New dev tools ? PlayStation 3 Edge

From here...

And to those that thought Sony were arrogantly counting each age as their console with Age 1 being PS1, you were wrong!

 

GDC isn't really the place you'll see a bunch of "trailers" shown off, it's a developers conference afterall. ND has a session on some of their animation tech that sounds pretty interesting though...

 

Pretty cruel on behalf of ND ! Talking about added realism on protagonists faces while other teams are still struggling to get decent bodies ! It's the image of the A+ student who gets mad at his 98/100 and asks for his two missing points restored, while the helpless D student stars at him wondering "what the hell ?"...

 

Strangely enough I never perceived the PS2 as a significantly online-enabled console, so to me it seems like Sony didn't even take part in what they now call the passing second age.
Probably depends on the games you played though, FFXI addicts would surely disagree.

 

SOCOM addicts would also slap you down onto the floor.... Possibly spitting on you as you lie there.

 

It was a short age! Nintendo certainly didn't take part. Sony did have plenty of titles you could play online, though without online services. And by Harrison's definition, that's not part of the Second Age. Second Age was buying content on a disk and connecting it over the network. I guess Dreamcast was the beginning of that age. Third Age is where the developers create a half-assed game, sell it at full price, and leave it to the community to fix up with user content (see Oblivion)

 

That's just your perception, there were far more Playstation gamers online than xbox owners. Although that was probably in spite of Sony rather than because of them.

I tried it once and the network and registration was a right ball ache.

I haven't used the PSN yet, but it does sound like Sony are leading the way in terms of content distribution this time round, even if the actual "online gaming" service lags behind Live at the minute (although it is free so who cares.... Sooner have something usable for free than something slightly better for $40~50 a year)

 

I'd have to disagree. There is notably more, varied, content on Live than there is on the PS Store, right now. Unless you meant something else in reference to content distribution?

 

I did, I meant in terms of full priced games and such (which Sony haven't done yet as far as I know, but it's what they are planning in the future).

It is unfair to compair the content on PSN to what's currently on live, as there is bound to be more as it's been live longer.

When I had a 360 (from launch until the end January) there was barely anything on it, certainly nothing worth having.

 

Oh, I see what you mean now.

Yes, comparing PSN to Live at there current state doesn't make much sense right now. Which is why I was extremely surprised to hear you say PSN had more content, no less!

Do you mean January 07 or 06? If since 06, then the content range has improved dramatically since then. I won't make an argument for content worth having , but there's definitely a lot more content there, across various categories too. The addition of streaming support (for certain items) is also a nice touch.

 

Downloadable games or movies isn't what this is about. It's about a two-way creative endevour, where users contribute to the experience. SingStar allows users to upload movies, for example, and supposedly players can vote for best performances. Does the XB360 have any games that allows users to create content and upload it for other gamers to download? I dunno. But that's the idea here. No longer are gamers tied to what the developers provide (in this supposed 3rd Age). Now users can create content and share it with other users, just like the PC space.

And I don't know how we got to this topic from PlayStation's new dev tools!

 

Ah, I see. That further explains it. If that's what was meant by content, then I was thinking of something entirely different.

That would be my fault, sorry.

 

'06.

It must've been later actually, as I was something on live was the reason I sold it. I was holding on to see what Test Drive unlimited was like (and the demo was out around E3 I think) when I played it and thought it was rubbish, there really wasn't a reason for me to keep the 360 anymore.

 

I suppose that the Gotham TV features and ghost uploads/downloads for PGR3 are of a similar standing ... Or that you can visit each other's gardens in Viva Pinata?

 

You can 'only' send Pinatas to other players.

By the way, highscore uploads are cool too (like in Lumines Live).

 

Very good news indeed!
great read! thanks for linking!

 

An article by Zenji Nishikawa, with slides and a demo movie (768 people and 50 cars with 140 million polys @ 60fps) from the session
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20070316/pe.htm

 

That's pretty cool. They put together a demo using assets from "one of our local teams" (i.e. The Getaway). With a nod towards ease of use and productivity, aparently it took two programmers and one artist just two weeks to make.







If that is the same technology being used in the game too, then that's a pretty cool insight. They mention that the scene features 768 people and 50 cars. They say it's 720p, with anti-aliasing, with 1.4m polygons/frame (after geometry processing on the SPUs) at 60fps.

 

Video download here http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/game/docs/20070316/PSEdge.zip

 

The geometry system of Edge is written in SPE Intrinsics and C. The code written in SPE Intrinsics is 20 times faster than compiled C at the best case. 1SPU can process 0.8 million polys @ 60fps (culled polys included).

As a side note, the last paragraph of the article contains what Nishikawa heard from several developers, they say the vertex shader in RSX really sucks. If they try to port a 360 code to RSX without using SPU, the polygon budget has to be cut. Their impression is the vertex unit in RSX can almost be cut from PS3 just like EE.

Another suspicion by Nishikawa is the C compiler offered by SCE sucks in terms of performance because SCE themselves say SPE Intrinsics is 20 times faster, albeit one of the featured strengths of Cell SPE was it could be programmed with a high-level language.