Japanese Devs Talk 360 Development

Japanese developers have had the chance to work with the Xbox 360, and as Gamespot reports, there are mixed feelings over there. From the article: "...but even with Microsoft's development tools and strong technical support (another aspect for which the developers had kind words), there are still a number of issues game makers face. Many developers consider the system's graphic capabilities 'double-edged.' The Xbox 360 can handle much better looking graphics than previous consoles, but it also requires a lot more effort in development."

Comments

Programming Complexity

[HRbnjR]

Increasing programming complexity is becoming an issue developers must tackle regardless of platform. With the move to dual core chips, software is going to have to move to be pervasively multithreaded in the future. I know it took me some time to learn how to program (and think/design) in a threaded fashion - and to quit making stupid synchornization mistakes, race conditions, etc. If anything, as a programmer I welcome these new requirements, as it helps me differentiate myself from less skilled programmers. Like everyone else, these game developers are going to have to learn to cope.

And so it begins.

[cornface]

There have been a lot of posts in the 360 threads about how the choice to use DVDs for storage (compared to Sony's Blu-Ray discs or HD-DVD) didn't matter. Nobody will fill up a dual layer DVD! Impossible! Doom 3 is only 1.5 gigs!

From the article:

"The volume of data in Enchant Arms won't fit into a single DVD. It's an RPG, so we're thinking it would be inevitable that we release it on two discs," says Takeuchi. "But to be honest, that's even looking grim."

Whoops!

Re:And so it begins.

[badasscat]

es, and we all know that multi-disc games are doomed to failure, and that the developer and producer will fail as well, like what happened with Final Fantasy VII, VIII, IX; Arc the Lad Collection; Legend of Dragoon; Gran Turismo 2; Star Ocean Till the End of Time; I could go on but you get the point.

All of those with the exception of FF7 came out very late in the PS1's lifespan. The PS1 was also designed at a time when there was no other choice for what optical format to use. If you wanted to go optical, it was CD or nothing. (The competition was also similarly limited, so that if a game took up more than one disc on the PS1, it took up more than one disc on the Saturn too, and likely couldn't even be done on the N64 or Jaguar.)

The Xbox 360 designers could have easily gone with a higher-capacity format. They chose not to, even knowing that the competition was going to do otherwise. If developers are talking about games coming out at launch or soon after using two or more discs, what does that say about the system two or three years down the road? It says to me that either a large number of games are going to require disc swapping on the Xbox 360 when they won't on other systems, or that textures are going to end up being so low-resolution on the Xbox 360 (in order to fit the game on one or two discs) that games look significantly worse than they do on other systems.

Some games can't even realistically use more than one disc because of their persistent world. Look at a game like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. This is a game that uses 4.7GB as it is, and only then because the PS2 doesn't stream from dual-layer discs all that well (the Xbox version is ported from the PS2, although the texture quality is in some cases bumped up a bit). I can guarantee you the designers at Rockstar would love to have as much storage space for textures as they could get. They would use it all. They'd have to use fewer repeating textures, and the textures they used could be higher-resolution. The more space, the better.

A game like GTA:SA is going to have more polygons on the Xbox 360 and it's going to run smoother, but it's not going to look a hell of a lot better overall than it does on the original Xbox. It will look significantly better on the PS3, because there will be about five times more texture storage space available.

This is the big, big weak link of the Xbox 360, if you ask me. MS can talk all they want about how close the two systems are in polygon performance or whatever, but the fact is in any large game with a persistent world you are just not going to have anywhere close to photo-realistic textures, and you are going to have a lot of noticeably repeating textures. Certain types of games won't suffer that much, but any 3D game where the idea is to create a believable world for you to explore are going to have major problems. It's a big bottleneck.

It's similar to having a massively fast 3.6ghz processor and then giving it only 64K of RAM to work with. I mean, it doesn't even matter how fast the system is, you just can't do anything with that power in that case. The DVD drive in the Xbox 360 isn't quite that limiting, but when you're talking about 1920x1080 HD resolutions and trying to texture convincing worlds, DVD's just do not provide for enough storage space. It's a real Achilles' heel.