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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?"
Posting Anonymously for this. There is no software reason why the two consoles don't share games. In development as an online engineer for another title (I don't work on Madden so I can't say for sure for them) I've actually done some game play tests between development consoles, it helps work out some uninitialized values and corner cases that cause online crashes when dealing with sloppy programming. But development consoles can work in non-secure mode, retail consoles can't. As developers we have to send everything out as secure. That means that a PS3 can't talk directly to a XBox360. The consoles can't even talk directly to the servers, instead they have to go through gateways that decrypts the data. The gateways are located centrally, and you can bet that Sony's gateway isn't going to talk to Microsoft's gateway (And I'm leaving a hell of a lot out here), so that means for one console to talk to another console it has to hit a central server, adding three machines, and a lot of hops/latency to the mix.
The gimped up networking layer is one of the reasons I'm glad I got out of online development, and into a much less stressful area. Everything, and I mean everything, can @#$@ up online, and its up to the online engineers to fix it. Someone forgets to initialize a variable in the game play engine, a bug only appears online, its up to online to find it, going though code that they haven't designed, written or looked at before. I've even had a mistimed animation cause a disconnect on me. That makes online very conservative, and you could say very religious as in 'please god don't let it @#&$ up on my watch'. The typical Online engineer is only about 5 hours from burn out, they aren't going to suggest xbox 360 - PS3 gaming. Besides I'm pretty sure that both MS and Sony have their lawyers on the case that you can't interpenetrate between the two. But also Online Engineers want to help make a great game. And they would love to add in cross platform play if they could, and if they had the men to do it, don't get me wrong about it, but online has never been a focus in most sports games, and are constantly over capacity.
I admit I didn't read over my own comments very thoroughly. I meant to compare everything using (more or less) equivalent GPU hardware (obviously can't do the same for CPU, unfortunately). What I was answering is the question about how would a developer get a 100% boost going from a hardware-agnostic engine to a hardware-specific engine (or 50% loss in the reverse direction).
That being said, all my statistics are based on actual profiles -- you really can't beat seeing a 5% performance drop by deliberately adding one single line to invalidate a GPU cache state in the middle of rendering your scene.
In addition, I would argue that the CPU (on the PS3) coupled with the architecture is actually more flexible than that of a PC. Have you heard of a PC game developer explicitly writing the framebuffer back to main memory in the middle of a rendering just so they can do post processing on the CPU? And that's the type of post processing that you can't get until DX11 hits (scatter, arbitrary ordered writes, etc...). Furthermore, I'm not sure what why you look down on tricks. Isn't any modern day real-time rendering just based on "tricks?" Isn't rasterization itself a trick? Unless you think all the games out there are solving full global illumination in real time, otherwise I think you can classify every one of them as a collection of tricks for all sorts of specific situations. And to answer your last point, post-processing isn't exactly free.
"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.