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Conflicting Reports of PS3 Programming Difficulty
xenongamer writes "It appears there isn't any type of concensus regarding the programming difficulty of Sony and IBM's upcoming Cell processor. From the article: 'Although few doubt the relative power of the Cell microprocessor, many have expressed concern over the chip's asymmetric design, which makes programming for it a potential disaster ... One such man was 3D artist Josh Robinson, who was fired from his position at Sony just weeks after making a public, negative comment about PlayStation 3 development on his Internet blog.'"
I don't see the conflict in the article.
One group is saying the PS3 is hard to program for.
The other group is happy that it's so much better than the PS2.
It can be both. Quite difficult is still better than insanely difficult.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
The guy was an ARTIST fired for for saying less than flattering things not only about an early development box, but the product he was working on. His opinion about how hard it is to program counts for nothing, he's not doing it, everything was heresay. His primarily complaint was that his game was not taking advantage of the PS3 because they were putting schedule before quality. Anecdotally he referred to other companies that may be doing the same. Nor do I give any attention at all to someones COMPETITOR who claims it is "a nightmare".
I wouldn't give him much air time, I'd rather hear from developers actually working with it. Those who have detailed architectural drawings, APIs etc. Even (especially) if they have to go to great lengths to achieve anonymity. Those guys would know what potential may or may not exist. This article does not give us information on that, the closest we come is a chief architect at a game haus who says he likes it. He's probably closer to development than the others, but still not reliable (since he's on record) and unless title inflation has gone mad, not someone directly doing the work.
A non-story.
I think the problem not understood by the blogging developer is, that it is MUCH BETTER to have unrealized potential at launch than to use up all your potential in the beginning. If the lifespan of the PS3 is 5+ years, then gamers will want nicer and better titles every year on the same hardware they have had for all that time. That can be achieved by squeezing more out of the hardware.
So I don't see a disaster here, infact, this probably suits Sonys aims quite well.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
Compared to Sega Saturn's dual processor hell, the Sony PlayStation was leaps and bounds easier to develop on. Of all the games released for the Saturn, only one (Panzer Dragoon Saga) managed to utilize them correctly (and it looks beautiful to boot). Everything else was designed either on one processor or a staggered mechanism that failed to extract the parallelism. This led to the belief that the PlayStation was far more powerful than the Saturn.
Now, the PlayStation 3 has (God knows what reason) nine concurrent microprocessors. Even if only one is primary and seven of the secondary ones are active, it'll be leaps and bounds more difficult to develop software than just two. And the difficulty curve is not linear; more processors would yield far more difficulty.
Of course, all this would be theoretically handled by a smart compiler. But compilers today are struggling with mere dual-core systems, let alone nine different processors. As for assembly coding, look at the failure that is the Saturn. I'm not questioning the power of the Cell. I'm questioning whether a developer exists in the world to extract at least half of its potential.
The same thing was said about the PS2. The developers of Oddworld switched from the PS2 to the XBOX early on, citing the fact that the PS2 was too hard to code for. There was widespread concern then that the PS2 was going to be too difficult to be viable.
How about everyone wait for the system to actually come out before making judgments on it?
sounds like the open source community to me... at least this is how it is in my shoes....
-this post brought to you by the image word "pumped"
I always thought it was because Nintendo systems didn't use "standard" media, like CDs and DVDs. They used carts up until the GameCube-era, and even then, they had some mini-disc format. (I'm not sure how protected that media was)
... it's certainly been a while.
When games were in cartridge format, there were various accessories that were sold that let folks read them in and "back up" the games to a separate storage device. Conversely, you could also read from such devices as well, and it opened the door for piracy. I believe (although I'm too lazy to Google), that Nintendo did frown upon that and went after people/groups that did this. I could be mistaken though
-- jchenx
Or at minimal, this is difficult if you've been trained to program in a single-processor enviroment. Crow, there are languages and compilers out there built from the ground up for that kind of enviroment. If schools stopped being so scared of teaching little jimmy anything that wasn't "this is in the top 10 skills on monster.com" maybe more people would learn them (I was actually in the LAST class at my university to teach such languages.. after which they were replaced by javascript and perl...)
Type 1 thinks in "i_unknown" theoretical concepts, tries to create a framework to rely on and then starts looking what the metal is capable of.
Type 2 looks at the metal, plays around with it, reads the manuals, plays around a little longer to make sure everything needed is understood, and then evaluates the possibility to use either a supplied framework (customized if needed) or to create a new framework.
I had my fair share of type 1s, I had my fair share of type 2s.
Type 1 had problems with the console-programming more than often, the perfectly crafted framework had to be duct-taped to the metal because it implied functionality that simply wasn't there, thus delaying delivery dates.
Type 2 sometimes got lost in the possibilities of the metal, but delivered results.
Before you start to flame me now: the type 1 approach is valid if the feature-set of the hardware is known and tested, but, if dealing with metal of not-so-tested capabilities, type 2 is needed to make sure there are no surprises later. To make my point: I had to fight with a type 1 at one time because the framework he invented didn't match the features of Nintendos GC. For him, this was no problem, "let's create another thousand classes and it will work." He did not understand that programming on metal, read consoles, is different from programming on a PC with an OS.
Maybe its time for the studios/programmers complaining about difficulties to evaluate the number of type 1s vs. the number of type 2s in the team. It won't work without a good mix of both and clear cut responsibilities/planning before.
just my 2 cents
Your fanboyism looks juvenile and just plain retarded in light of the technical nature of the post you responded to. I especially liked the part where you completely failed to redress any of his criticisms about programming for the PS2/3.