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Why Is It So Difficult To Allow Cross-Platform Play?
cookiej writes "I just got the most recent version of the Madden franchise ('10) for the PS3. Can somebody explain to me why EA has separate networks for the different platforms, only allowing players to compete with people using the same console? Back in the day, there were large discrepancies between the consoles, but these days it seems like the Xbox and the PS3 are at least near the same level. After so many releases for this franchise, they've got to have a fairly standardized protocol for networking; it seems arbitrary not to let them compete. Or am I just missing something obvious? Is it just a matter of Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network not working together?"
... sell you one copy of a game when they can potentially sell you two or three?
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
That was most likely the decision of MS and Sony respectively. EA is evil, but you can't blame them for everything!
I foresee one platform out-performing the other platform on a game-play basis. One may be more comfortable, decreasing the cognitive dissonance associated with translating mental (re)actions to hand actions.
Health Freedom is almost as popular as Freedom itself.
Why would you want to allow your competitor console to play with yours. If one claims their network is superior to the others, that's a selling point and by allowing the other consoles to connect makes your "superior" network play a moot point.
No. They just want to make more money.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
For the same reason console players can't play against PC players.
If they allowed a direct comparison between different platforms, people would realize more rapidly which is better and which is worse.
I'd love to see a match of TF2 between a bunch of console players vs. PC players. It'd be such a joke. :)
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
MS and Sony (and Nintendo) want you to use their respective online frameworks. They obviously aren't compatible or interoperable (different name/nick/whatever namespaces, different friends lists, different registration procedure, etc).
You can't have cross-platform online interoperation unless EA uses an entirely custom online framework that is identical among platforms. The console manufacturers wouldn't be too happy about that, and neither would gamers (who want to register once and maintain one friends list for all games, not once for each vendor or game).
The only sane solution would require heavy cooperation between all console vendors and standardizing quite a bit of the online experience, but that's never going to happen (at least not this generation).
I actually read something about this the other day... Sony doesnt care about it. They are actually allowing cross platform with the upcoming FFXIV MMORPG on Windows/PS3. I can't say I agree or disagree with MS's reasoning, but it has to do with Quality Control on XBOX360. Back in the PS2 and XBOX days, all servers were managed by the developer. After a few years, servers shut down, and people still continue to buy the game only to find out that when they try to go online, it doesnt work anymore. Since XBL users pay 50 bucks per year, MS has to offer quality control that all online games will be able to be played online. Since with a PC and PS3 the network access is free, SONY doesnt owe anything to their users.
Even if Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo were to come to an agreement about common online elements tomorrow, it'd still be nontrivial to merge all the player data, handle duplicate usernames, handle comparisons of records between different platforms and the such. Even if we disregard the political aspects, the technical aspects are daunting, and likely to grow even more so as these services continue to grow independently of one another.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
but I do know that the keyboard+mouse guys would _destroy_ the gamepad people in any sort of FPS.
also emacs is better than vi.
Each console has its own magic connectivity protocols - encryption, profiles, NAT, matchmaking, friends, invites, messaging, leaderboards, voice chat, and so on. Generally, you (as a console programmer) can't see the whole internet; you can only see connections which you get from the specific console net APIs, which are filtered to only let through things coming from signed compatible consoles. Behind the scenes these protocols are supa-secret to prevent people from being able to sneak packets through (to prevent cheating among other things).
There was one or two games that allowed play between PC/360/PS3 (I forget which) but the publisher ran their own game servers and completely avoided PSN/XBL.
I believe all 3 networks (PSN/XBL/Nintendo) have in their agreements that you will use their network exclusively if you use it at all. Thus it's use theirs and have no cross-platform network play or run your own servers. Of course it's always cheaper to use the game networks.
It's how it's implemented. The time it takes one machine to calculate different parts of the game code is different between the two machines. In the end it becomes rather difficult to keep the consoles in sync because of the differing rates (nobody wants to have one player catch the ball on one machine while on the other it's a miss because he wasn't close enough). From what I know they actually just send the inputs across and each console calculates the output on their own and the coders are responsible for keeping the AI deterministic so this is possible. Turns out the developers really don't care about the money as much as you'd like to think. The execs do, developers, not so much.
For the two systems mentioned (Xbox 360 and PS3), they're both using variants on the PowerPC architecture. While I can't be sure, I believe both chips use IEEE floating point numbers (outside of Crays, most chips nowadays at least have the option of using IEEE floating point), so the errors should be identical. I think the bigger problem is that the networking protocol for these games is usually licensed from the console maker, using the console maker's servers for matchmaking and the like, and it's considered to be less of a hassle to program against two different APIs than it is to write a single network protocol from scratch and maintain the servers required to support it.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
We ps3 owners dont want to listen to squeky voice pre-teenagers ruining the game all the time.
We do not want them. Please god, let them stay on that other console, the one that they can afford.
The x86 PC uses IEEE floating point as well... but while that defines the internal results, it doesn't mean you'll get the same results at a macro level.
Depending on how long a variable stays at 80-bit precision before being truncated back to 32-bit, you're going to get different amounts of error creeping in. The length of this duration is often decided by the compiler, which differs between all consoles and the PC.
Sony's infrastructure is basically open. Yes, it has some commonalities between programs, but in the end it is the game developer that has control of the network for their game. Ms took the opposite route and went with a closed network where they control almost everything. So, unless they make a special deal (ala what's been done with Final Fantasy XI), cross platform isn't allowed. For example, Live has it's own user account with all the capabilities to talk, block, etc with other live users. However, there really is nothing in place to deal with a non-live user which is obviously a necessity if you want to actually play with them.
PS3s are big endian machines.
Xbox 360s are little endian.
Q.E.D They can't talk to each other.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
360 and PS3 are both PowerPC derivatives but they're not FPU identical (esp when you add in the SPUs!), which makes cross console MP impossible for games that rely on a deterministic simulation w/ input passing (most RTS, sports, and fighting games). Client/server games are a possibility, though as the previous poster sez most games rely on native matchmaking and NAT traversal services which are definitely not cross platform. And even if all that were true, Xbox Live is a walled garden. Games need special permission if they want to reach outside of Live and talk to the real internets.
IEEE rounding is different between x86 and powerpc. x86 CPUs use an 80 bit internal representation. Those bits remain as long as the data resides in a register. Also the powerPC floating point offers a fused multiply accumulate operation (one instruction can do x+y*z) that can produce different rounding results. Knowing x86 they probably have it but its addition varies between architectures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiply-accumulate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
I'll put my 2 cents on the economics of the matter, rather than "vendor lock-in" or whatever. The platform gaming networks provide frameworks for the game developers plus the operational infrastructure (servers, server-side software, bandwidth, ops staff, etc.) and distributes that cost across all of the games on the platform that utilize it. This is likely to be far more economical for the publisher, as compared to coding and testing the client and server side code and paying the capital and upkeep costs of the network infrastructure. Also, the players may benefit further in that I suspect platform-wide backends will probably have a longer supported lifespan than game-specific backends. Time will tell.
All current consoles use PowerPC. On a PC, you can use SSE if you want true single or double precision operations. But either way, the real fix is to make your game engine robust enough to tolerate minute differences due to rounding. It's not that hard. If you're comparing floating-point values for equality or relying on "dead reckoning" with no compensation to sync up online, then you're already doing it wrong.
Could PowerPC Macs and windows PCs share the same network with their games?
The only issue I see is that one of the two would need to do some endian swapping, but on modern CPU's that difference would be neglicable.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Two replies to that post and both are discussing the gaming implications? Honestly I was explaining x86 vs powerpc, nothing more or less.
I'll agree floating point error accumulations should be easy to compensate for. But its not a problem I've ever had to work on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
You do know that an entire genre of games relies on a networking method that you're calling "wrong"?
How many thousand+ unit RTS games have you written?
p.s. while both consoles use the powerpc the xbox has a fused dot product operation (a=b*c+d*e). Thats one floating point variance I can think of, I'm sure there are others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
It won't matter, the server decides where objects are and how they move at each time interval, not the clients. Any slight rounding errors during the client prediction will be fixed on the next server heartbeat.
The Xbox and Xbox 360 use encryption implemented in the kernel as part of the Xbox Live matchmaking. There are many reasons for this but the main ones are security to help stop people altering the packets and cheating. This encryption is a requirement mandated by Microsoft before a title can be published. The encryption does mean the other consoles cannot decode those packets, unless a lot of effort is spent to reverse engineer the encryption and Xbox Live protocols. I have a feeling that if a publisher/developer did reverse engineer the Live encryption and protocols and used that to get Sony and Xbox consoles to join the same game then Microsoft would probably pull the plug on that title.
During development of titles I've had the Microsoft and Sony consoles happily joining the same games, but during development the encryption can be turned off. The PC build also had no problems joining the network session. This is because such titles tend to have the same network code and communicate the same data (before it gets encrypted).
Martin Piper
Owner - ReplicaNet and RNLobby
In these cases, you can always do with a centralized dedicated server that hosts all the calculations. This way all clients will have the exact same data.
You do realize that controllers (mouse+keyboard), more customizable settings, and more processing power all would still slant it towards the people playing on the pc, right?
You completely forget about the cheating.
It is incredibly easy to cheat on a PC. I have written my own cheats, and find it very easy to do so for each new game that comes out. I started to do it because I was curious about how programs used memory. I don't go exploit it that much, in fact, I rarely play. But I do like beating the system. And from what I have observed while watching other people play, there are definitely a ton of cheaters out there. Some cover their gameplay to make it harder to see, but most do not. As long as you don't make your hack public, you can probably go undetected for years... as I have done with every PC game I have been interested in.
It is unlikely that there could be any kind of agreement on a common online elements.
We already know how MS handles an ISO standard like OXML.
While you could see and shoot at any other player in the game, you can't hit them and they can not hit you.
Because MS wants you to run out of ammo and buy more.
I've worked on a game(http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/60210) that we could play across consoles. MS made us disallow cross-console play.
A monopoly is one of those things there can really only be one of.
The fact that MS, Sony and Microsoft are viciously competing for video game market share (see, e.g. the recent price drops) is a sign of a fairly healthy and competitive market.
because it costs money, money that doesn't translate into sales.
A lot like linux native support is perceived.
I record my sleeptalking
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/11/20/
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
If you're using floating point numbers in the game logic of a networked RTS you're doing it wrong.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Floating point should be sent as a string, and, if the game programmers, or their bosses, weren't such idiots, they'd have solved this years ago. Still pisses me off that the Mac and Windows machines could go head-to-head in Star raft because they used native integer representations on both the X86 and PPC. That's trivial, too. Network byte ( hton*()/ntoh*() ) order matches the PPC, but it would not have been hard, just intelligent, to have htoSC*() and SCtoh*() macros to map integers on both to the more popular X86 platform.
#include
double strtod(const char *nptr, char **endptr);
#define _XOPEN_SOURCE 600 /* or #define _ISOC99_SOURCE */
#include
float strtof(const char *nptr, char **endptr);
long double strtold(const char *nptr, char **endptr);
I guess nobody seemed to remember Final Fantasy XI. You can play this on PS2, Xbox 360 and the PC. It uses their own network and you don't need Xbox Live to play.
In short, yes this is possible.
I'm sure there are some architectural reasons why games don't talk, but just think if TF2 was cross platform online play. How bad would XBOX 360 players do vs people with keyboard and mouse. I think they would be at a HUGE disadvantage because they don't have anywhere close to the same control scheme. This destroys all balance to the game. Granted you can buy an adaptor to use keyboard and mouse on the 360, but i don't think that more than the top 2% of hardcore games go so far as to buy a $100 add on to do it.
The implementation of cross platform wouldn't be out of the realms of possibility.
However, cross platform integration would definitely be a TRC/TCR/lotcheck breaker. Failing them means no platform holder approval, which means your game isn't coming out until you fix the non-compliance, and your development budget is pissed down the drain if you don't fix it.
Rare even managed it with a DS 360 implementation for Viva Pinata - however I think despite their 'late in the day' talk, that the real reason is it was shot down fairly quickly (I'd guess probably by Nintendo rather than MSFT...)
http://kotaku.com/392055/rare-mated-viva-pinata-ds-and-360
Baka Drew
I used to work at EA and once had a conversation with a guy who wrote network code for an EA sports title. Basically, instead of proper servers controlling game state and updating clients, everyone sent their controller infomation and each client worked out where everything was independently.
I said "but since difference processors calculate floating point values differently, you'll never be able to play against different consoles"
I guess they haven't fixed it yet.... a lot of those titles are rehashed each year under great pressure and so have very old legacy code. I heard FIFA was still written in C (not C++) and that there was still a few bits of genesis code in the hockey game. They wouldn't have time to scrap it and start again, so likely this problem will be around for a while.
It's the same reason why Final Fantasy XIV is "exclusive" to PS3 initially, because Sony allow you game alongside players from other platforms, which in this case is the PC version. Microsoft policy is not to allow this, although there have been exceptions like Final Fantasy XI and Shadowrun.
Besides, do you really want 13 year old Xbox and PS3 owners with headsets in the same game together? It would instantly set a world record for the most times the word "gay" was said in a single minute.
It is called anti-features. The "Windows 7 Sins" website mentioned it. I love that term. When it costs more for a vendor to remove a feature they sort of got for free - natural effect of smart design - yet they remove it anyway for political, administrative, and marketing reasons - it is an anti-feature. Manually and permanently reducing amount of concurrent TCP/IP connections available in Windows NT Workstation versus Windows NT Server (which does not cap the limit) despite both versions sharing the same code - antifeature. Limiting amount of applications that can be open simultaneously on one Windows version versus not doing so in another, when both share the same code again - antifeature. Filtering game client list based on platform, despite protocol potentially capable of providing inter-platform gameplay - antifeature. Everything that is destined for the consumer goes through marketing before it leaves the vendor. It is the fear of not making enough money.
It can be done and has been done. Final Fantasy XI allows cross-platform play between PS2, Xbox 360 and PC. In fact, it breaks pretty much every supposed rule in the book, by not only allowing cross-platform play, but by 100% requiring console peripherals (hard disks for the PS2 and 360, though the 360 one is almost ubiquitous these days), and virtually requiring the use of a keyboard and mouse (which both . Despite all of this, it was the largest non-Korean MMO around prior to the World of Warcraft launch and maintains a large player-base today.
I think the message from this is that while console-manufacturers will resist cross-platform multiplayer releases, a strong 3rd party publisher (and Square-Enix have the kind of strength that can make or break a platform - just ask Nintendo about their experience with the N64) can force it through if they really want.
It does have disadvantages, though, when the PC is one of those platforms. PC technology has moved on a hell of a lot since the FFXI launch and the game feels awfully unfriendly on the PC these days, as the requirement to maintain cross-platform compatibility prevents the game from incorporating sensible UI and graphical changes on the scale that games like WoW can afford to make.
a bunch of my friends and I have been playing starcraft again recently...it's so freaking nostalgic.
some play on a mac and some on windows machines.
"The Xbox and Xbox 360 use encryption implemented in the kernel as part of the Xbox Live matchmaking."
Is there any reason you couldn't just use your own servers, and skip the whole XBox Live system, and send unencrypted packets? Perhaps XBox doesn't provide developers with any APIs to access the network driver directly, so that you *must* use Live to do networking? Someone mentioned that Final Fantaxy XI on XBox doesn't use the Live server, but connects directly to Square's servers?
Shadowrun was a game developed for cross platform play between the xbox 360 and pc?
Anyone know who dominates online?
I've worked on both consoles and it's basically just the API, everything is provided for you in a particular way and that is different depending on the system. Essentially while you are still stuffing packets there are fundemental differences between those packets, and each network API hooks up to a particular type of server. You could probably develop a bridge or actually write your own networking system, but when you are a game developer you don't want to piss off the only company that can give you a license (one of those ways is giving the users opportunity to buy the same game with all the same features on a different system).
Every time I try to join a Team Fortress 2 (PC game) server without the latest version, my client fails to pass server consistency checks and I can't play. In other words, if you have TF2 1.5.1 and the server is running TF 1.5.2, you can't play. (Granted, this isn't really a problem, since Steam can be set to auto-update, and after a version of the game is obsolete, it is almost impossible to obtain. Actually, you're more likely to encounter the problem of updating your client and then being unable to connect to any servers because none of the server owners have updated yet.) If minute engine differences on the PC platform can break a client's ability to connect to a server, think about how hard it must be for consoles using different hardware to work on compatible engines.
One of the major problems at the moment for the PS3 is a great deal of hackers/cheats ruining the game experience.
If they get caught, the only thing that happens is that they lose their account, and have to sign up for a new one,
Whereas, look at the Xbox360. People have to pay for an online subscription, and as such are more reluctant to start cheating, due to the loss of money,
Yeah, you can cut your losses and only buy them a month at a time, but it still stops most of the hackers ect..
The PSN and XBL are exclusive, you can only connect to other PSN and XBL users, respectively. It doesn't even have to do with the Floating Point stuff mentioned above. It is quite simply vendor lockin.
Each console speaks a different language and cannot talk to each other unassisted. Xbox speaks Low Microsoftian, Xbox 360 High, Playstation 3 speaks Smugtanic, and the Wii uses sign language. The difficulty lies in translation. Human translators are nowhere near fast enough, and current automated translation is just not up to snuff. So we'll have to wait for the state of the art to improve before we can have cross platform play, or else pass a law that all consoles must speak English.
You can't blame them, but for a different reason. The seeds of the devastation were planted in 1999, when the congressional Democrats forced Fannie Mae and Freddi Mac to lower their lending standards — suddenly, millions of people, who hitherto would not qualify for mortgage, were able to obtain one. The same supply of the real estate now faced a spiked demand, which in our highly efficient capitalist economy resulted in spike of both prices and building activity to meet the demand.
Unfortunately, helping the poor qualify for mortgage does not help them pay it off. That the Democrats were able to blame Republicans (whose only fault was in not fighting against it hard enough) for this is a spectacular feat of mind-manipulation...
What about the much-maligned easing of banking regulations? Nope, that's not, what caused the problem — even if it exacerbated it. Would you blame a powerful engine for an accident, when the car slams into a log lying across the highway? Sure, if it weren't running at high speed, the driver could've stopped safely without hitting the obstruction. But the blame is solidly on those, who placed the log across the road, not on the car-maker, that gave you the speedy vehicle...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
A Mortal Kombat/Street Fighter type beat em up is a lot more difficult to play on PC then on Consoles.
Only because apart from Capcom's Street Fighter IV, you have to run it in an emulator. Control isn't as much of an issue because there are USB joysticks and USB gamepads. Sure, they don't come bundled with the PC, but neither do gamepads for players 2-4 on the consoles.
The Wii should be the console of choice for FPS
Mice allow turning because they can move horizontally without bounds. The Wii Remote, on the other hand, stops seeing the sensor bar once the player has pointed it off-screen. What would you bind to "turn camera"? And what to "walk sideways"?
I think it isn't, mainly because FPS fans tend to be absolute graphic whores.
That's true, not only for "graphic" meaning scene complexity but also for "graphic" meaning intensity of violence.
Of course, I'm able to buy a gamepad for my computer, but what's stopping them from buying a keyboard/mouse for the Xbox?
Xbox had no standard USB port. Xbox 360 has three, but with the notable exception of Final Fantasy XI, Microsoft refuses to sign any title that uses the keyboard to input anything but text.
WoW
The guy who programs the code for the X-Box isn't the same guy that programs for the Playstation?
Sorry, what was the question again?
Remember that even nowadays most game programmers are unable to easily implement a 'replay' in their games.
*The* way to write and network a game is to only focus on players inputs, not on 'game state'. "floating-point CPU differences" are excuses made by clueless programmers.
To see how it *should* be done, look at how AoE did it, or look at how, say, Blizzard's Warcraft III allows networking between Mac and PCs and easy (and tiny) replay (the replay files are tiny, for they only ever store player inputs).
This is something 99% of today's game programmers are unable to understand.
There is no valid technical reason to prevent it: the dudes talking about floating-point differences non-sense and being modded +5 insightful are part of the problem: they're clueless. The only reasons *should* be political.
When Gamasutra had an article about how AoE used player input replication for networking and replays (which is *the* only way to do it), it was like a shockwave for those who read that article with an openmind. But this techinque was in production in games from the late 80's for sure. Yet 99% of today's game programmers are still unable to understand it. First they don't understand it (because they have their mind stuck in a "persist/transmit the full game state" mindset) then even if they understand it they don't think it's useful (because they're reluctant to admit the way they've been doing it since they code is bogus). They don't realize debugging becomes way easier, they don't realize networking becomes a non-issue, they don't realize varying framerates aren't an issue anymore either, etc.
Don't even get me started on the amateurness level of the programmers developing games for the mobile devices. Most of them cannot easily implement a replay, and hence cannot easily debug their game nor network them, nor adapt to different frame rates.
The knowledge is out there, the technique works for any game but the biggest MMORPG. And, no, Madden from TFA isn't a f***ink MMORPG.
A world of amateurness.
"By the same logic you can't blame the bankers who ruined the world economy"
You can't blame them, but for a different reason. The seeds of the devastation were planted in 1999 [nytimes.com], when the congressional Democrats forced Fannie Mae and Freddi Mac to lower their lending standards -- suddenly, millions of people, who hitherto would not qualify for mortgage, were able to obtain one. The same supply of the real estate now faced a spiked demand, which in our highly efficient capitalist economy resulted in spike of both prices and building activity to meet the demand.
Unfortunately, helping the poor qualify for mortgage does not help them pay it off. That the Democrats were able to blame Republicans [ldsmag.com] (whose only fault was in not fighting against it hard enough) for this is a spectacular feat of mind-manipulation...
What about the much-maligned easing of banking regulations? Nope, that's not, what caused the problem -- even if it exacerbated it. Would you blame a powerful engine for an accident, when the car slams into a log lying across the highway? Sure, if it weren't running at high speed, the driver could've stopped safely without hitting the obstruction. But the blame is solidly on those, who placed the log across the road, not on the car-maker, that gave you the speedy vehicle...
I just wanted to say, excellent summary & analogy...and spot-on, even if it's off-topic for the discussion. I remember screaming at the TV back in 1999 when this was put in place; "Why are you putting poor people who can't freaking afford a house onto a near-certain path to default & bankruptcy!?!?".
This was so easy to see coming that it makes you start to take Glenn Beck & his theories on a planned collapse and reformation of the US as a socialist/fascist regime seriously, and I don't *want* to.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
you know, when I think about it, cross platform for the masses doesn't really seem viable, however if games had the server software in game, and you created a game, making a system for like an X-Box to manually access a PS3's Game server through typing in a manual IP address doesn't actually feel all that crazy... just my thought though, I'm really not sure about the difference in intricacies of console game coding.
Why keep buying games you're not satisfied with?
They are two entirely different services.
To establish cross platform support, you would need some kind of intermediary. The service itself has anti-cheating built into it, so allowing non-Live people access to games run over Live is not going to happen- it would open up a HUGE security hole.
WHOOSH!
For one, Xbox Live is sort of a pre-packaged networking solution. There are many issues of consistency across the network, when you're using it you're buying into an environment where everyone is expected to be within the same gaming experience with the same method of communication and a standard means of identifying users and organizing their status within the community. You're buying into this closed gaming community when you're a user and you're buying into it when you purchase a developer kit and send a game to Microsoft to be published. You don't just choose Xbox Live... when you release a Microsoft Xbox 360 game, you are releasing a Microsoft branded software product and it must meet certain requirements, so you play with Microsoft's networks.
Playstation Network didn't exist last time I worked on a PS3 game, but I believe their networking is a bit more open and broad. A current developer might correct me on this. Network gaming on PS3 is the same as on PC, really, you do a lot more to set up your own service. If it's still the way it was when I worked on it, there's really not a *good* reason PS3's and PC's can't speak, for instance, besides issues of balance with the different control models and the common questions of cheating.
That's at least how I understand it. I think the Wii is similar to the 360 in that its networks are a tightly controlled walled garden.
The upcoming game Syberia III is supposed to have PC and PS3 users interact: "One of the main innovative points of the game will be its use of collaborate online gaming between players on both PC and PS3"
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
1. Greed. Lock-in artificially separates you from your friends, forcing you to buy what they buy if you want to play. Pay-to-play online things like GFWL and LIVE! bleed the customer of money.
2. Control. Microsoft has fucked their console by fucking up the standards. You have to use a specially-signed Microsoft bluetooth stack. The PS3 does not and adheres to standards.
3. Because they are clueless. No explanation needed for this one.
So what we have here is a group of companies that are willing to screw with your social interactions with your friends. Doesn't sound like a company you want to do business with, does it?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
But the hardware companies, especially MS won't. Can you imagine MS allowing those using the competition's system with it's free internet service being allowed to play against paying subscribers? At worst the graphics on the PS3 and 360 are the same so Madden on he PS3 and 360 are effectively the same.
Why would anyone buy the system that makes you pay to get online with no web browser, charges through the roof for wifi, doesn't give you an HDMI cable, doesn't play both DVD and blu-ray movies, charges you for add-ons that are free on the PC and PS3 and charges you extortionate amounts for proprietary hard-drive add-ons?
There is no way in hell EA would have a chance at making 360 and PS3 games interoperable.
I'm posting this anonymously, but here's an example from the requirements of one a platform maker (names have been removed):
"Because the [CONSOLE] system is proprietary, connections between [CONSOLE] platforms and non-
[CONSOLE] platforms (including, but not limited to, PCs, Macs, cell phones, [CONSOLE], [CONSOLE], [CONSOLE], [CONSOLE], [CONSOLE], and iPods) are not allowed for security and customer-satisfaction reasons."
That's directly out of their requirements guidelines. Without following those guidelines, you can't get a license to release the game on whatever console.
They're trying to keep it a level playing field. :-)
For example, I play Unreal Tournament 3 on a PC. Its available for consoles too but the PC network at least is kept separate.
If you had a console and they mixed console and PC on the same network, PC players would keep taking you to the cleaners because they have a natural advantage of faster hardware and better controllers (mouse gives massively better instantaneous aim than thumbstick controllers) it would be unfair and no fun to all console players.
PC players would have a blast though
Seriously? Fucking insightful? I hate seeing this same meme bandied about.
There were multiple actions by the government that worked together with a firm belief that housing prices would continue to rise to cause this situation. Deregulation by one party. Broadening lending standards by another. Bankers who found ways to make money that while not illegal, required a firm willful ignorance of potential future calamity.
No one group is responsible for this, and to try and claim otherwise shows a complete misunderstanding of the situation.
Seriously? Fucking insightful? I hate seeing this same meme bandied about.
There were multiple actions by the government that worked together with a firm belief that housing prices would continue to rise to cause this situation. Deregulation by one party. Broadening lending standards by another. Bankers who found ways to make money that while not illegal, required a firm willful ignorance of potential future calamity.
No one group is responsible for this, and to try and claim otherwise shows a complete misunderstanding of the situation.
You are correct that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are solely responsible, and nowhere did I claim or imply that. Both parties are at fault. The fault is with corrupt politicians seeking to increase their own wealth & power, and attempting to use the public's money to buy votes. I believe there are also other forces at work using these failings of both sides to advance their own agenda to "fundamentally change America", to quote Obama.
I'm very scared of precisely *what* that "change" that these forces seek will mean to our Republic and our Freedom.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Just out of interest which government legislation forced banks throughout the world to bundle crappy mortgages up with good ones and sell them on?
Just out of interest which government legislation forced banks throughout the world to bundle crappy mortgages up with good ones and sell them on?
As I understand it, US banks & mortgage lenders along with Freddie & Fannie bundled these "toxic" mortgages into debt-instruments that they then sold & traded. Many financial institutions in other countries got caught holding some of that debt, as well as holding other US debt-instruments whose value collapsed when the US banks & mortgage lenders got in trouble from all the bad mortgage paper they still held.
The economy is global. When the US financial market suffers, so do other countries' financial markets. Just as when the financial markets in, for example, Hong Kong or the UK suffer, so does the US financial market, among others.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
How about yourself.
I think it can be because of serialization of game objects, also called marshalling (useful for checkpoint/replay, and sometimes the whole multiplayer sync). It's pretty hard to do in C++, and even harder to make it platform-agnostic: the packing of data structures is different, and if you transmit that to the other platform, you have to code (template) the conversion.
And do this for all libraries and middleware in your game, because those never have the same serialization system, if any. And it's very difficult to standardize (boost is not used on consoles, for instance).
So.. in most cases it won't work, but the managers know better, so it won't even be tried !
Assuming it uses the x87 floating point unit, which Intel are trying to deprecate... Modern x86 processors support SSE instructions for floating point math, which will outperform the x87 equivalents.
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But those are rare third party components
The only way a Windows-compatible USB gamepad is "rare" is that the maker of a popular Windows-compatible USB gamepad owns a video game development company called Rare Ltd.
a KB and mouse is ubiquitous and available on every PC.
And a single gamepad is ubiquitous and available on every console. So why aren't console games limited to a single gamepad in the same way that most PC games are limited to a single keyboard+mouse?
Given the nature of fighting games there should be no surprise that they dont sell on PC's, they really are designed for gamepads and machines with multiple input devices.
No console has come with two gamepads since the Super NES era.
So here's my question: For which platform should a microISV develop a game designed for multiple input devices?
I understand that part. I'm just not sure how the sub-prime lending law was the cause of it. After all, damaging though it must have been to the US economy, it wouldn't have had such a dramatic global effect without those toxic financial instruments, and, as far as I understand it, those were a completely private sector invention that decent oversight would have prevented.
I doubt though the global financial crisis is as simple as either of us think though and keeping a very close eye on all the greedy fools would be in everyone's interests.
Just as a point as well: the UK doesn't have any such law and yet our financial institutions were doing very stupid things like sub-prime mortgages, easy to obtain debt consolidation loans, 125% mortgages etc etc. What we did have though was a similar relaxing of bank governance allowing them to do stupid risky things.
This is, what I was referring to with my "car analogy". There is nothing any more wrong with those private sector inventions, then with a 300 HP engine. Using the fast engine is only a problem, when the road is bad — the faster you go, the harder it is to stop.
Those inventions were all predicated on (almost all) mortgages being solid — just as you would expect the read to be clear of obstacles, when you enter a turn at 45MPh. The artificially high rate of people unable to keep up with their payments was unexpected...
Sure enough, both parties and multiple people are/were at fault. But the primary culprits are the Congressional Democrats of the 1999. The Republicans' fault is in not recognizing the problem as fatally flawed and to fight it more. McCain, for example, did try to raise an alarm in 2005, but no one was payed attention and he failed to sound grave enough and attract enough attention.
Both parties agree, that high rates of home ownership is good for the country — sentiment derived straight from Cato The Elder's "tillers of the soil are the best citizens and the bravest soldiers". But it takes a Democrat to simply give a house to the poor, regardless of whether they can afford it, as if that immediately transforms them into a responsible home-owner, that makes a good citizen.
It started with attempts to give mortgages with no money down (the poor, went the argument, are solvent, they just can't afford the down-payment). This devastated entire communities (some of them hitherto well off), when the poor moved in, then defaulted and walked away from the properties, in which they had no equity.
That was, I think, 70ies-80ies. In the 90ies, that folly was avoided, but still — the people, who could not afford them were given mortgages... They usually did have some money invested (down-payments, however small), which delayed the bubble-bursting.
In the end, to expand on my off-topicness further, it all comes down to whether the Government can help people — without hurting them (or others) more — even if everybody's intentions are perfectly clean and noble. And I — and the rest of the Libertarians — say, it can not. Nor is it legally allowed to despite multiple precedents:
FDR had to reshuffle the Supreme Court, before he was able to push his "New Deal" agenda, that is today the law of the land, through... But legality aside, it is simply a stupid thing to do...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
And I'll say to you again, there is no such law in the UK and yet the banks were quite happy to engage in similar stupid practices, assuming that the market would always go up, which is a totally moronic assumption. Nobody forced our banks to lend to people who couldn't afford it - they fell over themselves to do it. So the GLOBAL financial crisis was not down to the Democrats' law but to poor oversight in general.
When developing for PC, develop for the KB and mouse first
What library do you recommend for reading distinct actions from multiple keyboards and multiple mice under Windows? For example, how can a program distinguish a space bar press on player 1's keyboard from a space bar press on player 2's keyboard?
A mouse and keyboard is more configurable then a console controller.
"Press a button or a key for each of the following actions in order: Move left, Move right, Jump/climb, Crouch/climb down, Normal attack, Special attack, Shield." The player can choose to use a gamepad or a keyboard. I don't necessarily depend on a gamepad being present unless more than one player wants to join a game.
Did you mean that no console had had more then one controller since the Super NES era.
The first production run of the Super NES, which included Super Mario World as a pack-in, was the last major console that came with a controller for each of its two ports. All consoles since have come with only one controller and one or more empty ports. For example, a Wii console can use four Wii Remotes but comes with only one. So whether you're on the PC or on a console, you still have to buy something extra for more than one person.
I suspect you meant to say that all consoles since the super NES came with more then two controller ports
And almost every PC has six such ports: one for the keyboard, one for the mouse, one for the printer, and one for each of three gamepads. Hubs add even more. But each PC or console comes with enough controllers for one person: one keyboard and mouse for a PC, or one gamepad for a console. The other ports have nothing connected to them.
If you are making a beat em up, then target the consoles exclusively, Wii and Xbox360.
Allow me to rephrase: How can a small company produce a first title in a genre for which you would recommend that a developer "target the consoles exclusively"? The console makers want to see established companies with full-time employees in an office, not startups whose employees telecommute. (Source) What's the best way to get around "Concept declined; your company isn't big enough"?
UK banks bought plenty of "toxic" financial paper from the US banks. Also, the America's real estate bubble fueled similar exuberance elsewhere — simply by example. I'm not saying, they are faultless, just that they aren't the main culprits here — they were doing, what they were supposed to, and it would've worked, had it not been for the government's meddling.
At least, UK's Barkleys survived well enough to take over America's Lehman Brothers and remain solvent without the government's support (and all of the attached strings)...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Humans now face tremendous new selection pressure: birth control
Failing to defeat birth control is every bit as selective as being eaten by a lion. Look at the traits that allow people to defeat birth control, and you can predict the future of humanity. Here are the most likely:
1. high hormone levels in the woman (arms race with birth control pills)
2. stupidity, impulsiveness, and lack of concern for long-term consequences
3. an actual desire for children rather than sex
All are being strongly selected for, but it is #3 that delivers the ultimate crushing defeat to birth control. The first two traits are only favored in the absense of the third; in people with a passionate desire to make kids there will be selection against stupidity.
You can thus predict a temporary drop in typical intelligence, and a long-term increase in family size. Ultimately we return to the age-old situation of huge families, with the resulting resource consumption problems and early death.
Limiting amount of applications that can be open simultaneously on one Windows version versus not doing so in another, when both share the same code again - antifeature.
Limiting the number of applications that can be opened on a system with very limited resources can make a great deal of sense when the market is the novice user without technical support:
If you have more than one activity running, you can switch to it by clicking on the appropriate icon in the ring.
The size of the ring segment that an activity occupies is intended to represent its overall memory usage, but that feature does not work yet. When the ring fills up, no additional activities may be launched until some resources are freed up. In today's XO laptops, only a few activities can be started at the same time, and when memory is exhausted, one of them will die suddenly without any warning. Note: it is possible that work or play that is in progress may be lost. Switching Between Activities
How do you know it would have worked? You can't say that government-forced lending to people who couldn't afford mortgages in America was a huge mistake however when it was done in the UK it was just the market working as it should be. Let's be sensible here. This whole mess was a combination of bad government and bad corporate governance, not just the lefties trying to undermine capitalism.
Do you think there never would have been another recession? By the way Barclays survived thanks to a major injection of cash from the Abu Dhabi royal family which I'm sure has plenty of strings attached too.
This whole mess was a combination of bad government and bad corporate governance, not just the lefties trying to undermine capitalism.
This as a whole is true. However, in the US, without the government interference that mandated the creation of so much toxic mortgage paper, there could not have been a collapse of such magnitude, given the vast majority of mortgage lenders' loan practices prior to the interference by government.
Once the government forced them to create so much risky paper, it would be only natural that they'd try to sell-off as much as they could to whomever they could get to buy it to mitigate their risks.
It just happened that they couldn't sell off enough to prevent themselves from cratering, but they *did* manage to convince enough foreign banks and financial institutions t buy enough to inflict heavy losses on them as well.
The government interference was essential to creating such a disaster. Without it there might have been a temporary downturn in the mortgage finance market, but nothing approaching the size and severity we've experienced.
To think that these same people in government...like Barney Frank & Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the greedy, short-sighted, power-hungry incompetents in Congress...could end up running US health care is frightening to ponder.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
It has nothing to do with hardware compatibility, it's all about the network. In the PS2, it was pretty much up to the developer to create whatever "online" ability a game would have. In one version of Tony Hawk, the devs actually encoded drivers for a handful of USB ethernet adapters so that you could get online and play without buying the official PS2 harddrive/ethernet add-on. That is no longer the case, in both the PS3 and X360, the manufacturers have created proprietary networks. Some X360 games can be cross-platform compatible with PC games because MS allows it, and it's "possible but improbable" that could also happen with the PS3, but it's very unlikely that MS and Sony will ever agree to allow cross-communication and interpretation between the 2 consoles. Are there no other slashdot'rs that remember Quake 3? If you kept a copy of Quake 3 patched to version 1.06n, it used the same network protocol as the retail release of Quake 3 for the Dreamcast system, and you could get on GameSpy with your PC and beat the ever-loving crap out of Dreamcast players. That was definitely not a matter of hardware compatibility, it was all about using the same network. Incidentally, that was also the empirical evidence for "end of discussion" re: gamepad vs mouse/keyboard in an FPS. Assuming equal base skill and hardware performance, Gamepad user = horrid death at the hands of the PC player, every time.