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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 the decision to use an asymmetric CPU by Sony was a wrong one.
This is just my perception/opinion, but it sounds more like Carmac is getting old and lazy than any fundamental flaw with Sony's choice in processor. What we need is a new generation of developers to embrace the domain of parallel processing so that it can begin to realize its potential. I'm tired of the foot dragging and bellyaching about how different/difficult it is to multithread. Companies such as the previously mentioned RapidMind and PeakStream have made significant advancements in making multithreading more accessible, and if developers would put more effort into thinking in parallel rather than complaining about a changing environment, we'd be a lot farther along than we are now.
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have you seen VB? It's totally English-US-American to the max. People in other countries are all like "wtf are they doing it this way for?"
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He makes impressive engines. I'd say when you're talking pure development, then what he says carries a lot of weight.
I sure as hell wouldn't take his advice on game design though. He repeats the same tired formulas over and over. DOOM was cool in the 90's, but these days you gotta be a bit more creative.
http://www.ps3forums.com/showthread.php?t=52467
This thread has been one of the funniest things I've ever seen. All the PS3 fanboys are bashing Carmack for his comments about Cell, despite the fact that it's quite clear none of them program at all, let alone program on asymmetric CPUs.
Hilarity ensues as people who would have been lauding Carmack to the skies if they'd seen only his gripes about the 360 CPU attempt to prove that he's totally irrelevant and afraid of learning about technology.
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No, Carmak is NOT using DX9. He's using an Xbox 360 - that's something completely different. Granted, the API looks a lot like Direct3D 9, but it's not actually compatible, and it exposes 100% of the hardware features directly with minimal (virtually zero) driver overhead, no stupid driver bugs, no emulation, no possibility of missing features...
On a PC, OpenGL and Direct3D 9 are almost exactly equivalent. On a modern engine, 70% of the code is (or could be, if you put a little effort into the design) API-independent. Things like scene traversal, resource management, batching, loading and generating geometry and so on. In the API-specific part, you have a small piece of code that does useful work, and in an ideal world this is all you'd need. It simply manages resources for you, so you can (for example) tell it to load a mesh onto the video card and it does it, or give it a triangle mesh and tell it to draw it.
The larger part is dealing will all kinds of stupid garbage. For example, in Direct3D 9 you can lose any data you have stored in VRAM at any time, so you have to detect this condition, re-load (or regenerate) all the data, and fix it before you can do any more rendering. It's not difficult, but it's more work. In OpenGL (and on games consoles) you do not need to do this. With OpenGL, you need to detect and load appropriate extensions, which you don't have to do as much in Direct3D 9 (you do have caps bits, which serve much the same function). So in the OpenGL code, you might need a couple of extra paths to deal with hardware / drivers that don't support specific extensions. You could have four separate paths for things like render-to-texture, or several different texture formats for floating point textures, you might have to deal with drivers that don't support S3TC compression, and so on. You've got to deal with the operating system, other software components you're using, and the whole thing's a huge mess.
That entire part is unnecessary on a console. You have one piece of hardware, which maps directly to the available API, with 100% of all features exposed, including things that PC APIs deliberately prevent you from doing. It makes writing code so much simpler - you write some basic, low-level rendering code which interacts directly with the hardware, then get on with the useful task of writing the game engine. You never have to worry about whether or not you've hit a slow path (happens in OpenGL a lot) or a bug (happens in Direct3D a lot, and OpenGL if you're using Intel's rather crappy drivers) in the driver, because the drivers don't actually do anything more than queueing command packets for sumbission to the video hardware.
The same applies to the Xbox, but also to the GameCube, the Wii, the Dreamcast, and to a lesser extent the PS2 (because you have to write all rendering code in VU assembly to do anything useful).
I think its more of a total pipeline issue. When you look at software development tools coming from a largely US based company (MS for example) you've got a defined pipeline for development process. You've got IDE project templates. You've got command line tools that you can batch process files on as part of your build process. It's just more integrated. Looking at the solutions that come from Sony or Nintendo (though Nintendo is way better at this than Sony) you tend to get a loose collection of tools that aren't really integrated. This means you have to create all of the glue in-between each layer. That takes time and engineering effort. Sometimes this means greater flexibility, but again, it's all about how much time do you want to spend for your flexibility?
Honestly, developers don't want to re-create the wheel each time for their build processes, but these kinds of things end up forcing that on them. The first chance they have to jettison it, they're going to.
- Sighuh?
Zelda is a strange exeption. Some how all the games all feel the same, and look the ame on the surface, yet are still somehow very different and compelling to play. (if any one can explain it I would be very impressed).
DOOM 3 and Quake 4 (though Q4 is a bit better in my mind) really just feel like rehashes of the same ol', same ol', just with much better graphics. Better things have been done in the FPS genre, and those 2 just have not caught up. Quake Wars looks like it will be the answer however (admitedly it isn't actualy beign developed by ID, I tihnk).
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
Re Zelda:
All plots are old and tired. Fantasy seldom has any sort of different plot conflict than Lord of the Rings...Man vs. Evil. But the execution is what separates LotR from "Wizards of the Coast" licensed D&D spinoff novels.
Same is true with Zelda...The plot remains the same, but the details are always fresh and creative. It's the same with games like "Gears of War"...How tired is that formula? But the game is a great game!
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
It is not so hard to explain. The story schema is the same in every game, but the game itself is different. This happens in almost every game, all of them are follow one of the possible story lines (i.e.: boy meets girl), Zelda follows (more or less) the Campbell's hero cycle. The stories share other points (names, the nature of tri-force, and some other details), but the development is always different. You can see this clearly when comparing Ocarina of Time with Wind Waker, same story schema, (very) different game.
Doom (Doom 1 & 2, not 3) is still played. Check out, for example, http://www.zdaemon.org/. A DooM port converted to more modern netcode, but the oldschool DM and co-op gameplay is practically identical. (New stuff such as CTF is also available, but many people don't even play that.)
So Doom is still around, and still presumably "cool". The only reason why "you gotta be a bit more creative" is if you want to sell new games to people instead of the old games that they already have, or could buy cheaply. And since the gameplay of the old ones is good enough to make people very happy, the only reason you can persuade them to buy a new game is putting your creativity into the engine, not the gameplay.