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. "
RTFA. The first paragraph of the article:
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.
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
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...
I'm reading the exact sentence you quoted, but I'm getting a different vibe from it.
The quote says that the difficulty was specifically in porting the environment. Not "the PS3 is hard to develop for," or "we developed this in parallel on the 360 and PS3 and the PS3 version has been harder to do." Just that they developed it on one, and porting it is more difficult than they expected.
I'm happy to blame Sony for a ton of stuff, but it's too early to lay this at their feet.
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.
The GP was claiming that the article never blamed the PS3 for a delay, presenting this as evidence of Zonk's bias. This simply isn't true, as the quote I provided proves. You can make the argument that Sony shouldn't be blamed for the delay, but it's obvious that they are being blamed for the delay (at least in the article).
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
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.
Considering the RAGE engine is initially developed for the 360 (Table Tennis), its a fair assumption to make.
Also, Rockstar isnt the only ones having problems. Its widely known that EA sports games on PS3 are currently running at half the frame rate of the 360 version. Also, every Unreal Engine 3 based game on the PS3 this year has had major technical issues (slowdowns, glitches). Its not like its the PS3's fault. 360 was a year ahead of them, and developers are more familiar with it.
Take Two really cant afford this slip. They are in big trouble as it is, and this might sink them (or force them to sell out to another company). They should have gone the traditional route of timed exclusive on a platform (either PS3 or 360). They would have been able to get a nice chunk of change from the console maker plus been able to completely focus on that single platform. And in 6 months they could port it to all the other systems.
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 :)
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.