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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."
Let's be honest: Are we surprised? Load time has always been an issue for Sony machines. Even strong developers, like Rockstar, have had load issue times with the GTA games (though I understand San Andreas is supposed to have no load times, but I'll wait to see that for myself).
I hate to say it, but Sony is dropping the ball on the PSP. It's a slick looking machine, I agree. The specs are great. For what its features are, I think $350 is an okay price.
BUT, if the "portable" part of portable gaming means that I'm plugged in using a power adapter, then I'm not leaving my GBA SP for a PSP any time soon.
Can't say I'm buying a DS, either, but this discussion is about the PSP.
I don't see why optimizing for battery power performance would be much different than optimizing for cpu power performance. If you display a pause screen there really is no need to re-render the game scene every frame for example, or don't use the graphics system heavily while accessing the drive. The DS probably has a predetermined maximum power usage by using components that never drains the battery more than a guideline would specify while the PSP gives that responsibility to the developer.
So basically what you're saying is "I applaud you Sony for putting an optical drive into your handheld, and then mandating that developers can't take advantage of it." What are you going to do with all the rich content you've stuck onto the UMD when usage of it is rationed out? Like you said, FMV is a big no-no because it's likely to suck a lot of battery. High quality music too. In fact, high resolution textures and models will probably be a problem too, since you can't stick a lot of them in RAM at once. They'll want to keep drive usage to an absolute minimum, so the game's code, textures, models, music, and levels will probably all have to be loaded into memory. That means whatever you're going to do has to fit into 32 MB of RAM. And if that's the case, why bother having a massive storage format at all?
What about seek time? And how far will 32 MB carry you? Is it enough to store a 3d executable, 3d data, and your expectations for sound and music?
Games aren't made by stupid people, but every second they have to spend addressing this issue is time they can't allocate to extra features like multiplayer or a faster subroutine for something like antialiasing. Nobody is doing this now because nobody is doing portable rotational media until just now.
If you can't get more than 2 hours of movies out of it, then I have dismal hopes for the battery life from your average game maker. Just as not every game on the PS2 looks as great as Square's, there will be games that last longer than others.
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Duh... Make an option in the game itself and let the user pick: 1. Full experience - FMV, Backlight, In game music etc etc. 2. Conserve my battery - Turn off streaming in-game music, skip FMV between levels, turn off back light. I applaud Sony's initative! This way you get BOTH worlds (A kick ass system *AND* good power usage: You get to pick what option is important to YOU)
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Had Sony decided to build the system around their Memory Stick line, they could have had a system that was MUCH smaller and had a MUCH longer battery life.
Instead, someone got the bright idea to base it around discs. Why? Do you NEED a Disc to make a game system? Their current proposal of loading the game into the system memory says, "No". In fact, the disc based system introduces a whole host of problems such as: poor battery life, load times, moving parts to break, exposure of dirt to the laser / moving parts, etc.
Why make a such a poor design decision?
The ONLY reason Sony has decided to base the system around discs is so they can sell you movies.
This money-grubbing decision has introduced fundamental design problems into what otherwise could have been a great game system. Instead, it comprimises some core functions in return for making Sony more money by adding additional, potential revenue streams to the device.