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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."
He didn't make Daikatana. You're thinking John Romero.
s.clementmonkey@sympatico.ca, remove the 'monkey'.
Nope, Carmack was just responsible for Doom... Doom II... Quake... Quake III... Quake III... Doom III...
You're after Romero's head. And not the one in map30.
that's John Romero you dumb twat
I think the decision to use an asymmetric CPU by Sony was a wrong one.
Oooh,*burn*!
At least no one can say that he doesn't know what he's talking about. It's kind of hard to disprove that man's intellect when it comes to software development.
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.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I know this is Slashdot, and not reading the FA is somewhat expected, but your own "evidence"? :)
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?"
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Most americans who see VB also say "wtf are they doing it this way for?".
hahahahaha you're right :-P but we say it for a different reason
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Which was exactly the point originally being made - the guy knows what he's talking about when it comes to software development. The claim wasn't that he has a flawless history producing ground-breaking games...
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
Good luck writing a major application using nothing but Boolean logic.
The rest of us use programming languages - and those languages have a syntax, and that syntax can certainly be affected by cultural factors.
Advanced users are users too!
"their tools are more based on Asian design and logic"?
What a bizarre concept. When I worked for a software company in Japan, the only way that culture intruded into software development (aside from an organizational structure that makes Dilbert's seem positively effective) was the fact that programmers who could used English manuals. Japanese manuals and other reference/instructional materials were so vague and information-poor that the language barrier was easier for my co-workers to overcome than reading materials in their native tongue!
I will grant you that Asians (East Asians, at least) seem much more comfortable with interfaces that we find incredibly cluttered. But that's not programming as such.
And with a funny accent.
No reason to lie.
Indeed, considering all the amount of critism he had for Direct X many years ago.
Speaking of which, can anyone point me to a link or other resource that talk about, or actually has the so-called debates between Carmack and Bill Gates of OpenGL and Direct X? Last time I tried Google with this, I couldn't find too much useful information.
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.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
The rest of us use programming languages - and those languages have a syntax, and that syntax can certainly be affected by cultural factors.
Uh, so does Boolean logic. Ever read Frege's Begriffsschrift? I'm guessing "no". There are dozens of syntaxes for propositional and quantificational logic.
After all, I am strangely colored.
And this would have nothing to do with a little visit by MS a couple of years ago, right?
How exactly is the XBox 2 ("360") going to run OpenGL code, Carmacks API of choice?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
oremor nhoj em llik tsum uoy emag eht niw ot
The enemies of Democracy are
I happen to know that he uses OpenGL. Quake still works on Linux, even. This is odd, because Nintendo and Sony use OGL, which he (to my knowledge) does extreamly well. People say DirectX (used on XboX too) is easier and looks better but have you seen Quake4? If he could port his shooters to the Wii, that'd be awesome. With that Linux stuff, I would have though that by now he and MS would hate each other...
Um... Computer hardware is made up of a number of components using digital circuits, which in turn use logic gates, which are a circuit representation of Boolean Logic.
Besides, what do you think if() and while() do in programs? How about == and !=? <, <=, >, and >= are just a series of boolean comparisons.
That isn't to say you can write an application using just boolean logic, as you'd need math in there at some point...
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
I wonder if they would do Doom for Wii so that I can really jump around and smash my wiimote into things it's never smashed into before.
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
I'd be surprised if they even ask him when it comes to gameplay design. He's the lead programmer, not the game designer. Maybe that seems a bit strange since all other famous people in game development (well, after the NES) are the designers (Sid Meier, Shigeru Miyamoto, Hideo Kojima, Will Wright, ...) so people aren't used to the idea of a famous person not being in charge of "his" games.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Nope. You can build the math out of boolean logic.
I dont see anything which should have anything to do with asian logic in Sonys computer design, they just cram in the latest CPU suitable for their hdtv gear not thinking how good it is at general purpose computing or or not which is in fact really needed instead of getting in an overblown dsp, which just is usable for physics calculations...
I am well aware of what computer hardware is made from, and I never claimed it was impossible to write applications using nothing but boolean logic.
If you feel you have to write a program using nothing but logic gates to prove a statement I never made wrong, go right ahead.
But as I said in my original comment, the rest of us will use high level languages.
BTW, if and while in themselves are not "boolean logic", they are jumps that rely on a boolean condition.
Boolean logic has no concept of jumps, because it is not a programming language, it is a form of maths.
Advanced users are users too!
Ok, its been a few years since I studied this stuff, but thats surely not true, is it? You'd need more than pure boolean logic to handle arithmetic. You'd need at least bit-shifting?
VB is not about logic, or intelligence.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
Nope, bit-shifting is also done with boolean logic. Or to put it another way, logic gates on the CPU.
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?
. 2) Boolean logic is a system. It has certain, limited, capabilities which do not include anything like the concept of jumps. You can build other systems, that do include jumps, out of boolean logic but that still doesn't mean that if and while are boolean constructs. They aren't.
most chose to develop for the slightly less powerful and far more developer-friendly PlayStation.
That is utter bullshit. The saturn was much better at 2D whereas the PSone totally trounced it in 3D. And 95% of the games were 3D.
It just pains me to see possible innovation being killed because it's difficult!!! Is the PS2 tough to develop for, heck yes...PS3...even harder...remember when this was a good thing? The 360 is great, easy, straight forward and BORING!!!!!! Don't get me wrong, I like writing code for the thing, because it makes my job darn easy and I pretty much know what I am going to get on the back end.
...
You're an idiot!!!
I developed games for years before I 'burnt out' on the deadlines and schedule
The fact is no one wants to program for hardware that is 'interesting and challenging' they want to produce software which is 'interesting and challenging'. It is very difficult to produce an advanced 3d engine on a piece of hardware when you're fighting for adequate performance and as you add complexity you're constantly fighting with the hardware to get stable performance.
Essentially, an architecture which is 'difficult' to program for make creating high performance applications like building a sand castle in the rain.
He added, "I've been pulling for Microsoft..." - I never thought I'd see a sentence start from Carmack with that.
Actually, he's been on Microsoft's side ever since Quake in 1996 or so. David Kushner's book, Masters of Doom talks just a little about their partnership. After Doom II's major success, Microsoft saw the chance to push id to support it's Windows platform. The original Quake was released for DOS, but later a WinQuake version was released that worked using everything from DirectX except Direct3D. Carmack has released for Windows first ever since.
Carmack isn't necessarily tied to a specific platform or operating system, but he never was anti-Microsoft. He was more of a Free Software advocate than anything else.
IIRC there were three main problems with the PS2 to start with, the Emotion Engine and Graphics Synthesizer were poorly documented, the tools Sony provided were inadequate, and the system had several bottlenecks. Early in the life of the PS2 developers were blindly programming on the PS2 without a real understanding of the system, and when they were getting awful performance they didn't even have tools which allowed their code to be profiled so they didn't know why their performance was so bad. The result was that middleware developers started providing tool packages with PS2 support (which contained most of the tools and documentation Sony should have had when they released their first dev-kits) and developers who had 'survived' initial development started sharing what they learned with other developers.
The fact that the problem was mostly about information and tools (rather than it being a serious architecture problem) meant that developers could rapidly adapt to the system when provided the proper tools and documentation; look at some Madden Screenshots to see how much improvement there was
Madden 2001
Madden 2002
Madden 2003
Now, I could be wrong, but from my understanding Carmack is implying that the PS3 has architecture problem which will not (easily) be fixed by middleware or developer experience; what this (could) mean is that the majority of developers will not be able to get decent performance out of the PS3.
You can probably get away with an "oddball" console architecture as long as the development pain is swamped by the reward in the market. When I was writing games (years ago) I used to say, "No one cares how much the developers suffer making a title." And it's true, to a point.
That point is reached when your multi-million-dollar budget is being blown up by a system that is quite, quite difficult to extract performance from. Schedule slips cost money, they always have, but now the slips are *real* money.
For what gain? If the oddball architecture isn't dramatically different from the non-oddball competitors', the oddball one loses out.
I look at the SMP on the 360 and think, "Cool, I can do that." I look at the DMA-driven dwarves and busted-up memory heirarchy of the Cell and think, "Thank God I don't have to program that thing." If you care to throw yourself into that particular meat-grinder then I wish you all the best, you can *have* my lunch there, life is too short to burn yourself out on a broken architecture for what appears to be very little real gain.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is insufficiently documented.
Game developers I know say the same thing. In fact they go further in claiming that the PS3 has serious GPU issues causing them to treat the PS3 inferior to the Xbox360 when it comes to programming for the lowest common denominator.
Yeah, yeah, I truly do remember! When was that again... Oh, yeah, it was, uhm... never!
Why in the world would it be a good thing that the PS3 is hard to program?
You can represent anything a computer can do using true and false. It'll just be extremely time consuming and error prone.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
There are actually quite a few Nintendo fanboys working in MS, since for years they were the "home team" when it came to video games before the Xbox came around. There are still a lot of folks working in MGS that respect what Nintendo has done (myself included). Sony, not so much, due to their increasing arrogance.
-- jchenx
Ease of development is definately a pro, but from what I understand, the PS2 was a pain to develop for. I've heard horror stories of development teams using Internet forums to do shop talk, because the official documentation was just utterly useless.
However, when you're the market leader by far, as the PS2 undoubtedly was, game companies will do almost anything to make sure their titles come out on that console.
-- jchenx
You're a fool if you think developers only want "the most powerful box". There's a lot more to the industry, heck software programming in general, than power. Also, you completely ignore the fact that if you were right, then you'd have developers flocking to the Xbox, since it was the most powerful console last generation.
-- jchenx
Sony's decision to use asymetic processors, and NOT PROVIDE ENOUGH DEVELOPER SUPPORT was a bad decision. If the technology could be used easily, it is some pretty cool stuff!
What do you mean can? That's how a computer works. It's the only way a computer works. Everything is either on or off, true or false, 1 or 0. Everything we do with a computer is done by manipulating those 1s and 0s. We stand on the shoulders of giants when we write programs. Someone did have to do all that extremely time-consuming and error-prone stuff so that we can write in languages that are much easier to understand and a lot less time-consuming.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Actually, if you look back at archives of his .plan, he always liked Direct X. It was Direct 3D that he thought was juvenile. Over the years the Direct 3D programming model has moved very close to that which is used by OpenGL, so he may reconsider even that.
No kidding? Wow I thought all those programs just up and wrote themselves. I said "can" because you "can" do it that way. Jesus christ, go get some counseling.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
Uh the submitter that reposted the whole article inserted the text about CmrTaco into the story copy. And I'm the troll for noticing it?
Sometimes my arms bend back.
I'll re-iterate; its *many, many* years since I studied this stuff, but here goes. What you've said is strictly true - you can represent anything on a computer using 1 & 0. This is the basis of the Turing machine. However to be able to use that you also need to add other operations; L,R,read,write.
That's only because the CPU has abstracted the boolean logic for you.
http://outcampaign.org/
Because your prejudice against Microsoft means, in your mind at least, that they can never, ever do anything good..? Fantastic. The reason you're experiencing the cognitive dissonance is fanboyism :)
You implied that there was a choice. You said it can be done that way, but there are consequences, as if there is some other way to do it. Don't get all pissy because you got corrected.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Not all machines are binary, chief.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
We've been discussing Windows and PCs, so yes, all of them are binary. Windows doesn't run on any other kind of machine. Name one non-binary computer in common use today. Any that have been developed are simply for experimental purposes and are little more than curiosities. The only practical non-binary machines in development are quantum computers, and they are still very much in their infancy and don't do anything very useful yet.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I know this is a gaming mag, but sweet Jesus couldn't they hire a decent photographer? Up the nose shots, unbounced flash, red-eye, shooting subjects with their eyes closed, subjects slouched, distracting elements in the frame... the only thing the photographer didn't do wrong was take a picture of their thumb!
Actually this is not asian or european/american, it is more along the lines of ide approach or toolset approach. You can see similar things in Unix/vs Windows or Java vs. .Net.
You just get a huge integration due to Microsoft on the XBox because the dev tools people from Microsoft in a huge part are former Borland people (Anders HJelfsberg being the head of .Net).
This has nothing to do with asian philosopy!
interesting and challenging development tools vs. interesting and challenging games...
I think that is what this whole argument comes down to. Those that earn a living developing on the PSx don't want an interesting and challenging environment to work in. If the tools are *that* hard to work with, it's going to ultimately affect game quality until developers figure out the machine. More and more games could turn out wonky, buggy, and just plain substandard by player's expectations - not because of poor game design, but because that design couldn't be effectively implemented given the PS3's challenging tools and the available time developers have to work.
If you're bread and butter aren't tied into churning out software, interesting and challenging development tools can be quite fun; a kind of hacking challenge to see what you can get your system to do. That's where I am with GBA programming. It's fun, but thankfully I make my money on other platforms.