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John Carmack Discusses 360's Edge, Considers DS
Via a Gamasutra post, John Carmack's comments on upcoming id choices. Game|Life has a few quick comments on Carmack's hope to bring Orcs and Elves to the DS. This would be id's first game on a Nintendo platform in some time. Likewise, he makes it clear that he considers the 360 the dev platform of choice due to the ease of development on the console. From the article: "the honest truth is that Microsoft dev tools are so much better than Sony's. We expect to keep in mind the issues of bringing this up on the PlayStation 3. But we're not going to do much until we're at the point where we need to bring it up to spec on the PlayStation 3. We'll probably do that two or three times during the major development schedule. It's not something we're going to try and keep in-step with us. None of my opinions have really changed on that. I think the decision to use an asymmetric CPU by Sony was a wrong one."
I think you're wrong about id's dedication to writing good 3D engines for the hardware of the times, regardless of complexity. Quake3's engine, for instance, allowed for multithreaded rendering when nobody else was even considering multiple CPUs.
It wasn't completely stable -- and I wonder how many people actually turned the feature on -- but it was multithreading *way* ahead of its time on the gaming front.
C
The Sun is proof that we can't even do fire properly.
True, however that was many years ago, when Carmack still had some ambition and imagination. I'm not saying Doom III was bad, but... ... but you're still going to imply that Carmack is a luddite who can't adopt to new technology. What-fucking-ever, he is still what he's always been -- a pusher of new technology, and a great determiner of what technology actually works in practice and what is theoretical pie-in-the-sky wishfull thinking. Just because he is no longer the only man on earth who is serious about pushing the envelope on 3D technology doesn't mean he has lost his ambition or imagination.
The problem is people viewing it as a hurdle rather than an opportunity.
It's a hurdle and an opportunity. Practical people see this, theorists don't. Hell, even IBM admitted that it was a hurdle for programmers in an architecture talk about Cell that I attended at UT.
It's a safe bet that the XBox 1080 (or whatever) will have multi cores, and of course the PC industry is full-steam ahead on that front.
Are you mental? The 360 is already multi-processor, and multi-core is just a performance optimization to reduce communication overhead between processors (while making DRAM access more expensive). It already requires multi-processor programming which Carmack is an early adopter of. You think he doesn't know how to write a multi-threaded application? Please. His point, and a very good one at that, is that it is harder to write multi-threaded code when some of your processors have drastically different capabilities than others. Like I said even IBM, the creator of Cell, agrees with this assesment, so it is nothing but bald-faced denial of reality to pretend otherwise.
The enemies of Democracy are
Dude, Carmack is hot stuff. He makes hardware do things it was never intended to do, something which any console programmer should have the utmost respect for. A game developer not having respect for Carmack is like an inventor not having respect for da Vinci. Basically either jealousy or idiocy and in neither case healthy.
The enemies of Democracy are
"Makes impressive engines" is a bit of an understatement. "Has been at the head of engine development since Commander Keen cought up with Mario tech-wise." is a bit closer to the mark. Though he's sharing the limelight with a lot more people these days like Epic, Valve and Crytek. You're right though, when Carmak speaks, they all listen to what he has to say.
It really is a shame that the games tacked on these days tend to be glorified engine demos...
...I got nothing.
> At any rate, it's trendy to bash the PS3 lately. It really is a leap in console capabilities (and I don't even like/buy/use consoles period), but all the negative comments about developers avoiding the PS3 are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. The problem is people viewing it as a hurdle rather than an opportunity.
I'm a PS2 programmer; as "bad" as the PS2 is to program for, the PS3 is FAR worse; getting any sort of decent performance out of the PS2 involves utilizing each processor, and now our job is (at least) 7 times harder on the PS3?! Only a masochist would want to program on that thing. Give me ram, lots of it, and not fragmented into tiny little pieces. And few, but faster processors, then many, and slower. There are only so many tasks that can be parallized.
Even on the XBox, MS's tools were miles ahead of Sony's. Most of Sony's PS2 tools haven't been updated in ~4 years, and you wonder why developers are avoiding the PS3?!
And you have the gall to tell me and others it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, when people, like me, are saying the PS3 is "hard, dam hard" _based on past experience_, when you've never even programmed the PS2? Boy, are you naive!
Maybe _you_ want the "opportunity" of staying up late chasing down DMA bugs, trying to figure out why the hell your streaming engine isn't loading some data fast enough (guess what -- streaming is even MORE troublesome 'cuz we have 4 times the memory to fill, but yet the DVD transfer rate has only increased by 2 on next-gen consoles), trying to debug VU code when one of your models isn't skinning properly, trying to figure out where you're going to fit all the game assets in memory, etc, but I've jumped through enough hurdles, that I don't want or need any more then necessary, because I have better things to do (such as implementing the game), then fighting broken, and limited hardware. The principles are indeed the same, but the devil is in the details, and frankly, we're getting tired of having to spend such insane amounts of time on them.
And yes, I do actually love programming the PS2. The risk/reward ratio is very fulfulling. The XBox (1 or 360) even more so. But people aren't bitching when they are stating facts -- "Programming the PS3 is hard. Period." The risk/reward ratio is out of line compared to other consoles -- and we have to ask "Why? Why does it have to be so difficult?"
Maybe Sony will wise up, and realize that "when you make it -easy- to develop on your system, people will -want- to, and be are more then happy to spend the time expirementing. It's all about minimizing the cycle: code new feature - compile - link - export assets - convert to native format. Make it easier on the developers and we will love you -- make it harder and we will hate it. It's not rocket science, only computer, and social science.
Anyways, I've rambled on long enough.
Cheers