SO this is what I am getting out of the 360 and PS3...

[Shifty Geezer]

Regards software tools, have Sony ALWAYS been rubbish? How was PS1? I remember hearing PS1 got so much software because it was easy to develop for. PS2 went with esoteric hardware and lacked the tools, and it showed. There's been talk of Sony's improvements in this area, but who knows how that's going (apart from devs here posting insights )

Regards art, I give Sony their due there. They certainly have been working to help out with the introduction of Collada, which is a nice idea, though I don't know how it's developing. They have been talking about providing better support for content creation on all sides. One doesn't hold high hopes though. Sony software has never often amounted to much. To date though, it doesn't sound as though MS have progressed their tools much from their existing DX toolkits, which is kinda wierd considering that got to be their strongest asset.

 

[ERP]

Regards software tools, have Sony ALWAYS been rubbish? How was PS1? I remember hearing PS1 got so much software because it was easy to develop for. PS2 went with esoteric hardware and lacked the tools, and it showed. There's been talk of Sony's improvements in this area, but who knows how that's going (apart from devs here posting insights )

Regards art, I give Sony their due there. They certainly have been working to help out with the introduction of Collada, which is a nice idea, though I don't know how it's developing. They have been talking about providing better support for content creation on all sides. One doesn't hold high hopes though. Sony software has never often amounted to much. To date though, it doesn't sound as though MS have progressed their tools much from their existing DX toolkits, which is kinda wierd considering that got to be their strongest asset.

Actually for the time the PS1 tools were pretty good.

SN was at the time owned by psygnosis and built the tools for them. They still weren't particularly good by todays standards but they were there and they worked.

On top of that at least initially you were forced to go through the OS which was not utterly horrible for the time.

PS2 just didn't move anything forwards, you were stuck on linux with semi functional tools, until SN and Metrowerks put out their tool sets.
That coupled with the fact that the OS does almost no abstraction of the hardware.

 

[Fafalada]

That coupled with the fact that the OS does almost no abstraction of the hardware.

You know, much as it's nice to get housekeeping for filesystem and many other things done, there are just as many situations where I really hate being at the mercy of driver and OS ppl - ie. not having the option to just do things on my own if I don't like something ... certain recent hardware comes to mind here :?

Extra ground work or not - I am more comfortable with finding ways around hardware issues then finding ways around driver issues - the former is at least 'always honest' as we say...

 

[Inane_Dork]

Re: but xbox was still better looking

In some instances, might "programmer predicition" (hints) not be a little better than hardware prediction, even?

Sure. That's into providing excuses for why things are so bad, though (and yeah, this goes for MS too).

Microsoft should make a two pass building tool that compiles and runs an special data gathering version of the code before compiling it a second time taking the data from the test into account. Given their compiling experience, the IOE nature of the XeCPU, the apparently lackluster branch predictor and the fixed nature of the 360, it seems like the situation really calls for it.

 

[ERP]

That coupled with the fact that the OS does almost no abstraction of the hardware.

You know, much as it's nice to get housekeeping for filesystem and many other things done, there are just as many situations where I really hate being at the mercy of driver and OS ppl - ie. not having the option to just do things on my own if I don't like something ... certain recent hardware comes to mind here :?

Extra ground work or not - I am more comfortable with finding ways around hardware issues then finding ways around driver issues - the former is at least 'always honest' as we say...

Actually I agree with you, but I also think that a lot of early PS2 software would have been much better is Sony had provided somesort of graphics layer. They needn't force you to use it.

 

[3roxor]

Nope not the work of IBM.
Sony even turned down the IBM compiler, arguably one of the best multithreaded compilers around........ They are using the Gnu compiler again.

There is currently no way to debug native SPE code in the Sony toolset, and just single stepping is a hideous operation in the debugger.

They probably use Gnu again because most devs are familiar with it. I have to say it's not the best compiler out there..but the 4.xx version has great potential once the many bugs are ironed out. I also read the debugger for spe's is ready and they are currently working on implementing it. A more usefull version will have to wait al little longer though.

 

[3dcgi]

BTW, anyone think Nintendo might win ease of development?

Nintendo will likely just shift the development difficultly from the programmers to the designers. Consider the DS. It could have a lot of processing horsepower, but it still would be difficult to come up with good ideas for using the touchscreen. Designers for games that use conventional controllers have a lot of history to draw upon.