Xenon easier to develop for than xbox!?!

[Pozer]

I know its sponge..... 2 tons of salt.

http://news.spong.com/detail/news.asp?prid=8517

It is thought likely that Kameo, the ill-fated adventure game from Rare, will end up as an Xbox 360 title, the third platform to house the title in the past four years.

What is of more interest is the time it took for UK studio Rare - an outfit coming under increased criticism for its inability to release games on time and to expected standards - to port the game.

“Several months ago I gave a Xenon kit to a team at Rare,â€￾ said Xbox lead J Allard. “They had an Xbox game in development, and they converted it to Xenon in six weeks. It was up and running in six weeks. With the updates we're giving developers now, that same game could easily be transferred in half that time. Xenon is absolutely easier to develop for than Xbox, no question.â€￾

This impressive assertion from the upper echelons of Microsoft Games Studios claims that the Xenon, the development kit for the 360, can take in Xbox code and spew out next-generation code within three weeks, truly an unprecedented development ability if true.

All of which brings us to the question: which games at Rare are likely to make this jump? Perfect Dark Zero is something of a given, leaving Kameo as the only serious contender. As you may well know, Kameo had its release date removed by Rare back in November and no revised date was offered.

Given the reaction by the gaming press and gamers to Grabbed by the Ghoulies, it will be interesting to see the quality of Rare’s offerings, especially if they have been converted to 360, which in some cases will be the third host platform for the code.

We’ll keep you updated.

 

[GwymWeepa]

Its spong so you should take this news with...4 tons of salt.

 

[Phil]

Wow. Amazing. I wonder how efficient the code is that is 'spewed' out...

 

[j^aws]

Erm...this is what middleware does. I suppose the concept of middleware seems alien when there's primarily been 'one' Windows platform to devvelop for all these years...

Anyway, they we're converting code from one platform to another which was quick. This says nothing about how difficult the final target platform is to develop for and optimise.

 

[Wunderchu]

this particular 'news' that SPOnG has posted, is old.......

J. Allard did indeed make those statements, in an interview with IGN on March 10 ; http://xbox.ign.com/articles/595/595146p3.html

 

[V3]

Maybe Rare has some Gamecube code from last time, and they port that over instead

 

[Lumine]

Wow. With the ability to change whether a game was made for Xbox or Xenon so fast, backwards compatability shouldn't be a problem at all

 

[Inane_Dork]

Wow. Amazing. I wonder how efficient the code is that is 'spewed' out...

Between MS and IBM working on compilers, I would imagine the code is good to great.

 

[MfA]

So by ignoring the extra processor(s) and the two generations of improvements in the GPU you can do a quick port ... big whoop.

 

[jvd]

So by ignoring the extra processor(s) and the two generations of improvements in the GPU you can do a quick port ... big whoop.

Who is saying they aren't using improvements in the gpu ?


How do you know that a port of halo 2 wont have 6x fsaa and anistropic filtering turned on and mabye a version of hdr ?

If it really takes 3 weeks to port and entire game over to working on a xenon then they can surely spend another week adding crap on

 

[pegisys]

I'm pretty sure the code should compile they are using direct x and the windows kernel and libraries. If they didn't use any hardware specific code it souldn't take that long just for a port, but that says nothing about the art content that's what seems to take the most time now a days and I know I wouldn't buy a game if it's just cleaned up with filters

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I'm sure a four/six week port is nothing more than same game in higher res, kinda XB+ and not XB++. If they can write from the ground up in four/six weeks, then I'll be interested.

Weren't the PS2>PSP ports also in the same ballpark of 4-8 weeks?

 

[rabidrabbit]

They had the art and game design ready already, so all they had to do was convert the code from xbox to xbox2.
Both being DirectX based, I would guess it was not a huge job.

Still, if they release the Kameo to xbox2, I'm sure they'll redo at least some of the art, and add some new gameplay elements.
For this "test conversion", I think it was just straight porting of code from xb to xb2.

 

[Li Mu Bai]

I'm pretty sure the code should compile they are using direct x and the windows kernel and libraries. If they didn't use any hardware specific code it souldn't take that long just for a port, but that says nothing about the art content that's what seems to take the most time now a days and I know I wouldn't buy a game if it's just cleaned up with filters

Exactly, as this is not groundbreaking news regarding a DX based conversion.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

If devs are only writing for XB using DirectX etc., where's the difficulty come for backwards compatibilty? People have talked of a switch from nVidia to ATi as being a problem, but that'll only be true if devs hit the hardware.

 

[London Geezer]

If devs are only writing for XB using DirectX etc., where's the difficulty come for backwards compatibilty? People have talked of a switch from nVidia to ATi as being a problem, but that'll only be true if devs hit the hardware.

The problem lies in the fact that some games use NV2A specific features that are not found even on other NVIDIA GPUs. Tiny little things which still make a game work or not. Halo is one of those games. So unless they get this backward compatibility thing right, MS's most prominent game will be left to Xbox owners. Basically backward compatibility will be there for the hundreds of decent games on Xbox, but not for one of the biggest games in this generation. I assume many games on Xbox do not fit prefectly with DirectX standards. Therefore there could be many compatibility problems on Xbox2.
Doesn't sound too good to me.

 

[Kalin]

I fail to see how this points to any sign of BC... On the contrary, if BC was expected Rare wouldn't even bother doing the port (i guess).

 

[cybamerc]

It's probably a matter of perspective. Xbox 2 has better tools and in that sense is easier to develop for than Xbox 1. But the hardware is considerably more complex and much more powerful so porting code is one thing but actually taking full advantage of the hardware is another.

 

[function]

I fail to see how this points to any sign of BC... On the contrary, if BC was expected Rare wouldn't even bother doing the port (i guess).

He was talking about a game that was in development. I'm guessing this means they switched the target platform for the game, and had done that for the work completed so far in six weeks (with no mention of optimisation). This would be a bit different than porting a finished game to ready-to-ship status.

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

“They had an Xbox game in development, and they converted it to Xenon in six weeks."

Ummm... That's really not *that* impressive if you take it straight up. The use of extreme low-level code optimizations is pretty rare on an Xbox title. Most all of your code is C/C++ all the way. The only low level code you'll have would be your vertex and pixel shaders -- which would definitely have to change because Xbox's GPU has some instructions that are totally exclusive to Xbox. So you'll have to convert your vertex and pixel shaders to sm2.0 or so to get the sufficient number of instructions. Big whoop, a single guy could do that in about 2 or 3 days, maybe less depending on how many shaders you've got. Then there's the matter of making your code 64-bit clean because of the PPC ISA... i.e. no casting pointers to ints, no assumed data sizes and always using sizeof() instead, lots of error trapping, etc., etc. And then working out all the compiler/linker issues that are sure to popup because of differences in levels of ANSI compliance. That really doesn't amount to a whole lot unless their codebase is horrible spaghetti like so many game codebases out there (which doesn't really increase the workload so much as it makes the problems a lot harder to find). Oh, well, that and the the render pipe might need some minor modifications because some features supported on Xbox D3D are deprecated in D3D9 (e.g. arbitrary width wireframe). If it were a matter of commercial middleware everywhere through the codebase, it would have taken even less than 6 weeks.

The quote doesn't really say anything about optimizations or whether they converted the codebase to a multithreaded one (which should have taken a LOT more than 6 weeks if included with everything else)... I seriously doubt that a whole lot was done to get the darn thing performing well. Fact of the matter is that everything that would have to be done to get everything working comfortably in Xbox-land will probably run just fine (but not great) in Xbox2-land.