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.
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"
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 :)
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
"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.
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.