Anyone here with a PS3 successfully get a Bluetooth enabled Mac to connect to it? I was just thinking about this, havent tried yet, but will when I get home later.
The commercial success of the PS2 is utterly unquestionable. But the engineering of the machine is well-documented disaster.
It's success is down to two things.
1) The brilliance of the Sony marketing machine. Securing the best titles for their platform. -
and
2) The ineptitude of Sega and Microsoft in coming up with a credible alternative.
Uh, then who cares if it was a "well-documented disaster" of an architecture? It clearly succeeded. Really, how much of a disaster could it have been? Obviously those obstacles were overcome. Sure, Sony's marketing helped, as did their relationship with game developers. But the former wouldn't help if the product sucked. Great advertising with a shitty product actually makes the product fail even more. That's well-documented.
Uh, then who cares if it was a "well-documented disaster" of an architecture? It clearly succeeded. Really, how much of a disaster could it have been? Obviously those obstacles were overcome. Sure, Sony's marketing helped, as did their relationship with game developers. But the former wouldn't help if the product sucked. Great advertising with a shitty product actually makes the product fail even more. That's well-documented.
"The King's new outfit is the smartest thing you ever did see! Everyone agrees."
PS2 was an utterly crappy hardware, but despite that, fierce brand-loyalty and Sony's steroid-pumping marketing muscle made it a success. The crapness was perhaps more apparent to developers than it was to end users. and it was the developers that paid the price for the weakness in the hardware.
But people have memories, and there is only so many times that the old bait-and-switch trick works. It's clear that less people are being fooled this time around.
Suddenly a voice cries out, "Hey everyone! The King is stark bollock naked!"
More evidence - The Ebay prices are now less than the store prices.
Analysts are touting a price cut. And developers are showing declining confidence in the PS3.
I will say you are very brave. Someone may quote you on that in about six months.
It'll take longer than six months. A couple years probably...midway into the lifecycle of this generation of consoles.
PS2 vs Xbox vs GameCube there was rough parity.
Wii is fun and the best console of 2006 IMHO but not next gen.
PS3 vs Xbox and you don't have rough parity in two important areas:
1) Developers can't count on a HDD for their games for the 360. This means they are limited to 12x DVD rates (15.9MB/s) and 7GB usable space. Using the HDD is a crutch but one available to PS3 devs.
2) Developers can't count on HD-DVD for their games. Same limitation as above. Yes the 12x DVD has a higher peak rate for streaming (double...12x vs about 6.5x) but BR is large enough that folks like Bethesda have duplicated some data to reduce seek times and they still ultimately have more storage space. I also believe the 360 drive is only 8x for dual layer discs.
Looking how PS2 games started on CDs and ended on dual layer DVDs this will be an issue if past trends continue.
1) Developers can't count on a HDD for their games for the 360. This means they are limited to 12x DVD rates (15.9MB/s) and 7GB usable space. Using the HDD is a crutch but one available to PS3 devs.
Vinea
FFS how is 7GB a limitation?
PS3 & Xbox games have had DVD for years - and most games barely use over a single gigabyte for storage. The production cost of games assets is becoming astronomical. The very idea of >10gb of binary assets in a game is ludicrous. The majority of PS2 and Xbox games are actually shipped on CD and not DVD.
Games simply don't require that much storage. If they did, optical drive loading times would be immense (breaking the TRCs) and the authorship costs immenser.
There is only one way that games spend more on storage - and that is with BIG BIG files. And the only such files is what we in the games-biz call FMV video. But with audiences expecting movie-quality-visuals - these sequences are costing $250,000 per minute or more. Trust me, if the PS3's killer game is The Seventh Guest 2 - then I don't think Microsoft has much to worry about.
I will say you are very brave. Someone may quote you on that in about six months.
Six months ago 360 was looking weak and everyone said PS3 will be the sure-fire winner of this round.
Six months later and suddenly stuff has changed. Opinions are split. Consumers, press and developers are hedging their bets like crazy.
Six months from now, things will have changed again. On the 360 side we will have seen Halo3, the launch of Zephyr. Perhaps these events will be linked.
But on the PS3 side what do you see as an event that could restore the credibility of the platform?
I'm happy to stick with my statement. Dude, you can totally see the King's ass!
PS3 & Xbox games have had DVD for years - and most games barely use over a single gigabyte for storage. The production cost of games assets is becoming astronomical. The very idea of >10gb of binary assets in a game is ludicrous. The majority of PS2 and Xbox games are actually shipped on CD and not DVD.
Games simply don't require that much storage. If they did, optical drive loading times would be immense (breaking the TRCs) and the authorship costs immenser.
There is only one way that games spend more on storage - and that is with BIG BIG files. And the only such files is what we in the games-biz call FMV video. But with audiences expecting movie-quality-visuals - these sequences are costing $250,000 per minute or more. Trust me, if the PS3's killer game is The Seventh Guest 2 - then I don't think Microsoft has much to worry about.
C.
640k ought to be enough for anyone
PS2/XBOX games had pitifully tiny textures, and for the most part, incredibly low-res polygons.
Simply exporting current assets at HD sizes would take up more space than a DVD could handle.
If you genuinely don't think that the DVD format is going to limit the XBOX 360, I'd say you're off your rocker.
As a game developer, I do actually have a clue about what I am talking about.
In a modern Next-gen game - the polygon data is tiny. Texture data has grown - but we have texture compression nowadays.
The latest games struggle to make 3 gigs. Throw in ten hours of audio and ten mins of HD FMV and we get to 4.
Read the post - Imagine if a game *could* have 8gigs of polygon data and 10gigs of compressed textures. (in a console with 256megs of RAM!!!!) It would be unplayably slow, and unaffordably expensive to create. It's not going to happen.
You are just repeating Sony's marketing nonesense which implies that features included to play DVDs are in some way beneficial to a games console.
As a game developer, I do actually have a clue about what I am talking about.
You definitely come off as a software developer, since most developers I know are constantly bitching about technologies that require or simply recommend them to change their ways. But at the end of the day the team that sells the best product wins, regardless of how much bitching goes on. The PS3 definitely has a higher ceiling than anything out there at the moment, and you're foolish to think that lazy developers are going to somehow pull rank on management.
People always want better graphics. This means increasing poly count or using spline-patch rendering. The cell has enough FPU brawn to preprocess spline-patches. Texture-mapping is perhaps the most glaring detractor to computer generated imagery. Using displacement maps in the modeling process is easy and yields a vastly superior image at the cost of a lot more polys, but if you can do it, it's worth it. For the record, I refuse to use texture-maps, ever. Granted, product-vis isn't real-time, but the point is that texture maps are one of the last remants of unrealistic-looking CG.
As a game developer, I do actually have a clue about what I am talking about.
In a modern Next-gen game - the polygon data is tiny. Texture data has grown - but we have texture compression nowadays.
The latest games struggle to make 3 gigs. Throw in ten hours of audio and ten mins of HD FMV and we get to 4.
Read the post - Imagine if a game *could* have 8gigs of polygon data and 10gigs of compressed textures. (in a console with 256megs of RAM!!!!) It would be unplayably slow, and unaffordably expensive to create. It's not going to happen.
You are just repeating Sony's marketing nonesense which implies that features included to play DVDs are in some way beneficial to a games console.
C.
The average size for 2005 games on the XBox was 3.2GB.
Blue Dragon (360) - 3 DVDs (tons of FMV that the Japanese market likes)
Genji is like 12GB (at least the ISO is)
So much for struggling to get to 3 GB Mr. Uber Game Developer.
Launch and early titles. Yeah...give devs more space they'll find a use for it. FFXIII will probably be a dozen discs given Square's history... In any case, textures and polys can be streamed into that 256MB and remember the PS2 only had 32MB. Memory grew more than disc space (8x vs 3x).
And the PS3 has a HDD to stash textures and data on for faster streaming. Something that I had wished Bioware had done for Jade Empire in a few spots. The <talk to NPC> <loading> <Fight in Arena> <loading> <talk to NPC> <loading> <Fight in Arena> repeated a dozen times was majorly aggravating.
Hopefully Mass Effect (the only 360 exlusive title I'd buy the platform for) will be somewhat better at this.
Vinea
PS Procedural Synthesis is a useful tool but limited. Games will still require lots of assets to look good and not repetitive. Good for forests. Not good for dungeons.
It seems like most PS3 supporters are forgetting a few majors things...
BTW I just browsed through this, so some points may not be relevant to everyone
1) While the PS3 will go down in price, so will the 360.
2) The 360 is much easier to program for, meaning newer developers would much rather program on the 360 than the PS3
3) Many games that were exclusive to Sony just aren't anymore. The ones that aren't will be beat out by the Xbox games anyways. FF will be beat by Blue Dragon (by the original creator of the FF games), MGS by SC and so on.
4) The 360 has a MUCH better online service. I never would have imagined last year that in a year from then I would be talking to a friend with my wireless headset while playing oblivion, while downloading Mortal Combat while getting messages and video messages from people all at once. Live is just ingenious.
Blue Dragon (360) - 3 DVDs (tons of FMV that the Japanese market likes)
Genji is like 12GB (at least the ISO is)
Seven gigs of FMV! - oh my goodness, it's amazing that with sooo much storage it can be such a disapointing title. How can that be?
Like I say, the if the one unque aspect of PS3 is FMV , then heaven help us.
Yes the PS3 has a phat optical drive. But I never met a game developer who wanted more storage since the days of cartridges. More Ram, yes. More texture bandwidth, yes. More (real) processors. Yes.
Look, Sony's engineering team are out of control. Have been for a while. Like the PS2 - the PS3's engineering has been done by a team who have never produced anything other than graphic tech demos.
Last time around, the developers took it. They soaked up the pain and created games on the PS2 because there was no choice. Sony owned the market. The sales of the console were massive. There was no commercial alternative.
You definitely come off as a software developer, since most developers I know are constantly bitching about technologies that require or simply recommend them to change their ways. But at the end of the day the team that sells the best product wins, regardless of how much bitching goes on. The PS3 definitely has a higher ceiling than anything out there at the moment, and you're foolish to think that lazy developers are going to somehow pull rank on management.
If lazyness means profitable - then I'd be happy to be called lazy any day.
lazy = faster = cheaper = profitable
higher ceiling = difficult = expensive = unfit for purpose
Quote:
Originally Posted by Splinemodel
People always want better graphics. This means increasing poly count or using spline-patch rendering. The cell has enough FPU brawn to preprocess spline-patches. Texture-mapping is perhaps the most glaring detractor to computer generated imagery. Using displacement maps in the modeling process is easy and yields a vastly superior image at the cost of a lot more polys, but if you can do it, it's worth it. For the record, I refuse to use texture-maps, ever. Granted, product-vis isn't real-time, but the point is that texture maps are one of the last remants of unrealistic-looking CG.
Splines!. Welcome to 1990! Milli Vanilli are playin' on the radio and this dude is all about modellin' with the splines. That sounds very non-rational to me.
Back in 2007 we are groovin' to Bloc Party and we have a little something called subdivision surfaces. They have the major benefit in that you can actually animate them properly. One of the things that developers liked so much about the 360 was its ability to do sub-d's on the fly. You know like on the GPU.
If you had the Cell doing all this clever stuff to geometry, you'd then have to ship the geometry out of the Cell and into the GPU. Oops! Now children, can anyone tell me why would that be a bad idea?
Seven gigs of FMV! - oh my goodness, it's amazing that with sooo much storage it can be such a disapointing title. How can that be?
Like I say, the if the one unque aspect of PS3 is FMV , then heaven help us.
Yes the PS3 has a phat optical drive. But I never met a game developer who wanted more storage since the days of cartridges. More Ram, yes. More texture bandwidth, yes. More (real) processors. Yes.
Look, Sony's engineering team are out of control. Have been for a while. Like the PS2 - the PS3's engineering has been done by a team who have never produced anything other than graphic tech demos.
Last time around, the developers took it. They soaked up the pain and created games on the PS2 because there was no choice. Sony owned the market. The sales of the console were massive. There was no commercial alternative.
It's different this time.
C,
Try reading the thread. Those points have basically been made. They will be unlikely to determinne the success of the console. Developers will come out with great games, exclusive or not.
We'll talk in a year or so, when the PS3 has a more complete catalog of games. Then we can start comparing sales data.
Seven gigs of FMV! - oh my goodness, it's amazing that with sooo much storage it can be such a disapointing title. How can that be?
It can be because you are biased. R:FOM by most reviews is a decent game. There are still 6+GB of game assets and lots of audio (although multi-lingual).
Quote:
Like I say, the if the one unque aspect of PS3 is FMV , then heaven help us.
Yes the PS3 has a phat optical drive. But I never met a game developer who wanted more storage since the days of cartridges. More Ram, yes. More texture bandwidth, yes. More (real) processors. Yes.
The Cell should be a good performer once the tool chain gets more efficient. Of course given your anti-Sony bias you prefer to call SPE's "not real" implying "not useful". Given the PS3 has more ram, more bandwidth over the PS2 I guess it fits the bill in the other respects too.
Quote:
Look, Sony's engineering team are out of control. Have been for a while. Like the PS2 - the PS3's engineering has been done by a team who have never produced anything other than graphic tech demos.
Well they now have a console. Pricey but nice and actually fully next generation. Of course that may not make them successful.
Quote:
Last time around, the developers took it. They soaked up the pain and created games on the PS2 because there was no choice. Sony owned the market. The sales of the console were massive. There was no commercial alternative.
It's different this time.
C,
Its still early. The 360 will certainly take more share than the XBox will. Will it be a PS1? Perhaps. A PS2? Not given the current landscape.
If lazyness means profitable - then I'd be happy to be called lazy any day.
lazy = faster = cheaper = profitable
higher ceiling = difficult = expensive = unfit for purpose
Lazy = dev unwilling to learn new things = dev ready to become management.
In any case the Cell isn't that annoying and Sony can improve its tool chain. Not to the same level of MS but MS is a software shop with tons of investment already into dev tools and some of the best of breed products. VS is an awesome IDE and XNA a great framework.
Hmmm...had an amusing idea but there's no networking in XNA yet...I wonder if that means no decent reliable UDP implementation/DirectPlay stuff or no networking. I wonder how much effort it is to port MDX code to XNA...and I guess I have to do that anyway since MDX is effectively dead.
Are you saying that you're the top of the game developer food chain? If not, then you're point is not valid.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Carniphage
Splines!. Welcome to 1990! Milli Vanilli are playin' on the radio and this dude is all about modellin' with the splines. That sounds very non-rational to me.
Believe me, I know the scene of things. Spline-patch rendering costs less memory that polygon rendering. It also costs more CPU/FPU. If you have a scenario where you have a lot more FPU than memory, it makes a lot of sense to consider spline-patch rendering. Considering that 80%+ of modern CPUs are cache, it's possibly more cost effective to load on more cores and pursue a spline-patch rendering methodolgy. Sony actually had been experimenting with this. If it can provide a better visual experience on the same platform, I see no reason to pooh-pooh the idea, and I'm not sure why you're so adversarial about new concepts and ideas that have potential to improve the end product. The only conclusion I can come up with is that you ultimately don't care about improving the product.
I wish I was at the top of the food chain! Lol! I am more in a bottom feeding role right now.
Splinemodel - the world has moved on. Apart from product design - everyone uses sub-ds. Subdivision surfaces have all the benefits of splines - without the disadvantages. Checkout Pixar's recent work etc.
This article might interest you. it describes exactly what you were saying about using the CPU to generate geometry on the fly....
Comments
The commercial success of the PS2 is utterly unquestionable. But the engineering of the machine is well-documented disaster.
It's success is down to two things.
1) The brilliance of the Sony marketing machine. Securing the best titles for their platform. -
and
2) The ineptitude of Sega and Microsoft in coming up with a credible alternative.
Uh, then who cares if it was a "well-documented disaster" of an architecture? It clearly succeeded. Really, how much of a disaster could it have been? Obviously those obstacles were overcome. Sure, Sony's marketing helped, as did their relationship with game developers. But the former wouldn't help if the product sucked. Great advertising with a shitty product actually makes the product fail even more. That's well-documented.
Uh, then who cares if it was a "well-documented disaster" of an architecture? It clearly succeeded. Really, how much of a disaster could it have been? Obviously those obstacles were overcome. Sure, Sony's marketing helped, as did their relationship with game developers. But the former wouldn't help if the product sucked. Great advertising with a shitty product actually makes the product fail even more. That's well-documented.
"The King's new outfit is the smartest thing you ever did see! Everyone agrees."
PS2 was an utterly crappy hardware, but despite that, fierce brand-loyalty and Sony's steroid-pumping marketing muscle made it a success. The crapness was perhaps more apparent to developers than it was to end users. and it was the developers that paid the price for the weakness in the hardware.
But people have memories, and there is only so many times that the old bait-and-switch trick works. It's clear that less people are being fooled this time around.
Suddenly a voice cries out, "Hey everyone! The King is stark bollock naked!"
More evidence - The Ebay prices are now less than the store prices.
Analysts are touting a price cut. And developers are showing declining confidence in the PS3.
C.
"The King's new outfit is the smartest thing you ever did see! Everyone agrees." . . .
Suddenly a voice cries out, "Hey everyone! The King is stark bollock naked!"
More evidence - The Ebay prices are now less than the store prices.
Analysts are touting a price cut. And developers are showing declining confidence in the PS3.
I will say you are very brave. Someone may quote you on that in about six months.
I will say you are very brave. Someone may quote you on that in about six months.
It'll take longer than six months. A couple years probably...midway into the lifecycle of this generation of consoles.
PS2 vs Xbox vs GameCube there was rough parity.
Wii is fun and the best console of 2006 IMHO but not next gen.
PS3 vs Xbox and you don't have rough parity in two important areas:
1) Developers can't count on a HDD for their games for the 360. This means they are limited to 12x DVD rates (15.9MB/s) and 7GB usable space. Using the HDD is a crutch but one available to PS3 devs.
2) Developers can't count on HD-DVD for their games. Same limitation as above. Yes the 12x DVD has a higher peak rate for streaming (double...12x vs about 6.5x) but BR is large enough that folks like Bethesda have duplicated some data to reduce seek times and they still ultimately have more storage space. I also believe the 360 drive is only 8x for dual layer discs.
Looking how PS2 games started on CDs and ended on dual layer DVDs this will be an issue if past trends continue.
Vinea
1) Developers can't count on a HDD for their games for the 360. This means they are limited to 12x DVD rates (15.9MB/s) and 7GB usable space. Using the HDD is a crutch but one available to PS3 devs.
Vinea
FFS how is 7GB a limitation?
PS3 & Xbox games have had DVD for years - and most games barely use over a single gigabyte for storage. The production cost of games assets is becoming astronomical. The very idea of >10gb of binary assets in a game is ludicrous. The majority of PS2 and Xbox games are actually shipped on CD and not DVD.
Games simply don't require that much storage. If they did, optical drive loading times would be immense (breaking the TRCs) and the authorship costs immenser.
There is only one way that games spend more on storage - and that is with BIG BIG files. And the only such files is what we in the games-biz call FMV video. But with audiences expecting movie-quality-visuals - these sequences are costing $250,000 per minute or more. Trust me, if the PS3's killer game is The Seventh Guest 2 - then I don't think Microsoft has much to worry about.
C.
I will say you are very brave. Someone may quote you on that in about six months.
Six months ago 360 was looking weak and everyone said PS3 will be the sure-fire winner of this round.
Six months later and suddenly stuff has changed. Opinions are split. Consumers, press and developers are hedging their bets like crazy.
Six months from now, things will have changed again. On the 360 side we will have seen Halo3, the launch of Zephyr. Perhaps these events will be linked.
But on the PS3 side what do you see as an event that could restore the credibility of the platform?
I'm happy to stick with my statement. Dude, you can totally see the King's ass!
C.
FFS how is 7GB a limitation?
PS3 & Xbox games have had DVD for years - and most games barely use over a single gigabyte for storage. The production cost of games assets is becoming astronomical. The very idea of >10gb of binary assets in a game is ludicrous. The majority of PS2 and Xbox games are actually shipped on CD and not DVD.
Games simply don't require that much storage. If they did, optical drive loading times would be immense (breaking the TRCs) and the authorship costs immenser.
There is only one way that games spend more on storage - and that is with BIG BIG files. And the only such files is what we in the games-biz call FMV video. But with audiences expecting movie-quality-visuals - these sequences are costing $250,000 per minute or more. Trust me, if the PS3's killer game is The Seventh Guest 2 - then I don't think Microsoft has much to worry about.
C.
640k ought to be enough for anyone
PS2/XBOX games had pitifully tiny textures, and for the most part, incredibly low-res polygons.
Simply exporting current assets at HD sizes would take up more space than a DVD could handle.
If you genuinely don't think that the DVD format is going to limit the XBOX 360, I'd say you're off your rocker.
In a modern Next-gen game - the polygon data is tiny. Texture data has grown - but we have texture compression nowadays.
The latest games struggle to make 3 gigs. Throw in ten hours of audio and ten mins of HD FMV and we get to 4.
Read the post - Imagine if a game *could* have 8gigs of polygon data and 10gigs of compressed textures. (in a console with 256megs of RAM!!!!) It would be unplayably slow, and unaffordably expensive to create. It's not going to happen.
You are just repeating Sony's marketing nonesense which implies that features included to play DVDs are in some way beneficial to a games console.
C.
As a game developer, I do actually have a clue about what I am talking about.
You definitely come off as a software developer, since most developers I know are constantly bitching about technologies that require or simply recommend them to change their ways. But at the end of the day the team that sells the best product wins, regardless of how much bitching goes on. The PS3 definitely has a higher ceiling than anything out there at the moment, and you're foolish to think that lazy developers are going to somehow pull rank on management.
People always want better graphics. This means increasing poly count or using spline-patch rendering. The cell has enough FPU brawn to preprocess spline-patches. Texture-mapping is perhaps the most glaring detractor to computer generated imagery. Using displacement maps in the modeling process is easy and yields a vastly superior image at the cost of a lot more polys, but if you can do it, it's worth it. For the record, I refuse to use texture-maps, ever. Granted, product-vis isn't real-time, but the point is that texture maps are one of the last remants of unrealistic-looking CG.
As a game developer, I do actually have a clue about what I am talking about.
In a modern Next-gen game - the polygon data is tiny. Texture data has grown - but we have texture compression nowadays.
The latest games struggle to make 3 gigs. Throw in ten hours of audio and ten mins of HD FMV and we get to 4.
Read the post - Imagine if a game *could* have 8gigs of polygon data and 10gigs of compressed textures. (in a console with 256megs of RAM!!!!) It would be unplayably slow, and unaffordably expensive to create. It's not going to happen.
You are just repeating Sony's marketing nonesense which implies that features included to play DVDs are in some way beneficial to a games console.
C.
The average size for 2005 games on the XBox was 3.2GB.
GOW (360) around 6.5 GB
Dead or Alive 4 (360): 5GB
NBA 06 (360): 4.5GB
RFOM (PS3) 7GB FMV (720p), Audio 2.24GB, Game Assets 6.12GB: 17GB
Blue Dragon (360) - 3 DVDs (tons of FMV that the Japanese market likes)
Genji is like 12GB (at least the ISO is)
So much for struggling to get to 3 GB Mr. Uber Game Developer.
Launch and early titles. Yeah...give devs more space they'll find a use for it. FFXIII will probably be a dozen discs given Square's history... In any case, textures and polys can be streamed into that 256MB and remember the PS2 only had 32MB. Memory grew more than disc space (8x vs 3x).
And the PS3 has a HDD to stash textures and data on for faster streaming. Something that I had wished Bioware had done for Jade Empire in a few spots. The <talk to NPC> <loading> <Fight in Arena> <loading> <talk to NPC> <loading> <Fight in Arena> repeated a dozen times was majorly aggravating.
Hopefully Mass Effect (the only 360 exlusive title I'd buy the platform for) will be somewhat better at this.
Vinea
PS Procedural Synthesis is a useful tool but limited. Games will still require lots of assets to look good and not repetitive. Good for forests. Not good for dungeons.
BTW I just browsed through this, so some points may not be relevant to everyone
1) While the PS3 will go down in price, so will the 360.
2) The 360 is much easier to program for, meaning newer developers would much rather program on the 360 than the PS3
3) Many games that were exclusive to Sony just aren't anymore. The ones that aren't will be beat out by the Xbox games anyways. FF will be beat by Blue Dragon (by the original creator of the FF games), MGS by SC and so on.
4) The 360 has a MUCH better online service. I never would have imagined last year that in a year from then I would be talking to a friend with my wireless headset while playing oblivion, while downloading Mortal Combat while getting messages and video messages from people all at once. Live is just ingenious.
Well there you go, some major points to consider.
The average size for 2005 games on the XBox was 3.2GB.
RFOM (PS3) 7GB FMV (720p), Audio 2.24GB, Game Assets 6.12GB: 17GB
Blue Dragon (360) - 3 DVDs (tons of FMV that the Japanese market likes)
Genji is like 12GB (at least the ISO is)
Seven gigs of FMV! - oh my goodness, it's amazing that with sooo much storage it can be such a disapointing title. How can that be?
Like I say, the if the one unque aspect of PS3 is FMV , then heaven help us.
Yes the PS3 has a phat optical drive. But I never met a game developer who wanted more storage since the days of cartridges. More Ram, yes. More texture bandwidth, yes. More (real) processors. Yes.
Look, Sony's engineering team are out of control. Have been for a while. Like the PS2 - the PS3's engineering has been done by a team who have never produced anything other than graphic tech demos.
Last time around, the developers took it. They soaked up the pain and created games on the PS2 because there was no choice. Sony owned the market. The sales of the console were massive. There was no commercial alternative.
It's different this time.
C,
You definitely come off as a software developer, since most developers I know are constantly bitching about technologies that require or simply recommend them to change their ways. But at the end of the day the team that sells the best product wins, regardless of how much bitching goes on. The PS3 definitely has a higher ceiling than anything out there at the moment, and you're foolish to think that lazy developers are going to somehow pull rank on management.
If lazyness means profitable - then I'd be happy to be called lazy any day.
lazy = faster = cheaper = profitable
higher ceiling = difficult = expensive = unfit for purpose
People always want better graphics. This means increasing poly count or using spline-patch rendering. The cell has enough FPU brawn to preprocess spline-patches. Texture-mapping is perhaps the most glaring detractor to computer generated imagery. Using displacement maps in the modeling process is easy and yields a vastly superior image at the cost of a lot more polys, but if you can do it, it's worth it. For the record, I refuse to use texture-maps, ever. Granted, product-vis isn't real-time, but the point is that texture maps are one of the last remants of unrealistic-looking CG.
Splines!. Welcome to 1990! Milli Vanilli are playin' on the radio and this dude is all about modellin' with the splines. That sounds very non-rational to me.
Back in 2007 we are groovin' to Bloc Party and we have a little something called subdivision surfaces. They have the major benefit in that you can actually animate them properly. One of the things that developers liked so much about the 360 was its ability to do sub-d's on the fly. You know like on the GPU.
If you had the Cell doing all this clever stuff to geometry, you'd then have to ship the geometry out of the Cell and into the GPU. Oops! Now children, can anyone tell me why would that be a bad idea?
C.
Seven gigs of FMV! - oh my goodness, it's amazing that with sooo much storage it can be such a disapointing title. How can that be?
Like I say, the if the one unque aspect of PS3 is FMV , then heaven help us.
Yes the PS3 has a phat optical drive. But I never met a game developer who wanted more storage since the days of cartridges. More Ram, yes. More texture bandwidth, yes. More (real) processors. Yes.
Look, Sony's engineering team are out of control. Have been for a while. Like the PS2 - the PS3's engineering has been done by a team who have never produced anything other than graphic tech demos.
Last time around, the developers took it. They soaked up the pain and created games on the PS2 because there was no choice. Sony owned the market. The sales of the console were massive. There was no commercial alternative.
It's different this time.
C,
Try reading the thread. Those points have basically been made. They will be unlikely to determinne the success of the console. Developers will come out with great games, exclusive or not.
We'll talk in a year or so, when the PS3 has a more complete catalog of games. Then we can start comparing sales data.
Seven gigs of FMV! - oh my goodness, it's amazing that with sooo much storage it can be such a disapointing title. How can that be?
It can be because you are biased. R:FOM by most reviews is a decent game. There are still 6+GB of game assets and lots of audio (although multi-lingual).
Like I say, the if the one unque aspect of PS3 is FMV , then heaven help us.
Yes the PS3 has a phat optical drive. But I never met a game developer who wanted more storage since the days of cartridges. More Ram, yes. More texture bandwidth, yes. More (real) processors. Yes.
The Cell should be a good performer once the tool chain gets more efficient. Of course given your anti-Sony bias you prefer to call SPE's "not real" implying "not useful". Given the PS3 has more ram, more bandwidth over the PS2 I guess it fits the bill in the other respects too.
Look, Sony's engineering team are out of control. Have been for a while. Like the PS2 - the PS3's engineering has been done by a team who have never produced anything other than graphic tech demos.
Well they now have a console. Pricey but nice and actually fully next generation. Of course that may not make them successful.
Last time around, the developers took it. They soaked up the pain and created games on the PS2 because there was no choice. Sony owned the market. The sales of the console were massive. There was no commercial alternative.
It's different this time.
C,
Its still early. The 360 will certainly take more share than the XBox will. Will it be a PS1? Perhaps. A PS2? Not given the current landscape.
Vinea
If lazyness means profitable - then I'd be happy to be called lazy any day.
lazy = faster = cheaper = profitable
higher ceiling = difficult = expensive = unfit for purpose
Lazy = dev unwilling to learn new things = dev ready to become management.
In any case the Cell isn't that annoying and Sony can improve its tool chain. Not to the same level of MS but MS is a software shop with tons of investment already into dev tools and some of the best of breed products. VS is an awesome IDE and XNA a great framework.
Hmmm...had an amusing idea but there's no networking in XNA yet...I wonder if that means no decent reliable UDP implementation/DirectPlay stuff or no networking. I wonder how much effort it is to port MDX code to XNA...and I guess I have to do that anyway since MDX is effectively dead.
Or switch to Java/JOGL. Shudder.
Vinea
If lazyness means profitable . . .
Are you saying that you're the top of the game developer food chain? If not, then you're point is not valid.
Splines!. Welcome to 1990! Milli Vanilli are playin' on the radio and this dude is all about modellin' with the splines. That sounds very non-rational to me.
Believe me, I know the scene of things. Spline-patch rendering costs less memory that polygon rendering. It also costs more CPU/FPU. If you have a scenario where you have a lot more FPU than memory, it makes a lot of sense to consider spline-patch rendering. Considering that 80%+ of modern CPUs are cache, it's possibly more cost effective to load on more cores and pursue a spline-patch rendering methodolgy. Sony actually had been experimenting with this. If it can provide a better visual experience on the same platform, I see no reason to pooh-pooh the idea, and I'm not sure why you're so adversarial about new concepts and ideas that have potential to improve the end product. The only conclusion I can come up with is that you ultimately don't care about improving the product.
Splinemodel - the world has moved on. Apart from product design - everyone uses sub-ds. Subdivision surfaces have all the benefits of splines - without the disadvantages. Checkout Pixar's recent work etc.
This article might interest you. it describes exactly what you were saying about using the CPU to generate geometry on the fly....
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paed.../xbox360-1.ars
C.