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Sony to PSP Coders: Battery Life Your Problem
AssaultOnBattery writes "The fine folks over at GamesIndustry.biz are reporting that Sony has found a unique solution to the problem of battery life on the PSP - making their game developers solve it for them. According to the story, Sony is going to give devs a battery emulator which will tell them if their game is within acceptable power consumption limits."
I wonder if games will start being released with battery life predictions on the box.
If you can't access the disc often, that means only one thing. You have to load all the info off the disc into ram beforehand. That means, LOAD TIMES. Want to whip out your PSP in class for a quick game before the teacher gets there? Sorry, gotta wait a minute for it to load. Oh shit, times up! Not good for the PSP. Which was already looking bad with its much higher price tag.
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The PSP is a very complex machine(with a motor for the cd reader), and thus battery life will vary greatly depending on what you are doing(versus say a gameboy were battery life is easier to determine in general rather than per game) You want to load a lot of textures? That is going to kill your battery life. You want to have a lot of music? Going to kill battery life. A game such as quake will obviously take more battery power than puyo puyo pop. Sony did itself and it's devs a favor by providing this little kit.
Monstar L
This seems like the final nail in the coffin for the PSP. After all, what good is amazing, state-of-the-art hardware, if the developers avoid pushing it to its full potential for fear of draining the battery?
;^)
Remember the Game Gear? It was lightyears ahead of the original Game Boy. Color, backlit screen, processing power... The bastard took 6 AA batteries and lasted about 4 hours. (There was a trick where you could add a 7th AA to the section of the power supply that handled the backlight and get about 7 hours out of it, but that was little-known and difficult) It sucked batteries like a hoover, while the less powerful Game Boy lasted forever with it's ugly little brown-scale screen
Furthermore, what about load times? The PSP uses discs right? Power consumption concerns will put the kaibosh on streaming from the media, which means LOAD TIMES! That might be well and good on a console, but on a portable? These systems are supposed to be quick-on, quick-off, quick game before class or before the subway gets here.
It won't quite be an N-gage, but the PSP will definitly be "Game Gear 2"
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Well the Nintendo fan-boy in me would like to predict doom and gloom for Sony's PSP. However, I think I'm missing the point of why this article is as negative about it as it is. It's not like Sony can put an optical drive in this thing and magically make it work forever on batteries. If Sony's trying to say "look, don't piss off our customers" I say more power to them. (no pun intended.)
"Derp de derp."
If Sony is going to put the battery life problem off on Developers, then I think that having a battery life rating on the box, as accurate as possible, should be a requirement on each game. Maybe gamers only buying games that will give them a decent play experience will convince Sony that battery life is a HARDWARE problem, not a SOFTWARE problem.
This is why no one has wanted to use an optical disc in a handheld until now. Funny how much a simple spindle can drain a battery.
There are a couple of posters who have said this is a silly idea or its should be up to Sony to ensure enough battery life is available for its gear.
Well I think that you havent really got the gist of what Sony are saying. Sony can make the battery for the PSP as good as is possible (within the confines of cost and technology) for the PSP but if the thing is running say "Tetris" is going to use a hell of a lot less power than if it is running "Doom III". This thing aint a gameboy its basically a PS2 running off a lithium battery-powering a pretty damn big screen and some pretty powerful hardware.... just how long do you expect the battery to last on this thing?
Encouraging game developers to be careful about use of processing power and other parts of the hardware (eg optical drive motors/screen's/speakers) etc. Makes sense!
The more powerful these handhelds/portables get the more conservative use of hardware and resources is going to be an issue.
EG: imaging a game that streams shed loads of fmv off the optical drive... maybe there is a better way of acheiving this than having that drive constantly spinning. Howabout the use of audio etc ? having it constantly playing through the game? even on the title screens etc. There are lots and lots of legitimate reasons for Sony to encourage efficient use of hardware- I applaud them for that. It is Sony's job to ensure that the games that come out for the PSP are every bit as well engineered as the console itself. Cut them some slack 'cus they are only doing what is neccesary...
Nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
I remember Sonic on the Game Gear in particular was wayyyyyy ahead of anything the GB or GBC could do, and not just palette-wise.
Ya know, people on this site talk an awful lot about how games these days are all about the graphics and 3D sound, and not enough about the game play. Maybe with all that processing power and limits on battery usage, the result will be a step closer to games that focus on being fun and having good game play? Maybe? ........Nah.
While it's quite nice that Sony will be including a battery consumption utility with the PSP devkits, doesn't the whole disc thing add a whole new level of complexity. Isn't the idea for a video game system (to developers) is to make it as easy and efficient as possible to make games?
Based on the massive investment Sony just made on OLED technology, I wonder why they don't use those instead of LCDs.
If the battery life on the PSP sucks, people will find out and not buy it. They can blaim the developers all they want, but the company that will get blaimed is the maker of the hardware, Sony.
To me, it seems like a horrible answer to a (what should be) simple problem. Developers should be concerned with making a good game, not how much battery life their game will have. I'm sure this will eliminate or seriously affect entire genres. When building a portable, you would think that one of the first things you would focus on is battery life. Most companies hold off on releasing a product until it gets acceptable battery life.
I think you're misunderstanding the issue, here. The problem isn't that the hardware takes up a lot of power. The problem is that with an optical drive, the software developers have control over how much power their game takes up, not the hardware developer. One software developer can create a very efficiently coded game that very rarely spins the optical drive, while another could create a very inefficient, poorly coded game that spins the optical drive almost constantly. So whereas one game from one company could drain the battery in ten, another game from another company could drain it in just six.
And the worst part is that when Spongebob Squarepants: The Jackass Licensed Game Developer's Adventure drains the battery in six hours, no one will care that other, more professional developers like Capcom and Square are getting four more hours of battery life out of their games, or that the problem is obviously the Jackass Licensed Game Developer's fault. They'll just blame Sony, because they've never had an optical drive in a handheld before and will assume that any power inefficiency is the hardware developer's fault, just like it was with Sega and the Game Gear.
That would be a desaster. Handhelds see much usage during short wait times, wait for the bus, wait until your train arrives, wait in line, etc. If the shortest you could play the PSP for would be, say, 30 minutes, you could only use the system during very long breaks (like lunch break). Those rarely occur naturally and you'd be limited to long trips and time you take yourself for the PSP. Most of that allocated time is in your free time, anyway and most likely those parts of your free time you'd spend with gaming are spent at home. And at home there's no need for a handheld. And even less need for a proprietary movie format that only plays on the miniature screen.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Being tethered to the wall fucking sucks dude! And come on, who here honestly plays their 8-10-hours-on-the-battery GBA SP plugged into an outlet? I play mine in bed 3" from an outlet at times... but I never plug the bastard in until that little orange light lets me know I've only got an hour or so left.
And we've seen how well that one worked. Why develop for a platform when the competition is willing to do some of the work for you?
>The ONLY reason Sony has decided to base the
>system around discs is so they can sell you
>movies.
Well...
Optical disc is CHEAP. Are you too young to remember N64 (ROM) vs. PS (CD)?
So, again, this comes down to another way for Sony to make more money. My point is, they made sacrifices to the core system in order to make money, either through selling you things that are not games or by cutting the costs of the game media.
For a home system, discs may be fine. While on the road, battery life and loading time are two of the primary concerns, two that aren't addressed by Sony.