New article on Cell (good!)
- Thread starter Titanio
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mckmas8808 said:I don't think he would quite frankly. If a PS2 dev would jump for joy (as Jeremy puts it) then why so much negativity from Carmack about the PS3 and the love towards the 360? Had he said something like Jeremy Gordon the forums would have turned upside down months ago and you know Titanio.
I dont remember Carmack saying anything beyond the fact that he preferred the development environment on the 360 (not the only one to say that) and preferred the symmetrical design of Xenon over cell. He said the PS3 had more peak power and that overall the machines were comparable and would make excellent game machines.
You extrapolate that into 'so much negativity' and 'love'? Or was there something else i missed?
mckmas8808 said:
Negative, as in supporting a Playstation system equally I think for the first time ever? I think that indicates how far PS3 has come in terms of dev environment versus PS2. He may not be jumping for joy, but I think he's pretty happy with it. He's said so himself, and that any issues he had with the systems were nitpicks.
Has Carmack ever had to tame the PS2?mckmas8808 said:
mckmas8808
Legend
NRP said:
Oh okay I can respect that. But are you saying the PS2 was so much harder to program or the EE was harder to program? Basically is the EE of the PS2 in itself harder to program for than the Cell or are you looking at it from a whole system point of view?
mckmas8808 said:
I would hazard a guess and say... EE was easier to deal with than Cell will be, but GS (and the VU0/VU1) is likely more difficult and annoying to deal with than RSX will be. Overall it should be easier to get a project up and running on PS3, but to get the most out of it it's still going to be a decent bit of trouble.
Dev's are crafty tricksters, don't worry too much about them...
mckmas8808 said:
In short, the difficult thing with the PS2 as a whole was trying to use all the different processors it has (EE core, VU0, VU1, GS, and some people tend to count one or two more in there separately too, like the GIF), and somehow make them all work in parallel, keeping one busy with something while the other processors are doing something else, in order to achieve greater performance. That is unarguably rather difficult not least because the documentation and libraries from Sony were, at least initially and i think for more than a year after launch, a bit useless so to speak.
The fact that a fair bit of low-level programming was needed to get some of that extra performance going was also a pain. Not that low-level programming is a bad thing, but it is undoubtedly something most programmers tend to avoid as it's very time consuming, and they usually need to stay in budget and in time with the deadlines dictated by the publishers.
That's why you see such a huge gap between a game like Jak&Daxter (1, 2 and 3, obviously with the last game being the best example) which tends to use the PS2 architecture properly - or as good as it gets really - and other games (most other games, admittedly) that tend to use the EE-GS more "conservatively". As a consequence, it's clear that Sony's studios or studios that are first party, were able to stretch both budget and deadlines in order to get their games technologically right, because Sony was paying for them and they probably were given more room to play around, as Sony had an interest in showing that PS2 wasn't as "underpowered" compared to the competition as people were saying. And it shows big time, Sony's first party are the best games, techonlogically, in the PS2 library. Other technologically amazing games (relative to PS2 of course) always tend to be PS2 exclusives too, for obvious reasons. I can think of a very few multiplatform titles that made PS2 shine, one of them would be the Burnout series.
EDIT: Am i the only one who noticed that i've started talking about PS2 in past tense? Kinda weird, a bit like talking about a dead relative....
