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.
If it truly is a PS3 only problem that is causing this delay, Microsoft should just throw money at Take-Two to get them to release the 360 version early. Would be a big kick to Sony. Sadly, they are probably contractually obligated though...
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...
Yeah, even making *one* difference engine is hard. I heard one guy tried to make one for fifty years ... and failed!
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
This seems to feasible as all the press demos I've heard about have been on the 360.
Here's one I could find on short notice.
I'm not aware of Rockstar ever showing the press the game engine running on a PS3.
Anybody have examples of that?
--Just because you can doesn't mean you should--
Apparently, we take the opinions of analysts as news now? Especially ones that have been wrong in the past? This is the same guy who said:
... We play games to escape." Microsoft's strategy is "absolutely flawed," he said.
"At the end of the day, we don't play games for social interaction
I suppose he has never seen the game of World of Warcraft or any of the other games that allow you to play with your friends.
Seriously Zonk, try to have some news objectivity. I'm sure if you dug around, you could find some analyst on the Sony payroll to say how it was the xbox360's extra content causing the holdup.
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
Title of the article:
"Pachter: PS3 Port Caused GTA IV Delay"
Quoted verbatim from the article (emphasis mine):
"Wedbush Morgan's Michael Pachter says Take-Two management has "stumbled badly for the first time" with the delay of GTA IV, and said that he believes difficulties porting the game to the PlayStation 3 are to blame and that the company's new green light policy appears to be a failure."
The only confusing part is how you missed all that.
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.
"The PS3 is doomed."
:) When the PS3 comes down in price, it will do fine. I may even get it just to play GTA IV, rather than waiting for the PC release as I've always done in the past (thought I hate playing on a console with a controller rather than being able to use my mouse for pwnz0r headshot aiming, but it's decent enough while driving the cars, and the graphics will probably be as good as the PC version too)
Thanks for making me smile, that's the funniest thing I've read all day
which is totally what she said
But I think it's fair to blame this on the PS3, because their stupid architecture is the one that deviated from the standard.
But what is this "standard" that you are talking about? In game consoles, there is no such thing. Each console is simply the standard for that particular console, no more, no less.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
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.
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 [joystiq.com] 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.
Rockstar is having an easier time with the 360 because they already released a game on the 360 (Table Tennis). Any knowledge and code they obtained by writing that game naturally carried over into the next project. The PS3 is uncharted territory, relatively speaking.
I wouldn't be surprised if its easier to pump out a game on the 360 versus the PS3. Microsoft is a software company, Sony is a hardware company. Even amateurs can write code that runs on the 360 with Microsoft's XNA initiative (which I found really easy to use, coming from a web programming / open source background). I'm not saying Sony isn't a good company, or that their system is bad, because I was a big booster of the original Playstation (I believed using CD media and complex controllers was an important revolution that they helped foster), but now the focus is on HD graphics and sound and game complexity. The enhanced hardware handles the graphics and sound, and an easy to use API allows rapid application development so that more complexity can be added to a game in the same amount of time.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
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 :)
If I was making a game of the size and complexity of GTA4, I would at least get some experience on the platforms first, and even if I didnt... id get first party devs in to help. The only one to blame for delays is Rockstars stupidity.
There's a lot more than that to the game, not to mention that clever re-use of textures can go a long way. It's a question of asset management, good recording/compression of voices, etc.
Sure, you can throw a ton of different, high-quality stuff into a game and say "omg we can't fit this onto a disk!" But, well, that "problem" has been tackled by game developers for decades (ever since the first-ever video game probably). You'd have to be clueless yourself to think that *that* is what's delaying the game, honestly.
A dev house complaining about not knowing how to do something doesn't mean it can't be done. Even Blizzard wasn't clever enough to avoid limiting characters to specific servers in WoW. Not that they complained about it, heh.
I like basketball!!1!
If you're going to troll every games post over the last few days, at least log in so we can flame you properly.
See similar posts here, here, and here.
I think we've all got the point that you're really mad about Microsoft not using a larger optical disc format. Your soap box has been stood upon, you don't need to pick it up and bludgeon us to death with your daily rant.
Thanks!
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
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
Additionally the API's are there from Sony, but that doesn't mean they are in a form that makes them easy to use. Because of the underlying asymmetry in the cells, its likely that you can't just use a simple API call to get the same effect that you can with what is essentially a DX API call on the 360.
AKA: its not just take 360 API to do X and change it into PS3 API to do X.
Despite having the new shader and everything else in the 360, it likely sticks to the same DX style API calls and the developer never needs to care what the shader is underneath it all. Just like you can buy a new graphics card for your PC and DX will handle any new changes to shader technology.
"Dealing" with the SPEs is trivial. An API to take a pointer, a byte count, and a destination to trigger a DMA is trivial to write. Having seven processors all working on a portion of the same problem by communicating and computing efficiently and calling those APIs at the appropriate times is the hard part. So far, that hasn't been solved for the general case (by anyone on any machine) and is still done by using gray matter. To paraphrase the old joke... calling an API is easy... knowing when to call it... that's the hard part.
To say it another way... in parallel programming, data partitioning and data flow are the hard parts of the problem to solve. Once you figure out that, the program kind of falls out based on those things. Knowing how to call an API with the right parameters is trivial. There are no efficient automated mechanisms to solve data partitioning and dataflow for the general cases. Some cases are pretty easy and have solutions (and tools to do it for you) like dataflow pipelines. Other than that, people write libraries to solve certain problems like large sparse matrix solvers, large dense matrix solvers, and such.
So... no... I highly doubt Sony has released tools that make writing parallel programs easy for the general case. It doesn't matter whether or not dealing with an SPE and communication is easy or not. Parallelising an AI algorithm, for example, that's the hard part and has to be done before you even touch the API.
Awesome analogy, well done.
And all you PS3 1users can just wait until it's released.
But it will release on xBox360 at the same time as the Wii, so it's not like you'll have long to wait to basejump off of the Space Needle onto the Grey's Anatomy hospital and jump on a skateboard at the new (being built right now) skateboard park that Bill G tried to kill.
Due to the large number of bike paths and pedestrian corridors, there will be a lot more carnage, of course.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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.
If you find yourself making posts like that, it's time to investigate sarcasm.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Okay.. when the PS3 comes down in price.. it will do much better ;) I've heard plenty of people say that they're just waiting for the price to dip lower before they themselves take the plunge. My uncle has one because he's a total Sony fanboy (PS1, PS2, VAIOs, Aibo, Bravia, PSP, now PS3..) and is loaded, and one of my ex workmates has one because we got it as a leaving present (he was one of the people who were gonna wait for the price to drop before getting one), but those with an ounce of sanity are probably waiting until more games come out and the price drops a bit.. :P
which is totally what she said
You have no point to highlight. Releasing API's to make it easier to pass code to each SPE is by far the hard part of any of this.
Multi-threading in general isn't easy. Game developers generally don't do much multi-threading. I remember reading about John Carmack once "leaping forward and putting the audio code into a different thread".
Now, the PS3 has fairly slow processors, just a lot of them. To use 7 threads to get the power out of it is not only difficult, sometimes impossible given an algorithm or game.
Take it to the extreme if it'll help you, think about the following. Instead of 7 SPE's, pretend there are 4,000 SPE's, but each one only runs at 1.00mhz. Well, you've got yourself 4ghz (4,000mhz) of power in theory, good luck programming GTA IV to run on it. It will never happen in any amount of time that a development budget would allow, if it is even possible at all.
The PS3's development model of massive parallelism would of worked better if each core wasn't starved for memory and slow bus bandwidth etc...
Then you could write GTA IV using a single core, or main + a single SPE and get the same performance of the 360, but alas this isn't the case.
It'll probably be 10 years before massively parallelized games are mainstream and developers can write code to optimize for it as easy as writing single threaded code today.
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
Wow the PS3 comes with 3 harddrives standard?
Impressive.
Now, the PS3 has fairly slow processors, just a lot of them. To use 7 threads to get the power out of it is not only difficult, sometimes impossible given an algorithm or game.
What do you mean by slow? The PS3 Cell runs at 3.2GHz for the PowerPC core as do the 7 SPE's. The Xbox360 triple core also runs at 3.2GHz.
As far as writing GTA IV I am not privy to the design principles of the game and I seriously doubt that you are. One of the major issues between the Xbox360 and the PS3 is the Xbox360's lack of hard disk for game usage and also the fact that the PS3 has a much larger media disk (Blu-ray is 25GB single layer and 50GB double layer) compared to the 7GB double layer DVD (yes I was surprised by that to).
It would be interesting if the main issue is not the PS3 but the Xbox360 and I am quite sure if this was the case Microsoft would be bending over backwards to make sure that any issues are ironed out. For GTA IV to come out first on the Xbox360 could be a win for Microsoft but on the other hand when the PS3 one came out and if was significantly better then I am quite sure developers will start to jump ship so it makes a lot of sense to have the release come out for both platforms at the same time and have the play and graphics similar.
The above is conjecture but I can't see "Take Two" doing the dirty on Sony since they have done so well from that company unless (and it would eventually be found out) they were bribed to make the game look bad on the PS3.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Reality check: the developer of the compiler must do that. The developer of the game need not do it unless they need to squeeze a bit more performance out of it. Rockstar are not going to be writing all of GTA4 in hand-crafted PS3 assembly code, the bulk of it will be generic C code. There's a reasonably good chance that they haven't even bothered doing anything special with the Cell-specific magic yet - that's the sort of thing you would do fairly late in the development process, to ramp up the performance a bit more over what the compiler can give you.
We don't know what major problems they are facing, but it's more likely to be related to the video rendering hardware - that's what usually takes most of the time when porting. My bet is that it's got something to do with the fact that the PS3 is OpenGL, while the xbox is directx, since it's always been difficult to go from one to the other.
He said "..that we are aware of." If he isn't aware of it, and he is royalty, then he is correct (unless you know something about him I don't).
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
I don't know what I'm talking about but I don't think you know either?
What sort of response is that?
In fact the GP comments were pretty close to on the mark. The single general purpose core used in the PS3 is almost identical to the one in the Xbox 360, however the Xbox 360 happens to have three of them. So simply using a single core on the PS3 isn't going to bring it up to xbox 360 levels as the PS3's graphics chip is also somewhat less powerful then the Xbox 360's. The idea was that a lot of the graphics processing work would be handled by the SPEs taking some of the burden off of the GPU.
The usual criticism I see is that the SPEs are so specialized that it's hard to do anything but specific tasks with them and all of your thread management and scheduling has to take up cycles on the one general purpose core that might be the only one capable of performing other tasks too. Having enough bandwith to feed all 7 cores at once could become problematic rather fast too.
The overall point is that data storage, while being nice to have, is a rather old problem that developers already know how to deal with and in the end isn't nearly as difficult to tackle when compared to having to develop for a incredibly complex over-engineered architecture that stress massive parallelism, when games in the past haven't even set up to handle two cores at once, let alone seven. The Xbox 360 on the other hand with three general purpose cores and a more powerful graphics chip is much easier to program for and push the hardware farther.