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Activision Wants Consoles To Be Replaced By PCs
thsoundman writes with this excerpt from thegamersblog:
"We live in a world where we have multiple platforms for gaming: PC, PS3, 360, Wii, etc. Each platform has varying amounts of power when it comes to playing games. Activision, one of the leading cross-platform publishers, wishes to move away from the 'walled gardens' set by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. ... [Activision CEO Bobby] Kotick’s solution is to turn to the PC, where it can set its own model for pricing — not unlike what Blizzard has done with World of Warcraft and Battle.net. Kotick stated that Activision would 'very aggressively' support the likes of HP and Dell in any attempt at making an easy 'plug-and-play' PC that would hook up directly to the TV."
"We want an open, standard platform which is much easier than having five which are not compatible,"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7052420.stm
Bullshit. PC games provide ways to reduce the load for older PCs. I could play COD4 in my P4 with a two year old $75 graphics card. Now that I have a quadcore and a HD5770 (total PC price: $450) I play it with much higher resolution, particles, etc.
People are not forced to upgrade significantly more regularly than with consoles. They simply have the option to do so, and enjoy better graphics if they choose to.
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- a quaternion based animation blending and transitioning engine (and more importantly the tools to author the animation networks)
- Inverse Kinematics, aim/orient/point constraints
- 1000's of animation takes (our last title used approx 3000 animations per character)
- A rigid body representation for the physics engine, including joint limit set ups etc.
- A way to blend and transition back and forth between animation and physics (simple ragdolls aren't good enough anymore)
- The geometry & textures need to be authored by an artist(s)
- Vertex & Pixel Shader to render the character.
- Particle systems to generate smoke near the characters feet.
- A lodding system where number of bones in a character, geometry detail, etc can by changed dynamically.
- This data needs to hook into the collision, AI, and networking systems.
All of that has to run on the PS3, which means you need to use the SPE's (and the code most be heavily vectorised to make use of the altivec instruction set). This means all of that body of work has to be split up into lots of 256Kb chunks (for both code and data) so that you can schedule them to run on the SPEs. Finally you get to the really easy bit, rendering the data. That volume of work would take a team of 10 programmers about 3 or 4 years to complete.
Now lets compare that to how you'd do that for a 2D NES/SNES/Gameboy game:
- get an artist to draw some sprites.
- blit correct sprite to screen.
That should take an experienced programmer no less than half a day to write that. Art assets are certainly increasing in complexity, but the code complexity has exploded to another level completely.
because publishers are more inclined to say "she'll be right, we can patch it after release."
All games have to go through extensive QA testing, both in house, at the publishers, and at microsoft/sony/nintendo before the game gets gold status ready for release. This process alone can take anywhere from 6 months to 3 years. Unfortunately despite game teams best efforts, we can't catch all of the bugs, so patching a game after release has become a necessity.... I can assure all game teams want to get all bugs before a game is released. If you don't, you get bad reviews, and your sales suffer....
Modern video cards already have TV out hardware; DVI -> HDMI adapters come in the box of nearly ever video card I've seen in the past 2 years.
The impression that I get from reading comments to other PC vs. console articles is that gamers tend to play games on secondary TVs, not the main living room TV, because someone's watching a show like American Idol on the main living room TV when they want to play. These secondary TVs are often $10 thrift store CRT SDTVs that don't take HDMI. However, they do take VGA through a $40 adapter cable that produces composite video and S-Video.
I can see you are a game programmer then.
Now lets compare that to how you'd do that for a 2D NES/SNES/Gameboy game:
- get an artist to draw some sprites.
- blit correct sprite to screen.
This might interest you then. I suggest you do some research on those platforms. The 'GPU' these consoles used are far from what you see these days. There is no blitting, you setup a bunch of memory and registers during VBlank and the GPU does the wonder of rendering for you, the whole screen. You don't say "sprite N at X,Y" every frame, no you setup the sprite once and then it keeps getting drawn there. Which is the easy part.
All special effects come from tricks, poking the right registers while the screen is being drawn, but in some cases this is only allowed during HBlank.
Also, don't forget that you only have an assembler, no high level languages. And limited amounts of debugging.