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Valve's Gabe Newell Speaks on Console Development
DelitaTheFridge writes "Gabe Newell, of Valve fame, criticizes Microsoft and Sony on how difficult it will be for next-gen developers to produce games on their upcoming hardware. He is especially critical of Sony's model, where code written to run on Cell will be very hard to port to other systems, and vice versa. Will this bring upon a new era of PC Game superiority? Only time will tell. In the meantime, Newell says he believes that Steam-like systems will be extremely helpful for developers on the new consoles due to their ability to provide updates and new content."
Steam-like systems
You mean the one that forces you to "update" before you can play its game? This system is making a player's life difficult too.
It's worth noting, however, that Valve is historically a PC games developer and has only made two console games thus far--Counter-Strike and Half-Life 2, both for Xbox.
I think this line says it all - Valve is inexperienced in cross-platform console game development, and it's whinging about it. Kind of reminds me of Alternative Browsers Impede Investigations
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Say what you will about Gabe and Valve, he is very correct about both systems. In Microsoft's case, they've made things a pain for developers by having two different models with and without a hard drive.
In the case of the PS3 and Cell, it is different enough in design from "traditional" architecture that cross platform development for it is going to be a nightmare.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
There's the actual video interview.
I spoke to some people at Microsoft, and as I said, I can't point to a single feature in Vista that I care about that solves problems for us.
I can't see a single feature in Vista that solves any problems I've had with Windows on the consumer's side either.
And I totally see why Sony wants people to write code that runs on seven SPEs and a central processing unit, because that code is never going to run well anywhere else
You can say the same about DirectX. You can never run DirectX on anything but Windows. (WINE doesn't count). This is common practice, it happens with proprietary formats, why wouldn't it happen with game consoles?
Ironically, the CD version of Counter-Strike : Condition Zero allows just that : Playing the game from memory (it does not install anything besides your configs).
Exactly. To a non-coder it sounds like a walk in the park eh j3rry?. The x360 is, what, a triple core powerpc chip, and the PS3 is a less powerful chip, almost identical to one of the x360 cores, but with 7 SPE's (the S stands for stupid, not synergistic or whatever the fuck their marketroids named em)
These consoles are taking the idea of multithreading to the max, and both are taking very different approaches. Porting between the consoles was hard enough this gen (xbox getting good pc ports as it pretty much was a pc, the gcn being a ppc and the ps2 being made by sony, who can never make anything easy to develop for, and required alot of assembly code and hand vectorization to get a game working well on the already slower hardware) but now we've got not just different architectures to support, but completly and totally different programming models to support.
No, it's not. It's far from a simple download interface, it has a lot of code underneath its graphic interface.
Systems that provide update features have big advantages over a download by yourself one.
-The user don't need to know what he needs to update. If you stop updating... and a month later you try the game again you don't bother seeking and verifying the last 8 updates on the site. Not everyone is a linux user.
-Updates can be released more often, since the system manages the updates needed.
-Security. It's harder to crack the game. You may not mind it, but for a software selling company this is very important.
-Communication and news. It's way more pleasant to view news when you login into a game system than recieving not always welcome mail.
There is probably others I forgot to mention here.
Why all the complaining about Fileplanet when Filefront has every patch on Fileplanet but at 10 times the bandwidth, no fees and no queues? Is someone forcing you all to use Fileplanet?
What, me worry?
At least on the PS3 (and before on the PS2) the point is not having several static threads doing work, but putting all the units in the system to work at once. So while the SPEs (similar to VUs on the PS2) churn out some 3d vertex translation list and do physics, the cpu can do game logic or some other stuff. The best optimization is definitely having everything running 100% at once, although I suspect what will usually happen (which makes life easier and is acceptable too) is that units operate in sync but simultaneously (e.g. the main cpu starts everything else each frame, and the all work at once.) There will be some wasted time as some unit will finish sooner, but being kept in sync simplifies programming. It is not like threads in a PC which operate asynchronously (unless you explicitly sync)