theinquirer: PS3 powerful but hard to develop for

[bbot]

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23306

The question is: will developers bother with tapping all the power of ps3, or will this be a repeat of the situation with ps2, where most devs don't try to tap all the power of the console?

 

[London Geezer]

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23306

The question is: will developers bother with tapping all the power of ps3, or will this be a repeat of the situation with ps2, where most devs don't try to tap all the power of the console?

I thought it was made clear that PS3 was relatively easy to code for. OpenGL makes things easier than they were on PS2, relatively speaking.

The biggest hurdle is content creation, and that will apply to any platform with LOTS of computational power to use. Developers will need very good artists, and a lot of them, so make videogames look good, relative to the platform they're running on.

 

[j^aws]

Mark Rein On Playstation 3
Quote:
In addition to the Sony demos being shown by Phil Harrison, the Epic and EA presentations were the only third party portions actually running on the PS3 in real-time. But most of those movies, which I probably watched 3 or 4 during rehearsals for the event, look very achievable and some were probably rendered on the actual box but in non-real-time. When a system is year away, heck even with a system is 6 months away, it is reasonable to expect the power of the dev kits would still only be a fraction of the power of the final system.
I know we'll certainly be able to achieve much more on the final box than we were able to show in our demo after working with the early dev kit for only ~2 months. As Tim mentioned our demo only really showed off the power of RSX and then still we're talk about an RSX that's nowhere near as fast as the final one will be. When we get home from E3 we'll also start diving seriously into the power of the cell processor. This is a very powerful system!

Sony's cell demos were extremely cool and inspiring but are totally achievable, and over time even surpassable, by third developers like us because, as Tim Sweeney said, the development environment is made up of parts we're already intimately familiar with: OpenGL, NVIDIA graphics, Linux, and PowerPC. Think about Epic's experience, for example. We rock on NVIDIA hardware. We have been doing OpenGL since Unreal1. We regularly ship our games on Linux and we've won several Macintosh Game of the Year awards including a special World-Wide Design Award directly from Apple for UT2004. We're going to be able to kick serious ass on PS3, and so are a lot of our licensees and other 3rd party developers, in a way that wasn't remotely possible on past consoles.

I should add that we're in a similar position for XBOX360. It's also made up of parts we're intimately familiar with.

My point is that developers are going to be able to get SO MUCH MORE power out of these consoles than they ever could in the past and so much closer to the raw power of the components.

The next generation is just going to be AMAZING!!! Next gen games will be a huge leap forward over current gen.

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=23020

 

[cybamerc]

london-boy:

> I thought it was made clear that PS3 was relatively easy to code for.
> OpenGL makes things easier than they were on PS2, relatively speaking.

Well, that's just the GPU. What about Cell?

 

[London Geezer]

london-boy:

> I thought it was made clear that PS3 was relatively easy to code for.
> OpenGL makes things easier than they were on PS2, relatively speaking.

Well, that's just the GPU. What about Cell?

That's true of course, and i guess we'll have to see how IBM's tools turn out to be, but i still think, whatever happens, the biggest hurdle for studios will be content creation.

 

[nAo]

IBM Tools? Sony tools!

 

[London Geezer]

IBM Tools? Sony tools!

Whatever! It's all so incestuous there, it's confusing!!

 

[cybamerc]

Reg. Mark Rein's comments it wasn't long ago that Tim Sweeney couldn't fathom how one would code for Cell. Strangely, he became a lot more positive about the project around the time Nvidia jumped aboard...

 

[cybamerc]

IBM Tools? Sony tools!

Sony has made it clear in the past that it's up to IBM to figure out how to code for Cell.

 

[London Geezer]

Reg. Mark Rein's comments it wasn't long ago that Tim Sweeney couldn't fathom how one would code for Cell. Strangely, he became a lot more positive about the project around the time Nvidia jumped aboard...

Heh, surprised?

 

[nAo]

IBM Tools? Sony tools!

Sony has made it clear in the past that it's up to IBM to figure out how to code for Cell.

Dunno what Sony made clear in the past....but things can change sometime

 

[Inane_Dork]

You might say the PS3 is hard to develop for if you set your scale with X360 at the top and then zoom WAY in. At that point, PS2 development would be somewhere in the next county if you could graph that far.

 

[cybamerc]

Heh, surprised?

Certainly not. I just think Mark Rein's comments should be taken with a grain of salt.

 

[Glonk]

IBM Tools? Sony tools!

Sony has made it clear in the past that it's up to IBM to figure out how to code for Cell.

The only IBM tools are the compiler and an optimization guide, thati s more generic to PowerPC than anything else.

 

[Gubbi]

With Sony's track record for producing world class software development tools I wouldn't worry.

Cheers
Gubbi

 

[JF_Aidan_Pryde]

I thought it was made clear that PS3 was relatively easy to code for. OpenGL makes things easier than they were on PS2, relatively speaking.

The biggest hurdle is content creation, and that will apply to any platform with LOTS of computational power to use. Developers will need very good artists, and a lot of them, so make videogames look good, relative to the platform they're running on.

I agree PS3 is easier to develop for than PS2. But it's not just a matters of OpenGL making things simple. And content isn't the biggest hurdle IMO.

The biggest hurdle is modelling a game's code in terms of small kernels and data streams. The game's multitude of phenomenon and effects must be able to be organised in little programs less than 256kB big. This must be done consciously; no magic tool will do this for the developer.

But I think once this rethinking of game archiecture is done, PS3 has much greater potential the the Xenon architecture.

 

[MechanizedDeath]

With Sony's track record for producing world class software development tools I wouldn't worry.

Cheers
Gubbi

The irony of this comment is that the PS1 was supposed to be very easy to develop for. Of the two systems they've made, one was easy, one was tough. So naturally, everyone assumes this one will be tough too. PEACE.

 

[AlNom]

Well, they went from easy to tough... so... logically it would be from tough to tougher

 

[bbot]

Are you all saying the developers interviewed by theinquirer were lying about the PS3 being hard to program for? So Cell and Xecpu are both easy to program for?

 

[Geeforcer]

Are you all saying the developers interviewed by theinquirer were lying about the PS3 being hard to program for? So Cell and Xecpu are both easy to program for?

What developers? This is the Inquirer, for God's sake - they make up stuff all the time.