The Game Technology discussion thread *Read first post before posting*

Most people seem to be happy with Oblivion on PS3. That was developed by 4J Studios though.
I see a lot of people saying that they wished 4J would've handled all of Bethesda's PS3 projects.
 
This sounds like one case where the few extra available MBs on the Xbox would make a huge difference. Perhaps the game stores all texture data in video ram - might explain why you couldn't change texture LOD a save a few MBs that way?
 
As I said in the official Skyrim thread here, as a loyal TES fan and thankfully not suffering bugs for now, it's one of the biggest games ever, but their QA department doesnt' match. :cry:

The days of purchasing great quality games on day 1 are gone, seems to me, people better get used to patches.
 
djskribbles said:
Most people seem to be happy with Oblivion on PS3. That was developed by 4J Studios though.
I see a lot of people saying that they wished 4J would've handled all of Bethesda's PS3 projects.
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Oblivion didn't suffer noticably from this because the world had far less persistence. As long as 3 days have passed, most cells will reset (dead npcs are removed, new ones are spawned, containers have their contents reset, moved objects are reset) when you enter it. In Skyrim, its 10 days, and a ton of things (including entire cells) are set to not respawn. Additionally there are more interactive objects that can be moved around (especially accidentally, with a explosive spell or something). The save file grows a lot larger much faster. With Oblivion you would have to play 80+ hours to even reach 5mb.
 
What about Fallout 3/Vegas? Those games had issues, too.

Not trying to be smart... I really don't know as I haven't played any of these games.
 
djskribbles said:
What about Fallout 3/Vegas? Those games had issues, too.

Not trying to be smart... I really don't know as I haven't played any of these games.
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I didn't play those games, too. I love Bethesda but I have never been interested in Fallout, I don't know why.

The solution to the problem might be in N_B's post, but not to repeat the same thing I said in the official Skyrim thread, I will quote myself on that:

Maybe the solution is reducing the numbers of days before items or NPCs, creatures, disappear. I would rather have that that some console gamers complaining and saying that after they release a patch the game and Bethesda have hit a new low, etc etc.

I am level 15 and I remember moving a cart close to the river in Riverwood the very first day I played the game, and the cart is still there. :oops: It's amusing. The wolves I confronted and went sprawling that day, are lifeless in the same place.
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According to Inaba's tweets PS3 is the lead platform again (after Vanquish) for Metal Gear Rising which is quite disappointing considering that the Bayonetta engine was heavily optimized for the 360 and the Xenos edram.

Really curious to see how Bayonetta 2 will look if it will too lead on the PS3.
 
Kameradschaft said:
According to Inaba's tweets PS3 is the lead platform again (after Vanquish) for Metal Gear Rising which is quite disappointing considering that the Bayonetta engine was heavily optimized for the 360 and the Xenos edram.
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:???: It's not like the engine will become rubbish on XB360! If the platform is already heavily optimised for one console, it kinda makes sense to switch focus to the other one and spend time tuning the engine there as well. And 'leading on' doesn't really mean anything anyway, does it? I mean, some devs lead on one platform and then port it, while others lead on a platform and spend as much care tuning it to the other.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
:???: It's not like the engine will become rubbish on XB360! If the platform is already heavily optimised for one console, it kinda makes sense to switch focus to the other one and spend time tuning the engine there as well. And 'leading on' doesn't really mean anything anyway, does it? I mean, some devs lead on one platform and then port it, while others lead on a platform and spend as much care tuning it to the other.
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Who said that the engine will become rubbish on the 360? the Bayonetta engine was designed around the 360 exploiting the systems strengths, seeing Vanquish on both systems (which is based on the Bayonetta engine) being literally copy paste minus the triple buffering on the PS3 when in theory the 360 should have for example an advantage in alphas/particles considering the engine's optimization on that system is what I find disappointing.

It's like if hypothetically FFXIII-2 having as the lead platform the 360 just because SE wants parity and ends up compromising an engine that's heavily optimized for the PS3 - I don't want to see both version turn out sub-HD just to say "hey both versions are identical".

As I also said in the neogaf thread about this that's not a system wars bs attempt neither I believe that one system is weaker than the other but I hate when I see compromises in both versions that run at heavily optimized engines for one system just for the parity's sake alone.

I know that all this talk is maybe a bit too theory-based as we'll most probably never know if for example Vanquish on 360 could've been better but that's what I believe.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Why is it a shame if they lead on PS3 then? What are you expecting the outcome to be different to if they lead on XB360?
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Yep, I believe that there's a possibility that Rising and Vanquish might turn out better as the engine these games run on were based and made a great use of the 360 hardware which is quite different than the PS3's.

Does that sound weird? it's like making a game based off the Uncharted engine and having the 360 as the lead platform (won't happen I know but you get my point)...will that bring the best possible results? I don't think so as the two platforms are vastly different design wise and something like that will require massive optimization that not many devs will be happy to do (or even have the time or the budget to try something like that) and rightfully so.
 
Kameradschaft said:
Yep, I believe that there's a possibility that Rising and Vanquish might turn out better as the engine these games run on were based and made a great use of the 360 hardware which is quite different than the PS3's.

Does that sound weird? it's like making a game based off the Uncharted engine and having the 360 as the lead platform (won't happen I know but you get my point)...will that bring the best possible results? I don't think so as the two platforms are vastly different design wise and something like that will require massive optimization that not many devs will be happy to do (or even have the time or the budget to try something like that) and rightfully so.
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That doesnt make sense. Uncharted's engine was designed with PS3 in mind since it was an exclusive. If it was going to be used for the 360 the engine was already designed around the PS3's capabilities anyways and hence its as if it was already led on the PS3.
Vanguish was using the PS3 as lead platform and hence the engine was well suited for the PS3 and hence achieved platform parity. Why was that a bad thing for the PS3?
If Rising is led on the PS3 the same may apply there as well.
Do you think its going to have better results for the PS3 if it is led on the 360? :???:
The latter is more likely to end up worse on the PS3
This is not an example where the engine was designed around the 360's capabilities and the game will be led on the PS3 instead. Its a multiplatform engine and game that will be led on the PS3
 
Kameradschaft said:
Yep, I believe that there's a possibility that Rising and Vanquish might turn out better as the engine these games run on were based and made a great use of the 360 hardware which is quite different than the PS3's.
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Might turn out better on 360 than PS3? On Ps3 vs XB360? Might turn out better than Bayonetta? Not sure what you're saying.

The game will surely be no worse on 360 than if they led on 360 as the engine will remain fundamentally the same. Perhaps assets will be limited by leading on PS3 with less RAM, whereas leading on 360 and maxxing out its resources would have meant gimping the PS3 version by comparison. Regards the underlying game tech though, I don't see how leading on either platform really affects the other. What matters is how much consideration is given to both platforms, and whether the non-leading platform gets a cheap port or a properly crafted rendition.
 
Nesh said:
That doesnt make sense. Uncharted's engine was designed with PS3 in mind since it was an exclusive. If it was going to be used for the 360 the engine was already designed around the PS3's capabilities anyways and hence its as if it was already led on the PS3.
Vanguish was using the PS3 as lead platform and hence the engine was well suited for the PS3 and hence achieved platform parity. Why was that a bad thing for the PS3?
If Rising is led on the PS3 the same may apply there as well.
Do you think its going to have better results for the PS3 if it is led on the 360? :???:
The latter is more likely to end up worse on the PS3
This is not an example where the engine was designed around the 360's capabilities and the game will be led on the PS3 instead. Its a multiplatform engine and game that will be led on the PS3
Click to expand...

First of all I don't care for parity, that's why I'm saying that making compromises for parity's sake is not a good thing IMO.

Also Bayonetta was an exclusive game for some time under development (before Sega decided to publish and port the game to the PS3) and the engine was built around the 360.

In other words in an ideal world games that run at heavily optimized engines on a specific system like Crystal Tools & the Bayonetta engine lead on the system that the engine is optimized/designed for.

Shifty Geezer said:
Might turn out better on 360 than PS3? On Ps3 vs XB360? Might turn out better than Bayonetta? Not sure what you're saying.

The game will surely be no worse on 360 than if they led on 360 as the engine will remain fundamentally the same. Perhaps assets will be limited by leading on PS3 with less RAM, whereas leading on 360 and maxxing out its resources would have meant gimping the PS3 version by comparison. Regards the underlying game tech though, I don't see how leading on either platform really affects the other. What matters is how much consideration is given to both platforms, and whether the non-leading platform gets a cheap port or a properly crafted rendition.
Click to expand...

Better = higher res framebuffer, higher frame-rate or better particles? Vanquish is sub-HD and 30fps with low res particles instead of Bayonetta's 720p, 50-60fps, very good texturing and a ton of beautiful particles on screen...the DF Bayonetta article stated that the engine from Platinum put to shame most of MS's first party efforts meaning that the game was taking advantage of the system's GPU and unified memory so yeah I think that results could've been better on 360 on this particular engine than what we've seen now that PS3 was the lead platform of Vanquish for example.

Unless Platinum took advantage of Cell/SPU's in any form on Vanquish that I not know of I think that the game was simply made on the PS3 cutting corners in IQ and the frame-rate and then just ported to the 360 which was probably a fairly easy process since the engine was friendly to the system...in other words in a way you gimp the game for both platforms so you don't have to listen to all the bitching about the bad port/lazy devs even though the game could've been better technically on one platform. I happen to prefer the latter.
 
So... what you're implying here is that because Vanquish was lead on PS3 with Bayonettas engine, the development resulted in worse performance on 360... because?
 
So you're claiming if the 360 was the lead platform, the game would perform better while the PS3 version would struggle again? In other words, Vanquished would have turned out better on the 360 if the PS3 wasn't the lead platform for that game?

I don't think that's something you should be assuming. IIRC performance between each version was quite similar, it's possible performance could have been worse on the 360 if they opted to use 1280x720 frame buffer for example.

I agree with Shifty that the lead platform doesn't matter much as long as the other platform receives enough attention.
 
Kameradschaft said:
First of all I don't care for parity, that's why I'm saying that making compromises for parity's sake is not a good thing IMO.

Also Bayonetta was an exclusive game for some time under development (before Sega decided to publish and port the game to the PS3) and the engine was built around the 360.

In other words in an ideal world games that run at heavily optimized engines on a specific system like Crystal Tools & the Bayonetta engine lead on the system that the engine is optimized/designed for.
Click to expand...

If I got this straight the problem is not that the PS3 version would be compromised for being the lead platform, but that it is multiplatform and the ideal solution would have been to make the game exclusive for one of the two consoles to achieve maximum optimization for the specific console.

So lets say that exclusivity is not an option for this particular game, what is the next best approach to make the PS3 version good? Lead on the 360? Lead on the PS3? Design simultaneously on both?

Or are you saying that the PS3 is more capable than the 360 and the only way to show this is to make the game heavily optimized on PS3's acrhitecture and unique strengths while make the 360 version "inferior"?
 
We don't need discussion on console power. Each platform has its strengths and weaknesses, so generalizing doesn't get us anywhere.
 
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