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Playstation 2 Emotion Engine
Basil writes: "Here's an in-depth article on the Playstation 2 Emotion Engine at Ars[Technica] that you really shouldn't miss. The article goes a long way in explaining the intricacies of the overall design, relating the performance of the MIPS III core to their somewhat odd implementation of two vector processing units."
They don't want you telnetting to it, though. I think they did some tricks to the pty system that may have made interactive shells a bad idea. Just a guess.
/etc/passwd when it is run. not difficult. However, Sony did this for a reason - they don't want billions of tech support calls from Win32 people who screwed up the linux box. If you were in their shoes wouldn't you do the same thing?
You can telnet to it by using the devtool admin menu to install an rpm. Just have the rpm add you to
Cost of one tech support instance = $200-$1000, cost buying your own damn linux box : $500. Go buy your own linux box - there is no reason you need to telnet it other than so you can brag to your friends.
The VU's have basically no memory. So, you can't actually fit an entire model inside them. So, we were going to do a pipeline where individual primitives (i.e. quads, tristrips, fans, whatever) would get queued, the VU1 would just eat stuff off the queue, do the transforms, and render. Well, we also decided that the system would be great for doing curved surfaces. That complicates everything. How does your physics system do collisions with a dynamically tesselated curved surface where the generated tris are all off on another CPU where you can't touch it? So you need to resolve collisions either directly between the surfaces (ow) or use simpler geometries. Annoying.
That's what vu0 is for. You can run it in macro mode and access main memory to your hearts content. I use vu0 macro mode for most of my stuff. Vu1 added very little cost to the system and can add a lot power if you have an application for it. It's not supposed to be used for everything.
I personally believe that there will be more RenderWare based games than studios touching the raw hardware, especially for generation 1. Its a lot easier to learn an API than to try to understand poorly documented (and japlish, when it is documented) hardware specs.
Or you can hire high paid consultants like myself. Incidentally, I know some people who are starting personal training program for new PS2 programmers - it's well worth the money. Programming vu0 and vu1 IS pretty difficult. I know most of the top developers, and they are all using vu0/vu1. While there is a market from RenderWare, I don't see the top titles using it. One note, there is a semi-secret project going on now to developer a Vu compiler and debugger. It's sweet! You program in a C-like language but of course some extension were added to use vector ops. It's not based on gcc/gdb.
I've been using hand built systems before their was a "devtool", and I think Sony did a good job with this baby - I only found a few hardware bugs and most of them were fixed in time for "devtool". On other console systems I've found hundreds. Anonymous for obvious reasons.
Hell, it's got PCMCIA and USB, slap a couple of network adaptors on that thing and you've got a router! :)
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
Looks like the PS2 is going to do for 3D what the Amiga did for 2D back in 1984/5. Back then they had a revolutionary "Copper" which could spew 2d graphics faster than anything going (yes, I know it's a lot more complex and flexible than that, but this is slashdot... :)). I have a feeling that it's going to be an amazing couple of years, where we'll first see some fairly cool 3D games, and then gradually as developers figure out the Emotion Engine we'll start seeing some damned awsome 3D stuff coming out. Interesting Times (tm).
Also, it's interesting how ArsTechnica are becoming the "Byte" of the 21st century. I wish Byte would get back to these seriously in-depth technical articles.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Looks like the PS2 is going to do for 3D what the Amiga did for 2D back in 1984/5. Back then they had a revolutionary "Copper" which could spew 2d graphics faster than anything going (yes, I know it's a lot more complex and flexible than that, but this is slashdot... :)). I have a feeling that it's going to be an amazing couple of years, where we'll first see some fairly cool 3D games, and then gradually as developers figure out the Emotion Engine we'll start seeing some damned awsome 3D stuff coming out. Interesting Times (tm).
Also, it's interesting how ArsTechnica are becoming the "Byte" of the 21st century. I wish Byte would get back to these seriously in-depth technical articles.
Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Having read through the whole thing (my head hurts!) I was wondeirng if anyone knows how the vector processors stack up against the altivec processor in the G4s especially as the new G4+ will be out soonish (we hope) and will have 2 altivec units (and more processor units in general - all to enalbe faster clock speeds I guess).
Also, concerning the Mips processor, how quickly do you think we'll have a version of linux running on the PSX2 and can anyone think of a valid reason for doing so? I'm wondering if a PSX runing linux would make a decent low-end computer for home use that I could (at the flick of a switch as it were) play storming games on as well. I'm assuming you'll be able to use firewire hard drives etc but what about Ram requirements? I can see ram being the stumbling block to a really useful linux implementation.......
Any thoughts?
troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
I'd be intriguied to see if the emotion engine could be used as an add-on to perform high end rendering for things like movies etc in render farms such as exist at Pixar etc!
Troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
For an idea of where Sony is really headed with the PS2, Check out this article over at The Register about its destiny as the access point for Sony-branded broadband internet content.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
to start crying if you don't buy it the latest cart....
:(
But seriously, a ladyfriend just happens to be in Japan on vacation right now. Would it be possible to beg her to bring (smuggle?) a PS2 back with her? Or would it be confiscated at customs and get her in trouble
The thing sounds very streamlined - kinda reminds this old manipulative bastard of the early game consoles - there's the cpu, and the ANTIC chip processing a display list - I'm certain that from there all simularity ceases.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Aren't the Pentium pipelines all inside of the same integer unit? The EE's vector processesors are separate units entirely, not just pipelines inside of a unit.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Toshiba's EE is a verrry nice processor and I've been waiting for someone to take a good look at it for a long time. I think the most impressive part to me is how they handled all the processing units on the chip. It looks like it'll be VERY flexible and probably last as long as the PSX has. I think what Sony is going to do with the PS2 is not make it take over the desktop market but become the centerpiece in their home entertainment line-up. What Sony ought to do is release home media components as add-ons to the PS2. As an aside, today I got to wondering why PC gaming has always remained rather popular dispite powerful gaming consoles that come out. I used to think it was due to networking or the fact that the computer had other uses besides games. These two elements are being incorpoarated into the latest gaming consoles, so someone else was thinking along the same lines as me. I realized today though that PC gaming remains popular because in 6 months or a year a new faster computer will come out that will run the games faster/better. Because faster chips and so forth are coming out all the time they start out slow (the PSX was a monster gaming machine when compared to the PCs c. 1995) but soon enough they are monsters themselves. Also related to this, old PC games are usually compatible with the brand new systems. Doom and Zork will run on a brand new PIII and on an aging 486DX. NES games don't play on SNES consoles. I think this is partly why Sony has made the PS2 able to run some PSX games, people already have libraries of games yet want to purchase a new and faster system. If a console is released that is backwards compatible and runs the old games FASTER people will be more apt to buy it. I think this is also a quasi-reason for the X-Box, it's supposed to run some PC games without rebuilding them (I've heard). Maybe Nintendo will see this too and build some sort of small expension module that one could stick a game cart in and play in emulation mode [on the Dolphin].
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
The gaming software would have to support putting out Dolby/DTS, the card can't make up the signals.
But if quake supports true 5.1-channel digital sound, any sound card with digital out (S/P-DIF) can send that digital signal to a Dolby/DTS decoder.
I have my computer hooked up this way right now with a SonicVortex2 (Aureal chipset) so that I can get true 5.1 channel dolby digital surround on my DVD movies. But I don't know of any other application that uses true 5.1 surround. I know a few games are starting to support quadraphonic surround, but that's generally using direct3D or Aureal/Creative APIs, not Dolby/DTS.
I think Panasonic is coming out with a sound card with built-in Dolby digital decoder. Not sure why any sane person would buy it when half the point of using digital out is to get the audio signals away from the electromagnetic noise inside your computer case.
I suspect the Playstation2 has the digital out for the sake of DVDs, adding Dolby to a game rather than 3D "accelerated" sound would probbaly increase processing overhead too much. But I'd love to be proved wrong!...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Can you say, "best game of all time"?
:-) I love getting stoned and playing battle mode.
Cutting-edge graphics and music (on 286's, no less), an extremely compelling storyline, interesting characters, a large, rich universe, strategy, problem-solving, action....
Hahahahahaha hell yes! That game is phat. I still have a ~100mb DOS partition just for that game
I mean, in computers, people get nostalgic about the Amiga, and you see anyone in 15 years wishing for the simple days of Win95?
15 years? Hell I'm already nostalgic about the simple days of CivII, Warcraft and Quake I. (From a Win95 perspective, as those are the first games I recall playing on a Win95 machine)
Eye candy alone doesn't cut it anymore, and it's finally seems that we're getting games that aren't just based on eye-candy anymore. If everyone has it, you have to add gameplay back it to sell the game.
--sugarman--
It seems that the Playstation 2 will have AC-3 and DTS out. It could be connected to a home-theater for real surround sound. I have been looking for a sound card that has real surround (AC-3 and DTS) but it seems they don't exist. Does anyone know of one? Playing Quake with DTS sound must be awesome.
Okay now go and look at the first games ever released for the playstation, now compare them with games running on that same piece of hardware now. The difference is stunning.
No platform is pushed to its limits until developers have tried to squeeze the last ounce of power out of it for a few years.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Not at all similar. The Sega system had two full processers. This just has two vector pipelines, like the Pentium III has three integer pipelines. It is much easier to do sheduling across two pipes than two procs.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
A dozen function units hooked together can be really fast, but the logic for connecting them (both hardware and software) is the true determinant of how efficiently they can be used and thus the actual performance that can be attained. I find it hard to draw any conclusions about raw performance from the data described. Clearly the biggest thing Playstation benefits from is the miniscule screen resolution of TVs (640x480, 24fps max); how many games are there that aren't 24fps at 640x480 on the PC with practically any 3D card these days?
On a different note, I found it odd that the author shrugged his shoulders at a 600 MHz SIMD Intel processor (MMX/SSE = SIMD) in the X-box when speaking so glowingly of a 200 MHz SIMD one. I suppose the number of functional units differs, but it was still a little wierd given that the author focused on the MHz as being unimpressive. It seemed like he got caught in the understandable trap of looking at the X-box as a PC, not as a $300 console. For a console (and that *is* what we are talking about, right?) 600 Mhz would be a breakthrough, right?
Provocatively (?) yours,
--LP
Agreed. It was odd to see the reviewer revert to it when gauging his "excitement meter," despite having a generally decent grasp on other things.
A dedicated and optimized piece of hardware can often run at one third the speed of a normal CPU in MHz and still outperform it.
Note that the Emotion Engine DSP/VLIW/SIMD approach is *not* "dedicated and optimized" for a single purpose such as geometry calculations. It's got a lot of fp circuits lashed together in general-purpose form for AI, 3D geometry, or whatever other use software developers can think of. The GeForce geometry engine or the 3Dlabs "Gamma" geometry engine, in contrast, do contain dedicated ASIC circuits aimed at precisely those matrix operations needed in the geometry manipulation stages of the graphics pipeline. The Emotion Engine falls somewhere inbetween the pendulum of special purpose and general purpose circuitry, being both more specific than a CPU (i.e. due to lots of floating point circuitry, registers, and high-bandwidth memory paths), and more general and programmable than a standard geometry pipeline ASIC (i.e. with its DSP-like approach)
So does a more general CPU but a more specific geometry engine win (i.e. X-box) win out over a slower CPU with heavy floating point but still somewhat generalized geometry apparatus (PS2)? Of course! It's coming out 2 years later than PS2, what do you expect?
And I still think its all irrelevant in the end; how relevant can 16-66 Million triangles/sec (PS2 claims) or 300 M tris/sec (xbox claim) be when a worst-case NTSC 320x200 display at 24fps even with one triangle per pixel only requires 1.5 M triangles? Even factoring in overhead for theoretical vs. actual figures, the limited requirements of TV resolution makes console chip wars not too terribly relevant going forward, IMHO. (True, a best-case 640x480 TV res requires 7M tris/sec to hit one tri per pixel, which soaks up more cycles but even this still suggests that 300 M tris/sec is overkill/irrelevant.)
The technically-relevant bottlenecks for consoles are the display and network bandwidth, not the CPU and graphics!
--LP
Hot damn! After reading that article (ok, reading the first 5 pages then blankly staring at the last few) it looks like all these crazy cprE classes might have a point afterall. Look ma, I'm programming my Playstation 2!
On a side note, I have to write a physics lab using none other than BASIC. How friggin arcane is that? Over the past semester I've gone from C++ to C to Assembly and now to some BASIC? Go technologically up-to-speed physics department! Maybe I can even use one of their circa 1994 Gateway 486's! Yeah!
pfft.
LDAA #$80 BITA 0x40 BNE END
I think it will be pretty quick - after all, the development workstation runs Linux. If the DVD player will read DVD-RAM or CD-R, then burn a bootable OS. Expand anything writable into memory or onto a USB or Firewire HD.
Well, a cheap home computer that plays all the PS games you already have comes to mind. Throw StarOffice or somesuch onto that CD you burned (or something a little less bloaty). Plug in a USB kbd and mouse, a USB HD, and you've got the world's best Quake machine, and a word processor too.
32MB of RAM is just fine for StarOffice, KDE and X and everything - my old VAIO 505 laptop runs just fine in 32MB (it even runs a slash server! :-) Yes, it pages a fair amount when you switch apps, but I've made no efforts to keep down RAM bloat.
-----
Klactovedestene!
--
Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.
That's the beauty of the free market! If you don't like Playstation 2, get a Dreamcast! It has a much more conventional architecture and it even runs Windows CE (well, a version anyway).
Or, if you want to wait, x-box and dolphin should be even more to your liking.
Personally, I think Sony is going to be laughing all the way to the bank.
// TODO: fix sig
Not to rain on this weird, misogynistic parade, but this AC never states that s/he is a woman. What, like there's never been a gay coder? Poor ole Turing is spinning in his grave, no doubt.
Much Love,
"S"HM
*****
(I refuse to spellcheck out of contempt for your belief system)
This processor looks like it should kick some serious ass. On the fly switching from RISC core for SIMB to VLIW, autonomous vector units, etc., this puppy looks like it will be amazing.
:)
The problem is going to be game design. I'm doubting that game designers crank out assembly code for games (you really can't hand code VLIW without going insane) so you need to get the tools there.
Now, with VLIW, compilers are VERY important, poor compiler technology, and your chip will run at 10% of it's speed. The upshot is that as the product matures, the compilers that Sony puts out will get better and better, so the games will improve tremendously as Sony's compiler gets better.
The only thing that concerns me is this obsession with display, will game design suck? I mean, I still haven't seen a game come out that is better than the original Zelda, I just wonder if it is possible to create a game that captures our imagination the way the simple old stuff did.
I mean, in computers, people get nostalgic about the Amiga, and you see anyone in 15 years wishing for the simple days of Win95?
...
Well, it looks like I may be cramming a console into my room at school now...
Alex
I guess I will have to give it up, but I used to never buy the "gaming drives the industry" argument that you hear from so many Wintel folks. But here, with the PS2, and all of the problems they're having, and the technology and whatnot, everything seems very different from my day. When I played console games, the only thing that mattered were what platforms supported what titles! Props to Toshiba on an impressive core.
The real power I see in the PS2 that I believe will exceed the X-Box is simply the difficulty of programming for the PS2 vs. the simplicity of the X-Box. (Yes. That is what I meant to say.)
Both machines will have more than enough power to do amazing things, particulary if the graphics card for the X-Box is as excellent as hoped. The difficulty of developing for the PS2 is actually symptomatic of an incredible strength: innovation. As people learn to use the Emotion Engine, they will need to become intimately familiar, excellent programmers to create market-winning games. This intimacy allows them to program more efficiently and do neat tricks that one normally does not think of. All of the best Japanese companies are lining up behind the PS2 and investing the time necessary to get great developers for the system. This means that the games will be excellent by the time the X-Box is hitting its release. In contrast, many more American companies will jump onto the X-Box bandwagon that have not played in the console space before, as the barrier of entry is much lower due to the higher similarity to American and European PC programming. I expect the learning curve for using the full potential of the X-Box according to MS's claims will be far less steep in difficulty, but longer in time.
And all of this means? X-Box as described by the specs will be an excellent system that will satiate many gamers. However, we still have yet to see what portion of those specs are realized and in what fashion. We have yet to see the graphics "card" that will be the true power behind the X-Box. We have yet to see if the PS2 becomes as popular in the US as it is in Japan (every last machine sold out in the first weekend). If the PS2 and Dolphin are too firmly entrenched, the X-Box may have difficulty getting market share. Let's not forget that the much mentioned, never seen Nintendo Dolphin is supposed to come out in early 2001. The fierce competition will probably be good for gamers. The problem is that the extreme differences in the different systems may force gamers to get all three systems to play all the games they want!
B. Elgin
B. Elgin
"Read at your own risk; feel free to ignore."
Well i agree that in order to release the games they might have been rushed...
however...
Just think how long the PSX has been out - If you listen to you geeks in space (!!!!!) you heard the statistic that 3 in 4 homes has a PSX. This thing is huge, and its here to stay...
so... The PS2 will probably be here to stay for a while too (just a hunch) and that being the case, in a while we can expect the initial rush of games to have come and gone, and then game developers will start to push the limits of the machine. This is what has happened - as of now, the PSX games rock! Back in the day, they were... eh... ok... a little better than the SNES, but heck they took so long to load....
All this just to say that Yeah the first games might not use all the capabilities... but wait a little while and you'll start to see games that push the envelope and your jaw will drop.
The waiting's the hard part...
God what a stupid login name - i should get a new one, but it'll be 6 months till I moderate again.
sig?
Very Nice. (what was it, 6 or 7 pages?)
Of-course 250Mhz is not that much in terms of the CPU cycles but we all know that a Sun Solaris box or a G4 will run at 250 better than some 400-500 Intel simply due to their advanced designs (32, 64 32bit registers, wider bus, stronger IO)
What does emotion stand for? E-motion as in electronic movement? or is it emotion as in feeling?
One thing for sure X-Box is will not cut it in compare to this beast.
Cheers
You can't handle the truth.
You don't need God to do anything.
Just go and get yourself "Philosophy of Sexuality" by Sigmund Freud "The History of Sexuality" by Michel Foucault and maybe the "Symposium" by Plato.
Those are great manuals for your needs.
now we are back to the theme - emotion processor.
You think it's possible to build a farm of those and to use them for movie rendering?
Just a thought.
You can't handle the truth.
Because to get the same amount of power using off the shelf WinTel stuff would cost rather more, it would destroy the economic model used by console makers, and the PS2 already has far more games in development than Linux and Windows CE put together.
I'm not a chip designer, but from what I can tell by looking at these specs, the P2 might be able to do rendering-on-the-fly that is hard to distinguish from FMV. It will be interesting to see what directions 3rd party developers take this technology. I'd like to see a game that pushes the emotion chip to its limit... maybe a real-time, more complex version of Dragon's Lair?
love,
br4dh4x0r
I thought games like GranTurismo (2), Medievil and well lots of the newer PSX games were pushing the PSX to the limit?
troc
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
I realize this goes against the interactivity of the consoles, but there are times where I just like to take a video or DVD into my system & sit back & watch, w/o having to defeat three zillion different monsters to get through the story line.
With these cool graphics engines coming out, how long before we can see feature-length 3D CG movies, where the data on the CD represents the setup & movements of the 3D models instead of a frame-by-frame type of video? (In particular, how long before I can see these things in the US!)
I can see interactivity up to the point where you can move through the movie "set" looking at stuff during the course of the movie (and forwards & backwards the movie too, of course) - but for the most part, the storyline is linear (unless the director wants to explore storyline branches)?
Would such a setup actually be more efficient in terms of data storage than the frame-by-frame setups? As things got more realistic, would it slowly start supplanting "normal" movies? Would you get a hybrid of 3D & "real-life" stuff (where the real-life stuff was modeled into the 3D worlds)?
Evidently most games out for the PS2 in Japan (this is second hand information, btw) were rushed out so quickly that they only use 50% or less of the PS2's capabilities. The upshot of which is the graphics you see currently are usually well below the PS2's capabilities.
What I'm getting at is, all the graphics power in the world doesn't mean squat if nobody's programming to take advantage of it. Just look at how amazing late-generation SNES games are.
Now, the PS2 is still a beast of a machine, no matter what, due to the machine's highly specialized graphics (3D only, and fast as a sonovabitch). But there's not much to compare it to, as the Dreamcast comes in woefully behind in the specifications race, and the Dolphin isn't even out yet.
Also, according to the company behind Bleem (the name slips my mind), the Playstation 1 was a queer beast due in part to a strange method of streaming textures into memory, and a whole wealth of other odd choices. It makes the PS1 very hard to emulate, and ironic as it seems, just as hard to emulate on the PS2!
***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***
***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***
So basically the Graphics Synthesiser on PS2 is like a blitter...and the Display List is like a Copper List.
That sounds like ye olde Amiga Blitter and Copper List combination just 16 years later, and a damn site faster...
I'd fancy that in a nice shiny G4 Amiga (Well we can all dream...)
That's the problem. MS is really leading technical people to believe that the X-Box is more PC than console. They are selling it to developers as the "easy to program for" system. "It uses DirectX and we know you love that!" The CPU seems more likely to be a slightly altered 600 MHz Celeron chip than anything else. Depending on which question you ask and who is asking, MS developers will tell you that X-Box is not a PC and is totally a console, or they will tell you that it is exactly like a PC.
The PS2 is a console through and through. I'm a little surprised, because previous reports I had seen about the PS2 marked the Emotion Engine internals at 350 MHz, not 250 MHz. When it gets to the US, I'll look into that more. Either way, MHz is really a very poor metric for console performance. The problem with PC CPUs, it that they are Jacks-of-all trades. They do everything about equally well: Mediocre. As a result, high MHz speeds allows them to chug through stuff faster and mimic the effects of more dedicated machines. A dedicated and optimized piece of hardware can often run at one third the speed of a normal CPU in MHz and still outperform it. This is because the dedicated hardware might take 6 cycles to complete a specialized task that takes the PC CPU 20 cycles. The trade-off, is that a task outside the specialized field is likely to take the dedicated hardware 60 cycles while taking the PC CPU the same 20 cycles. (Note: This is an example I am making up as an illustration, I don't have the specs for any dedicated hardware memorized offhand.) When the PS2 tries to do email and such, it will lose the massive edge it has, because it is optimised completely for 3D games. On the other hand, email can be done just as well by a 25 MHz 386 as a 1 GHz P3.
B. Elgin
B. Elgin
"Read at your own risk; feel free to ignore."
Last time I checked the Playstation Emotion Engine running linux was the top Single CPU system in the Pov Ray benchmark tests. The Pov Ray basically renders the image to a file so you're looking at a benchmark of sheer CPU power.
This beat out Intel, Athlon, and Alpha Based systems. Usually the Alpha is considered the winner in gfx rendering. Titantic (A.K.A. Chicks version of Star Wars), used over 100 Alpha based machines running Linux to render the GFX.
The thing does run a mangled version of Linux internally. It can get files via NFS, and it has an internal web server that lets you perform various admin functions. They don't want you telnetting to it, though. I think they did some tricks to the pty system that may have made interactive shells a bad idea. Just a guess.
As a former PC game shop, we actually were using the Metroworks system to do development. Compared to dev studio, it was wretched, frankly. Building on a linux system with a gcc cross compiler was the recommended way to do things, and frankly, I would have preferred it.
The hardware is fucked up. Seriously fucked up. Scary fucked up. The first generation of PS2 games isn't going to get close to actually using the system capabilities. Nor is the second generation. Maybe the third generation.
We had several hard-core 3D graphics programmers with multiple commercial titles under their belts working on the system, and their progress was, frankly, pathetic. Why? Because although its not all that hard to write a simple renderer from the EE Core, its a major pain if you want to actually use the box. After all, the core is only 300Mhz, its not all that interesting. You really need to use the VUs if you want to start slamming matrix manipulations around.
The VU's have basically no memory. So, you can't actually fit an entire model inside them. So, we were going to do a pipeline where individual primitives (i.e. quads, tristrips, fans, whatever) would get queued, the VU1 would just eat stuff off the queue, do the transforms, and render. Well, we also decided that the system would be great for doing curved surfaces. That complicates everything. How does your physics system do collisions with a dynamically tesselated curved surface where the generated tris are all off on another CPU where you can't touch it? So you need to resolve collisions either directly between the surfaces (ow) or use simpler geometries. Annoying.
Then Renderware came in and gave a demo. They've had dev systems for quite a while, and they have a mature abstraction to the whole rendering process, and their entire scheme for doing the rendering is fucking wild; as I understand it, they don't even leave code on the VU's, they download it constantly, alongside whatever work they need it to do. They are running the DMA at like 90% capacity, which rocks. Their stuff looks awesome, and they get pretty damned good performance.
I personally believe that there will be more RenderWare based games than studios touching the raw hardware, especially for generation 1. Its a lot easier to learn an API than to try to understand poorly documented (and japlish, when it is documented) hardware specs.
At any rate, its not a good year to invest in the games industry. Everybody is blowing wads of dough trying to learn all the new platforms.
You think this emotion engine is complex, you should try to figure out the one in my girlfriend. Sometimes, I wish God would just Open Source women so that maybe I'd be able to understand them.
kwsNI