I had to work with PSN@Home Kit, so for me it never changed and that was the tail end of PS3. I suspect perhaps there were some other methods to do it, but it's beyond me, I was struggling with the lack of documentation already.. That was what was provided (the only known method of producing those mini-games for PSN@home).
For other projects as far as I know, they had full access to the hardware.
uhh, yea, sorry man, I wish I could answer it better than that. I would have loved a debugger, but I didn't see one; (that doesn't mean there wasn't one though) it would have been a lot more useful than print statements etc.

 

[Nesh]

I had to work with PSN@Home Kit, so for me it never changed and that was the tail end of PS3. I suspect perhaps there were some other methods to do it, but it's beyond me, I was struggling with the lack of documentation already.. That was what was provided (the only known method of producing those mini-games for PSN@home).
For other projects as far as I know, they had full access to the hardware.
uhh, yea, sorry man, I wish I could answer it better than that. I would have loved a debugger, but I didn't see one; (that doesn't mean there wasn't one though) it would have been a lot more useful than print statements etc.

It is very alarming how Sony was investing so much in this chip's performance but barely invested in its useability.
You would expect a company that literally have bet in their expansion into computing would have also designed the right tools to assist all those who were supposed to support it.
A curious discussion about what went wrong. Interestingly enough neither Toshina nor IBM seemed to have helped in this regard. Billions went down the drain for a technology that was almost impossible to use.
What a shame.

 

[iroboto]

It is very alarming how Sony was investing so much in this chip's performance but barely invested in its useability.
You would expect a company that literally have bet in their expansion into computing would have also designed the right tools to assist all those who were supposed to support it.
A curious discussion about what went wrong. Interestingly enough neither Toshina nor IBM seemed to have helped in this regard. Billions went down the drain for a technology that was almost impossible to use.
What a shame.

PSN@Home was some serious experimentation. A method to sort of attract indie developers to try the platform out. Think of the SDK like the Xbox 360 XDK (IIRC that being called that). Off the top of my head, just a library for letting you load sound, graphics, vector math. SN tools to load stuff. Majority of the coding is done in lua, which is normal. It was a fairly bare bones system IIRC. Everything we made was from scratch, though the publishers and Sony helped with some things I couldn't figure out, mainly testing etc, but yea. It was a great learning experience.

Considering the way things went with Unity and being able to cross deploy; it was probably the right choice. Unity is a fully built engine capable of deploying onto any platform now with reasonable speed and features, marketplace etc.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

PSN@Home was some serious experimentation.

When you think about it, Home was kind of nuts. But I hope neither Sony or Microsoft stop doing weird experimental stuff.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

The weirdest part about Home was it generated loads of users and revenue, but Sony closed shop instead of building on it.

 

[Nesh]

The weirdest part about Home was it generated loads of users and revenue, but Sony closed shop instead of building on it.

You mean it was profitable?
I think they needed to change the traversal system a bit and make it snappier.
Home would be a perfect fit for PS5. Zero loading times. It would also benefit if the character movement was faster and smoother.
It had potential.

 

[iroboto]

It is unfortunate that it went away, I'm not sure how customers who did purchase things were reimbursed.

All I know is that I got in shit for delivering too late.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

You mean it was profitable?

Apparently it made lots of money for the content sellers, but not for Sony with the running costs. Which basically means a fault on their end with their monetisation strategy. I guess they didn't really know what to do with it though as it didn't fit their model of a game-launch platform thing. It ended being a social experience and I think lacked any sort of vision or any inside champion to keep it going.

 

[iroboto]

You know, that would be a cool feature to see it make a triumphant return in PS5 -- with PSVR support.
They can always fix monetisation, but if people genuinely enjoyed it, their purchases could come back over etc.

 

[upnorthsox]

You know, that would be a cool feature to see it make a triumphant return in PS5 -- with PSVR support.
They can always fix monetisation, but if people genuinely enjoyed it, their purchases could come back over etc.

This. I feel that this would be well worth it for VR, even if that was its only use. It could even extend to PC and mobile.

 

[goonergaz]

I thought home was a great place to chillax - I remember one year when E3 was streamed in home...great memories.