Slashdot Mirror
PS3 Issues Caused GTA IV Delay?
Dr. Eggman writes "According to statements made by Michael Pachter on Gamasutra, 'The Rockstar team had difficulty in building an exceptionally complicated game for the PS3, and failed to recognize how far away from completion the game truly was until recently.' The article goes on to describe an agreement between Rockstar and Sony not to favor the 360 by releasing their version first, necessitating the delay on the 360 as well. Pachter's comments are interesting, because all Take-Two has been willing to say is that 'technological issues' were causing the hold-up. "
Oh i guess its to be expected. Nowhere in the article does it blame the PS3 for the delays. It specifically states BOTH systems have their technological issues that they need to work through. In typical Slashdot fashion, it is turned into an anti-ps3 article. Way to be unbiased in the news reporting once again.
As the first article states, it's only the uninformed opinion of a financial analyst that PS3 development difficulties were responsible for the delay. Of course, the financial analyst also believes the PS3 version is a port of the 360 version, when in fact the PS3 has always been the lead platform for the game. Shows how much his opinion is worth.
Rockstar says they have challenges on both platforms (likely Cell development on the PS3 and stuffing everything onto a DVD-9 on the 360). Nothing to see here, folks...
But I think it's fair to blame this on the PS3, because their stupid architecture is the one that deviated from the standard.
Who said there was a "standard" gaming architecture? What part of the PS3 is not standard? It has a processor, a motherboard, a hard drive (hell, the 360 doesn't even adhere to that standard), RAM, a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray disc drive. I know, it's the wireless card that's throwing Rockstar off!
Want to dive in deeper? You have to deal with threading in the cell, core duo (2), and of course the PowerPC. The only difference is the division of the work to the cells, and Sony has released software to help deal with that. The 360 has that newfangled Unified Shader pipeline versus the PS3's traditional pixel/vertex pipeline.
So what's exactly not standard? The fact that you have those mysterious cells that no one knows what to do with? It's all API'd out at this point. Sony released help for developers at the GDC six months ago. So I don't think it's really a good argument to say that it's such a craaaazy hard platform to program for anymore. There's help there if they want this.
Even Pachter said, this was a failure of management to figure out that it was taking so long. They should have known this weeks ago. I personally was surprised to find out that they were going to be able to develop this game so quickly - look at MGS and FFXIII, they're taking much longer.
Are you serious? The 360 has no problem running Oblivion. Squeezing what little more (less?) content they'd have for GTA IV on there would in no way significantly delay anything unless they are rubbish at managing their assets compared to other dev houses.
Given the engine GTA IV is being developed on is the same as a 360 exclusive Rockstar made, the issue is most likely on the PS3 side.
I like basketball!!1!
Actually it doesn't have one processor. It has seven of them that the developer must use in tandem in order to achieve any level of real performance. The Cell of the PS3 is like having a V8 engine without a timing belt. Yes, it can be damned fast, but only if you can manage to get each SPU processing chunks of data and completing their jobs in a timely manner without having any of the "luxuries" of synchronization features that every other flavor of SMP, including that in the XBox 360, have had since SMP first came into existence. What's worse is that the SPUs don't speak the same language as the CPU so you can't just take a normal task and thread it like you can on a normal SMP system; each task has to be built specifically to be handled by the SPU.
So yes, the PS3 introduces a number of unique challenges. The only other console system which was similarly difficult to program was the PS2 which was basically the same infrastructure except instead of 7 SPUs it had 2, and developers still complained about how massively difficult it was to work with.
Actually... to extend your simile, it's like an 8-cylinder (not necessarily a 'V') where two of the cylinders are of one size and run on standard gasoline (PPE) and the others (SPE) run on diesel and are a different size and crank length (to reflect the differences in capabilities) and there's no timing belt or single crank shaft or valves :) It's up to the programmers to keep the cylinders fed at the right times and synchronize all of them properly and in ways such that the power can be applied efficiently to the transmission :)
25/50 gig BluRay drive standard
20/60/80 gig harddrive standard
360
3.5/7 gig last gen DVD drive
No standard harddrive You forgot one:
PS3
No demo of GTA 4 ever shown in public, or private that we are aware of.
360
Demo shown at E3 using the engine developed on the 360.
-- toolie
It's easy to forget that R* has never developed a game the size of GTA III or GTA IV from scratch. They used Renderware for their previous "big" GTAs. GTA IV is the first "modern" GTA to be developed from scratch. Sure, they used an early version of the engine in Table Tennis, but something like GTA IV is in an entirely differen league.
My guess is that they simply underestimated what it would take to polish a game like GTA IV to a shippable version.
Who is this Michael Pachter and why does his opinion matter? He doesn't work for Take-Two nor is he quoting a Take-Two representitive. It's just his opinion that the PS3 is to blame for the GTA IV delay. Hardly news worthy.
While this may be true, I also believe fitting GTA4 on an Xbox360 DVD9 might also be an issue.