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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."
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but to be fair, the complaint about the 360 having better graphics but being more difficult to develop for is going to apply to ALL of the next-gen consoles.
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.
Yes, 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.
Pressing a second disc is incredibly cheap compared to the rest of the development process.
You were developing for Windows. You were a small peanut. You didn't matter. So you got customer service that was appropriate to your place. The fact is is you were Macromedia, Adobe, or EA or some other big publisher, my guess is you would get much better support.
But this is the XBox 360. So not only are they helpful to the big publishers (because consoles don't succeed without great games), but they will help small publishers too (at least at first). They NEED good games at the start of the console's life. It is in their best interest to give every developer every little bit of help they can (especially in Japan where the XBox had so much trouble).
This is all what I can deduce (I'm not a professional game programmer or anything, I'm still in school). But the point is they can't (and shouldn't) give the same respect to a little Windows developer (which has already succeeded wildly) that a big publisher/group like Team Ninja or some such would get on their new multi-billion dollar Console launch.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Nice rant.
You're missing the points of the "article":
1. It will take some time for developers to make games that wow us.
2. Some 360 games will have so much content that they won't fit on two discs!!11!one!
This "article" is a marketing tool, a disguised press release, and is not really denigrating the 360 at all. They are reminding us that 1st generation games never utilize anything close to the full potential of a system, and that there will be games with a massive amount of content.
Sure, a lot of people on Slashdot do not like Microsoft, many of them for good reasons.
When you read a blurb like this from Gamespot or anyone else, you have to read between the lines -- there is probably an ulterior motive to what is published.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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.
But what makes you think that the Revolution will be any more easier to develop for. The Revolution is going to have multiple cores and it is going to be more powerful than the Gamecube. So developers WILL have to create better graphics and learn to work with a multicore chip (all complaints given about the PS3 and Xbox 360).
Multicore development for games is a new concept for most developers and it's something they HAVE to face. Right now, multicore chips seem to be the only way to get more performance from CPU's and developers will have to adapt to this to remain competitive.
It's no surprise that first-gen games will not be able to take advantage of all features of a console. It happens every generation. However, as developers get familiar with the milticore concept and development tools mature, things will definitely improve. Microsoft is at least offering a way of easily transitioning, but Im betting Sony and Nintendo are going to offer the same thing. Difficulty of programming never stopped the PS2 from dominating.
How about when the first console with a Quantum CPU appears. I bet game developers will really complain about that because, as I understand, quantum programming is A LOT different than the traditional programming we use today. Developers should stop complaining a start programming.
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