Slashdot Mirror
Bungie Hiring PC Developers
Gamespot reports that Halo-maker Bungie Studios is seeking PC developers for an unnamed project. From the article: "Taken in and of themselves, the listings are merely interesting. However, the wording of the graphics programmer job description has many positively convinced that Bungie is porting Halo 2 to the PC, in-house. 'This is an opportunity to influence the direction of Windows gaming technology in MGS [Microsoft Game Studios],' reads the post after first teasing, 'Want to work on the biggest franchises for Microsoft Game Studios?' Since becoming part of Microsoft Game Studios, Bungie has worked on only one franchise for the division--Halo."
No, actually old school programmers are going to be able to squeeze a lot more power out of the Cell and Xenon architectures and are far better suited to understand the limits of in-order execution and the memory timings involved. They know what coding for the specific hardware means, and they're used to limitations not typically present in a PC.
Programming for a single-processor, general purpose machine with gobs of slow RAM gives you very little applicable expertise for these multiprocessor or massively parallel SIMD monsters with limited high-speed RAM. Honestly, Cell is NOTHING like a regular PC architecture. You'd be better off with a background in programming Crays than PCs.
The best thing that PC programming will prepare you for is working with the graphics hardware on both platforms, and even there most people are used to generalizing their code.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
A little while ago, MS made this huge deal about a thing called XNA. I don't know exactly what it does or how easy it makes game development, but I do know that it was supposed to further bridge the PC-Xbox platform development gap. With Carmack doing most of his development on the 360, a Windows developer would be right at home making a game on the 360, right?
They're probably hiring people to work on their next game for the 360, I doubt MS would be too thrilled that resources are being spent on a PC title. But then again, I didn't check the link so I could be way off.
"This is considered plagiarism."