Bethesda: We Can't Make Dawnguard Work On the PS3

the reason by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-31 02:24 · Score: 5, Funny

The rootkit takes up too much disk space on the drive.

Re:the reason by Kalriath · 2012-08-31 12:15 · Score: 2

Actually, no it can't. Downloadable content requires storage media. Either a hard drive, or a memory card in the controller. If you have no storage device, the 360 would not let you download Dawnguard (or anything else for that matter).

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For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".

Is it Bethesda or the PS3? by 0racle · 2012-08-31 02:25 · Score: 5, Insightful

One way to answer that question is to ask are any other companies having problems with large DLC on the PS3?

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"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."

Re:Is it Bethesda or the PS3? by Cinder6 · 2012-08-31 02:53 · Score: 3, Interesting

Well, Bethesda themselves released Shivering Isles on the PS3, and that was a rather large piece of DLC.
As someone who owns the PS3 version of Skyrim (wasn't paying attention and ordered it instead of the PC version, said "screw it, I'm impatient" and played it instead of returning it, and now I'm regretting it more and more each day), I can't tell you if Dawnguard is more complex than Shivering Isles.
I spoke with Gamestop a couple weeks ago, and they offered $23 for Skyrim. Right now, they have a +50% trade-in bonus going on, making the trade-in value $34.50. I'm tempted to take advantage of it, and then watch Cheapshark for deals on the PC version of Skyrim. I've seen it for $30-$35 in the past.

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If you can't convince them, convict them.
Re:Is it Bethesda or the PS3? by ildon · 2012-08-31 03:07 · Score: 3, Informative

At one point during the Steam summer sale, Skyrim was ~$30. I'd expect a similar (or better) price drop on Steam either during Black Friday or just after Christmas.
Re:Is it Bethesda or the PS3? by justforgetme · 2012-08-31 03:18 · Score: 2

I haven't heard of anything like that before. Could it be that Microsoft just lined those guys' pockets? Everybody know that the Xbox division has been given unrestricted playroom in order to get exclusivity...

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-- no sig today
Re:Is it Bethesda or the PS3? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2012-08-31 03:19 · Score: 4, Informative

I suspect that Shivering Isles isn't a terribly useful comparison. It's fairly large, in terms of quests and art assets and whatnot; but it is only modestly more demanding than any other part of Oblivion in terms of other resources.
For the PC versions, the minimum-recommended specs for Oblivion GoTY(Oblivion+all official expansions) are fairly modest:
Processor: 2 Ghz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent
Memory: 512 MB
Graphics: 128 MB Direct3D compatible video card and DirectX 9.0 compatible driver
Hard Drive: 4.6 GB
The minimum recommendation for Skyrim, no DLC, is substantially higher:
Processor: Dual Core 2.0GHz or equivalent processor
Memory: 2GB System RAM
Hard Disk Space: 6GB free HDD Space
Video Card: Direct X 9.0c compliant video card with 512 MB of RAM
And, if you actually want it to look nice and play properly at higher resolutions, the recommendation is double that on both system and GPU RAM, and a punchier processor.
Obviously, direct comparisons are a bit tricky, since the Cell is sort of an oddball; but the PS3 only has 512 MB of RAM total, which must be a nasty constraint to work under(and it seems likely that Bethesda is having some trouble coping, even on the PC side, they cut the various battles in the civil war questline right down to the bone, with barely a handful of soldiers on each side and magic fast-disappearing corpses, in order to keep things running).
I am a trifle surprised that Bethesda can't get a gimped version of Dawnguard running on the PS3(ie. no improvements to poly counts, texture quality, environmental detail, etc. over the original release; but with the new items and quests and arrow-crafting); but I'm rather more surprised that Skyrim ever managed to be released for the PS3 at all...
Re:Is it Bethesda or the PS3? by drkich · 2012-08-31 03:25 · Score: 2

Steam sale on July 15, $29.79 USD

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Mid-Eastern Pennsylvania Gaming Convention
Re:Is it Bethesda or the PS3? by Simply+Curious · 2012-08-31 04:52 · Score: 5, Insightful

Mods. Bethesda has one of the best user communities for making mods. Any Bethesda game should only ever be purchased for the PC because the mods will extend and improve the game dramatically.

"Oh, there's a game-breaking bug for this quest?" There's a mod for it, faster than the official patch.
"I find the levelling system to be annoying." There's a mod for it.
"I want a new guild, with new questlines, and new NPCs across the world." There's a mod for it.
"I want a complete world conversion with a brand new storyline, balanced gameplay, and an in-depth world." There's a mod for it.
"I want to ride a pink zebra while casting spells that will turn villagers into anthropomorphic wombats." There's a mod for it.
Re:Is it Bethesda or the PS3? by VGPowerlord · 2012-08-31 05:13 · Score: 3, Informative

No, but it could be due to RAM or processor issues.
Both the PS3 and Xbox 360 have roughly 512MB RAM.
The Xbox 360 has 10MB of eDRAM embedded on the graphics processor die, plus 512MB GDDR3 system RAM. My understanding is that it can allocate some of the system RAM to the video processor as needed.
The PS3 has 256MB XDR DRAM for its processors and 256MB GDDR3 RAM for its GPU. Yes, you read that correctly: the PS3 has as much video RAM as it does regular RAM.
If it wasn't clear, this means that the Xbox 360 has more RAM that games can use.
As for the processor, the PS3's Cell processor (and its 7-8 SPUs) is harder to optimize for than the 3-core PowerPC processor used by the Xbox 360.

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GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011

Consoles are at their limit by AdmV0rl0n · 2012-08-31 02:25 · Score: 3, Interesting

With gfx, storage, cpu, mem all piling on the pressure, consoles are drowning. Eventually, devs will move back to the PC because of its more open, less limited setup - even with the headaches that brings with it.
Frankly, with steam its a good platform for devs and users. And the hardware is pretty amazing today, even in the medium PC markets, with bang for buck being quite high.

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We`re all equal .. Just some of us are less equal than others.

Re:Consoles are at their limit by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-31 02:29 · Score: 5, Funny

Woah woah woah! Didn't you get the memo? The desktop PC is dying! Everyone is going to be playing FPS' on their touchscreen tablets.
Re:Consoles are at their limit by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-31 02:30 · Score: 5, Insightful

*Current gen* consoles are at their limit (well past them, actually, most games can't even come close to 720p @ 30fps these days, let alone 1080p @ 60fps), but there will inevitably be a pair of new consoles out next year that will reset the clock so that instead of working with a 10 year old PC equivalent the devs are only working with 2 year old PC equivalent.
The PC will always end up ahead in terms of raw power and flexibility but game devs like the stability of consoles and the low barrier to player entry that gives them a bigger target market.
Re:Consoles are at their limit by Colonel+Korn · 2012-08-31 02:34 · Score: 5, Interesting

Eventually, devs will move back to the PC
No, eventually MS/Sony/Nintendo will release a new generation of consoles. But do keep dreaming.
In terms of sales the PC is the largest and fastest growing game platform every single quarter.

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"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Re:Consoles are at their limit by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-31 02:34 · Score: 2, Insightful

Yikes.... I cant even stand playing an FPS on a console, let along on a tablet o.O
Re:Consoles are at their limit by RogueyWon · 2012-08-31 02:38 · Score: 4, Interesting

The move back to PC is already happening. The proportion of games which aren't single platform console exclusives which don't get a PC port is shrinking fast. And if anything, the number of single platform exclusives on the consoles is shrinking even faster; one lesson of this generation has been that development costs are so high that you can't afford to limit your market unless you're getting a very, very high degree of financial support from the console manufacturer.
We're also at the point now where even the shoddiest and most rushed of PC ports are significantly better than the console equivalents. I recently played Spec Ops: The Line (great game, don't be put off by the title and box art, it's not a generic modern military shooter) on the PC and felt pretty hard done by. The port's an absolute mess, with all of the rubbish around lack of graphical and control customisation options that drive PC gamers up the wall. Then I saw the 360 version running on a friend's console. And all of a sudden, I felt rather better about the PC version, simply because it was so much easier to actually see what was going on with a decent resolution.
The true next-gen is probably still 18 months or so away (the Wii-U doesn't really count, in hardware terms). Developers know they can get a head start on it at the moment by working on PC development - particularly with all the indications that the PS4 will go for a more PC-like architecture.
We've been here before, actually. Just as "PC gaming is dying" is a cyclical thing, so is "console games have been left in the dust". The PC actually moved into a very commanding position at the end of the SNES/Genesis cycle, when there was a long gap before really credible console successors emerged in the form of the Playstation and (to a lesser extent) the N64. That was a great time to be a PC gamer and a terrible time to be a console gamer.
We kind of missed out on this at the end of the last cycle because, to be honest, the PS2, Xbox and Gamecube probably had a year or so of life in them when they were replaced by a new generation (indeed, the PS2 carried on doing quite nicely for ages after the PS3 launch, getting some of its best games during this window). But that was in a different economic environment, when there was felt to be a lot of customer demand to spend money on new consoles and when it felt like a genuine race to market. This time around, the PC's had much more of a chance to come into its own.
Of course, 6 months after the next Xbox and the PS4 launch, the gaming headlines will be full of "PC gaming is dying".
Re:Consoles are at their limit by RyuuzakiTetsuya · 2012-08-31 02:50 · Score: 2, Funny

Today's XKCD is surprisingly relevant.

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Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Re:Consoles are at their limit by Gr8Apes · 2012-08-31 03:15 · Score: 5, Insightful

Should developers move back to OpenGL, then the API is relatively fixed, and these particular issues all go away. What's more, 1 codebase for all platforms, and then consoles will essentially die, to be replaced by commodity small form factor PCs that will perform better, are most likely upgradable regarding CPU, and just all around better. Since DirectX seems to be slower than OpenGL, there's no argument for coding to that proprietary API anymore anyway, and perhaps we really can move to a single graphics API, which would improve things across the board even if you can't take advantage of that one little hack on a specific system to get that 401 fps vs 400....

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The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Re:Consoles are at their limit by Zaphod+The+42nd · 2012-08-31 03:18 · Score: 3, Insightful

You've just demonstrated a large ignorance of games, consoles, and hardware.

If gfx, storage, cpu, mem were the issue, we wouldn't be seeing Skyrim on PS3 at all.

Skyrim is already on PS3. This is purely adding a small DLC. There's no way that its memory or gfx or cpu limitations.

Maybe, MAAAAAYBE I could see an argument for RAM limitation being the limiting factor here, but I still feel like there'd be tons of workarounds. Most of the new content isn't stitched into the existing world, and I don't think they're that maxed out on RAM budget all the time, they could just cache to disk more, and the game already has to have to cache to disk. Most of the new areas are separated from the overworld, and so allow you to unload the overworld from memory to load the new areas.

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GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
Re:Consoles are at their limit by Zaphod+The+42nd · 2012-08-31 03:21 · Score: 2

NOPE. Its not the static development target at ALL that makes the difference. You're right that those games looked poop and they run better on the same hardware now, but you've completely failed to recognize the reason.

Those differences in quality from when X1800 was out? Those are differences in RENDERING ALGORITMS. Improvements to bump mapping, then parallax mapping, then displacement normal mapping, have progressively allowed more detail without costing more polygons. This is purely software, math, not hardware changes. Notice how people have gone back and modded Oblivion to add bloom and HDR and normal mapping, and it looks 100x better? That's not because of a "static target", you can change your hardware and Oblivion still looks and runs good with bloom and HDR.

What does help the consoles run better than an equivalent PC is that they don't have a big-ass OS running in the background to split resources with, and they don't let you run torrentz or whatever in the background. If you ran a PC on a slim, console OS, you'd get the same improvements.

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GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
Re:Consoles are at their limit by Narishma · 2012-08-31 03:49 · Score: 4, Insightful

You missed his point. He didn't say consoles had better versions of the games compared to expensive high-end PCs of the time. He said console games look and perform better than they would running on PCs with similar specs.

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Mada mada dane.
Re:Consoles are at their limit by Applekid · 2012-08-31 04:00 · Score: 2

I haven't personally messed with OpenGL in a long while. What I remember is that while the core was standard, all the really cool stuff is always via vendor-specific calls that had to be discovered via enumeration (and no guarantee that Nvidia's version worked the same way as ATI's version).
Is that still the case?

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More Twoson than Cupertino
Re:Consoles are at their limit by bdwebb · 2012-08-31 04:07 · Score: 2

And your evidence to the contrary is wheeerrre? To invalidate a claim you have to provide evidence supporting your position. Granted, the GP does too, but just having an "I'm right, you're wrong - because." war is for politicians.

I on the other hand used the Google on the internet machine and after 10 seconds of searching for the simplest metric I could think of, 'PC vs Console sales', came up with the following from Nvidia last year:
http://wraltechwire.com/business/tech_wire/news/blogpost/10174154/

Granted this is from last September but it shows the rising trend of PC gaming once again and the stagnation of console gaming across the past few years and the trends into the next few years. GP was wrong in that PC gaming is still the largest - that hasn't been true since Brody and Broseph found out about Call of Duty...however, PC gaming is coming back in spite of all of the claims to the contrary over the approx. 19 years that I've been into PC and console gaming.
Re:Consoles are at their limit by SScorpio · 2012-08-31 04:56 · Score: 2

The main reason is this generation is running too long. The original Playstation came out in the US in 1995, the Playstation 2 2000, and the Playstation 3 2006. The Xbox 360 came out in 2005, it will be eight years old by the time the next revision comes out, the Playstation 3 will be seven years old. And the Wii was outdated when it was launched.
In past console generations the games looked a year or two ahead of what was available on a PC when they were launched. With this generation PCs were about a year or two ahead of the consoles when they were launched.
Developers are limited fully by the console hardware as they know how to pull the maximum performance from them, but with PC you will have about a decade of improvements (if the PC was two years ahead of the 360, it is 2003 tech and the next console will hopefully launch in 2013).
The cost of entry isn't stopping anyone. Console were always niche devices. You can't claim $200 is too much to spend when people were blowing more than that on arcade quality joysticks when Street Fighter IV was released.
The biggest thing this console generation has done is made it easier to game on a PC. You can buy a PC for $500 that will play any game out on the market at higher quality than the current consoles. Spend $800-1000 and you'll have a PC that will be as powerful as the rumored specs for this "next gen" consoles that are coming.
Re:Consoles are at their limit by Lord_Naikon · 2012-08-31 06:43 · Score: 2

The way you program the GPU has drastically changed since the advent of shaders, for both Direct3D and OpenGL. In the end, both APIs are now glorified memory managers (for texture and vertex buffers); all the actual effects and vertex transformations are programmed using shaders. Any other functionality they offer (matrix operations for instance) can be replaced by other libraries. Annoyingly both APIs use a very similar but different shader language. ATI vs nVidia is still a problem though in terms of the stuff you can do with shaders (and the quality of the drivers).
You will find that the most important vendor specific extensions people have been using for years are now in the core library (in particular vertex buffers).

Bethesda is just incompentant by h4rr4r · 2012-08-31 02:25 · Score: 2, Informative

The simple answer is they are incompetent. After all the issues I had with Fallout and New Vegas I will never buy another Bethesda game. The crashing, the stalling, the slowing down of the game as you get farther along.

Games are my time to relax, not be frustrated with the amateur hour programming Bethesda seems to employ.

Re:Bethesda is just incompentant by i+kan+reed · 2012-08-31 02:34 · Score: 4, Insightful

Yep, I'm sure it's a problem with bad programming, because good programmers never produce serious bugs, right? It's not like quality control is actually really hard, especially with large and complex software under a single unyielding deadline. Forgive me, but it seems like you've never done professional software development in your life.
Re:Bethesda is just incompentant by h4rr4r · 2012-08-31 02:38 · Score: 5, Insightful

Good programmers can make serious bugs, but good companies fix their products when they find them.
What unyielding deadline? These games have been out for years and they are still not fixed.
Oh noes, its hard, so we should be able to ripoff the customer with an unfinished product that we will not take a return on nor will we ever fix.
Re:Bethesda is just incompentant by Type44Q · 2012-08-31 02:55 · Score: 2

Of course they're buggy. *You* try building open worlds on the scale and complexity of Fallout New Vegas or Skyrim and see if you don't end up with at least a few bugs, bucko!
But is that why they're buggy? I suspect not...
Re:Bethesda is just incompentant by Altanar · 2012-08-31 02:56 · Score: 2

You can't judge Bethesda for New Vegas. New Vegas was made by Obsidian, masters of half-finishing games.
Re:Bethesda is just incompentant by Altanar · 2012-08-31 03:01 · Score: 2

Considering the size of Fallout 3, the bug list is pretty short. Personally, I've never had any issues with Fallout 3. New Vegas is a different story. But then again, Bethesda didn't make New Vegas. Obsidian did.
Re:Bethesda is just incompentant by Moheeheeko · 2012-08-31 03:01 · Score: 3, Interesting

The real problem here is both of those games are on console, and if they fixed the pc version they would be forced to also patch the console versions, and console patches are HUGELY expensive.
Re:Bethesda is just incompentant by Thruen · 2012-08-31 03:10 · Score: 2

It's a massive world with more options than you can count, as open as game play gets, you can dump hundreds of hours in without ever doing the same thing twice, of course it's buggy. Find me any game with a world that large and open that Bethesda didn't make with fewer bugs. Go for it. I don't think you'll have any luck, though. MMOs are often as big but they're far simpler worlds, much more linear game play, and all the ones I've played (which is a good number) have both been full of bugs and failed to hold my interest past a single end-game run. The closest single-player showing I can think of is Two Worlds, which had such potential to beat out Oblivion with mounted combat and two-player action, but never stood a chance with a crap story and more bugs than you can shake a stick at, definitely more buggy than any Bethesda game I've played. The truth is, most of us know exactly what we're in for with a Bethesda game, it's going to be somewhat buggy, but it's going to be a better game than anything else out there so we put up with it. If you don't want to, that's fine, but to call them incompetent is a bit absurd given the popularity of their games, obviously they're doing something right and most of us appreciate it.
Re:Bethesda is just incompentant by gman003 · 2012-08-31 03:23 · Score: 2

Bethesda sucks at removing bugs. We know this, we've known this ever since what, Morrowind? Maybe even earlier.
But that doesn't mean their programmers are incompetent. Their problem, rather, is twofold:
1) They give level designers access to a fairly powerful scripting language (it's no UnrealScript, but it's more code-like than most others). All those quests with broken "coding"? All those items with broken effects? Those are the natural result of giving a programming task to a non-programmer.
2) A focus on quantity over quality. They downright *brag* about quests being made by one guy in a few days. That may be the only way to produce the amount of content they need, but it's hardly conducive to reliable, well-tested content.
Those bugs may be infuriating and numerous (the Unofficial Oblivion Patch fixed roughly 7000 bugs back when I used it), but they're not the kind of bugs that would prevent them from getting the game to run. Their actual engine coders seem pretty competent.
My own suspicion is that it's just a RAM issue. The PS3 has a whopping 256 megabytes of main memory, plus another 256 for video data (textures and meshes). The 360 at least has a 512MB chunk shared flexibly between both - a game that needs a lot of RAM like Skyrim can sacrifice some texture resolution to free some up for the CPU. And of course on the PC it's not a problem, since even the weakest gaming PC has 4GB plus another gig or two in the graphics card.
I'll end by noting two things:
1) Bethesda seems to slowly be getting better at quality. Oblivion had bugs everywhere, Fallout 3 had fewer, and Skyrim had only one bug that I actually encountered.
2) New Vegas wasn't developed by Bethesda.
Re:Bethesda is just incompentant by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2012-08-31 03:28 · Score: 4, Interesting

Yep, I'm sure it's a problem with bad programming, because good programmers never produce serious bugs, right? It's not like quality control is actually really hard, especially with large and complex software under a single unyielding deadline. Forgive me, but it seems like you've never done professional software development in your life.
In fairness to h4rr4r, Bethesda is notorious for releasing sprawling RPGs with absurd numbers of bugs(and not just technically challenging 3d-engine-developer-wonk stuff, bugged quests, faulty item stats, broken dialog trees, etc. are also quite common and can persist through multiple patches even after being conveniently cataloged on the assorted fan-wikis or even systematically cleaned up by 3rd-party mods...)
Software quality is definitely a hole with no bottom, into which even the smartest can fall; but Bethesda is undeniably a standout for "AAA big-budget titles from people who should know better that are crawling with bugs you can discover just by playing through once, never mind actually doing any QA".
Re:Bethesda is just incompentant by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2012-08-31 03:39 · Score: 2

I think my favorite Fallout 3 outstanding bug is the 'Entire game locks up hard periodically on at least some systems with more than two cores" one.
Since the CPU requirements aren't actually all that high, you can change one line in a config file (or modify the processor affinity settings for the game process, though that is more of a pain) in order to confine it to two CPUs and entirely avoid the problem. Despite already having the pre-launch utility that detects hardware capabilities and produces a recommended configuration accordingly, they haven't deigned to add a simple check that does this automatically if more than two cores are present...
Re:Bethesda is just incompentant by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-31 03:43 · Score: 2, Informative

The large-scale stuff isn't where Bethesda put bugs, though. It's all the close-range stuff like conversations not triggering properly, leaving you stuck in one location forever, or the infamous "dragons flying backwards" bug.
Or cliff racers.
Re:Bethesda is just incompentant by Blakey+Rat · 2012-08-31 04:07 · Score: 4, Insightful

To give you an idea, Skyrim has thousands of quests all of which can interact with each other in thousands * thousands of ways.
There's no support in Bethesda's development tools for unit testing of quests. There's no support for fuzz-testing of quests.
They don't have the tools to make a bug-free complex game, and they haven't bothered to make them.
They did however waste tons of time writing a custom BASIC-esque scripting language (which is itself incomplete and buggy) instead of just glomming-on some JS or Lua.
I used to think the problem was simply complexity, like you. Since Bethesda has released their dev tools to the public, now I'm thinking it's 90% incompetence.

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Comment of the year
Re:Bethesda is just incompentant by DarkTempes · 2012-08-31 04:23 · Score: 2

It'd be really interesting to see what a Bethesda QA person says the game looks like BEFORE release...
Re:Bethesda is just incompentant by geminidomino · 2012-08-31 06:02 · Score: 2

We tried asking one once, but we couldn't get a satisfactory answer.
He just kept mumbling "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"
We tried running it through ROT13, but no luck...

PC for any Bethesda game by danbuter · 2012-08-31 02:29 · Score: 2

I'm really glad I bought Skyrim on PC. I've got at least one "Dawnguard expansion" worth of material free as mods. (I've even posted a few small ones of my own)

Re:PC for any Bethesda game by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-31 02:39 · Score: 2, Funny

Yes, we're all familiar with your "Winterhold Male Brothel" mod, Dan.

Obligatory by bazorg · 2012-08-31 02:31 · Score: 4, Funny

"I'd like to know what the exact problem is they can't overcome[...]"

perhaps an arrow in the knee?

Re:Middle Earth and Lawsuits go together by tradit by jythie · 2012-08-31 02:33 · Score: 2

Yeah, but it would be nice if the receivers did not have to bow simply because they can not afford to fight back. The rights of IP ownership are often much more restrictive then the companies sending out these C&D letters with they were.. but they have discovered that they can abuse the civil system to make it behave like they have rights they do not, simply because it would be too costly for the defendant to defend themselves.

Re:I've played Bethesda games by dywolf · 2012-08-31 02:36 · Score: 2

I've played their games too. But on a PC. They make PC games, and then cram them into consoles. You think you can do better? Prove it.

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The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.

Barriers to whose entry by tepples · 2012-08-31 02:40 · Score: 4, Interesting

game devs like the stability of consoles and the low barrier to player entry

PCs, on the other hand, have far lower barriers to developer entry. You don't have to start by making a mobile phone game in a genre you dislike in order to get a job working hundreds miles away for five years in order to build "relevant video game industry experience" in order to qualify for a console devkit.

Re:I've played Bethesda games by h4rr4r · 2012-08-31 02:42 · Score: 3, Insightful

You don't have to be able to better yourself to state facts about flaws.

Do you think Ebert makes better movies? Do you think you should not be able to sue GM when your new car burns up in your driveway because you could not make a better one?

Unplayable by symes · 2012-08-31 02:52 · Score: 4, Interesting

Skyrim is pretty much unplayable on the PS3, particular in the latter stages. I enjoyed the game but have since swapped to my PC and will no longer buy new games for the PS3... now it just sits there as a bulky blueray player. I think this is Sony's loss rather than Bethesda's downfall, imho.

Re:Unplayable by Flector · 2012-08-31 03:18 · Score: 2

I played to level 31 on a PS3 before buying the Steam version for the PC. The PC version is so much more responsive, not to mention moddable, that there's almost no comparison. The long delays on the PS3 when moving to another area, opening doors & etc. was pure torture.

Re:Permission how? Original how? by RaceProUK · 2012-08-31 02:52 · Score: 2

It is always best to use IP with permission

How should a non-commercial mod team go about obtaining such permission, practically?

By asking nicely.

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No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun

Re:I've played Bethesda games by Nemyst · 2012-08-31 02:52 · Score: 2

Hah! Nice one. Just a single look at the deficient UI for Skyrim on PC should be proof enough that Bethesda makes games for the most profitable platform available at the time, and then try to mostly port it to the other platforms. Hint: that platform isn't the PC.

This is why the 360 gets the best experience with the fewest bugs and receives all the DLC exclusively for a certain time period.

Re:Middle Earth and Lawsuits go together by tradit by Cute+Fuzzy+Bunny · 2012-08-31 02:53 · Score: 2

I am not at all shocked to see this C&D letter arrive at their doorstep. Commercial rights owners will act to protect their properties. The (any) team doing dev work on a IP other than their own and acting without a license should expect as much too. It is always best to use IP with permission or that is original no matter how 'cool' the property may seem.

Its no big deal. They just have to change a few things. They'll be marching with Bobbits (make your own joke) and smelfs, fighting balsmogs on their way to Fordor.

As long as the game play doesn't include any pinchy motions, they'll be just fine.

I've developed for the PS3. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-31 02:54 · Score: 5, Informative

It's a strange architecture. Most modern machines are symmetric-multiprocessor (SMP). That means programming is very straightforward - all the processors share the same memory space and each processor can do any work you like, so you just have to worry about the normal threading issues (race conditions, deadlocks, etc.) but it's otherwise just standard multithreaded programming.

The PS3 is not SMP - it has one main processor with 256MB of non-video RAM (a big chunk of which is reserved for the OS) and a lot of smaller coprocessors that have very limited RAM (256K). If you can fit chunks of work nicely into 256K, then the thing screams. If you cannot, then you have to do most of the work on the main processor, in less memory than is available on the Xbox360. In other words, you've gone from 6 hardware threads on the Xbox to 2 on the PS3. The combination of less general-purpose processing power and less usable main memory is a really hard problem to solve.

Now, for a lot of games, the Cell is great. Fighting games, puzzle games, art games, ARPGs, JRPGs, platformers. Any time you can offload individual character animation or rendering to the SPEs, you win. The PS3 can animate and render a whole lot more mobs in a scene than the Xbox360 can. If you have a physics calculation like waves on water or swarm movement that is easily separatable into small chunks, the PS3 is also superior.

But think about an open-world game - especially one with the sort of wide-open spaces and anyone-can-go-anywhere gameplay of Skyrim. We did open-world games and we constantly had trouble because physics and AI could interact over a long distance. We broke the world up into cells and aggressively limited the range of some computations to avoid this problem, but still, a lot had to run on the main processor because once the size of a physics calculation or a pathfind exceeded 256K, you couldn't do it on the SPEs. And believe me, pathfinding data alone in an open-world game is always going to be larger than 256K! AI in modern games is expensive, and we know that Bethesda takes their AI very seriously.

Maintaining a large, persistent world also means keeping track of lots of stuff, and that means memory. On the PC, you have practically unlimited swap and tons of main RAM, so it's not an issue. On consoles you have limited RAM and swap space and fragmentation can kill you if you dead. To be honest, I'm surprised the game runs as well as it does on the Xbox360, but again, you have more memory there and they have the ability to "steal" RAM from graphics if they need it, whereas you can't on the PS3.

So while I wish Bethesda had overcome the technical hurdles and made the game workable on the PS3, I can hardly fault them for coming up short. It's just not a platform well-suited to the type of game Skyrim is.

Re:I've developed for the PS3. by crossmr · 2012-08-31 03:41 · Score: 3, Interesting

http://www.cracked.com/article_15748_a-gamers-manifesto.html
I've been posting this link since it came out. This was originally written on a website called "pointless waste of time". I guess cracked bought them. Anyway, point 1, 5 years ago called this:

Two, as developers have lamented, the guts of the new consoles are geared to make the gaming equivalent of dumb blondes. It has to do with the fact that both the XBox 360 and the PS3's Cell CPU use "in-order" processing, which, to greatly simplify, means they've intentionally crippled the ability to make clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games in favor of beautiful water reflections and explosion debris that flies through the air prettily.
Re:I've developed for the PS3. by Sez+Zero · 2012-08-31 03:41 · Score: 2

They already got the game to work though. Is there really that much more new stuff in the DLC that can't be bothered to figure out?

It sounds like just a calculated choice: "It would take X man hours and would bring us Y dollars. Skip it."
Re:I've developed for the PS3. by Tridus · 2012-08-31 03:50 · Score: 2

No, they wouldn't say they're going to do it, then suffer this embarrassment if it was really doable. The PS3 is a highly RAM starved system, and Skyrim uses a ton of data. Increasing the amount of data is going to hit a wall at some point where it's just not doable. GP already explained why extremely well.
This is Sony's design decisions years ago coming back to bite people in the ass, nothing more.

--
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Re:I've developed for the PS3. by robmv · 2012-08-31 04:04 · Score: 2

Because the Bethesda developers suffer the modern developer illness: "we have more RAM on this new platform, load everything to it" (no matter you do not use all that data everytime). I always wondered why Bethesa games always had long loading screens, they hasn't mastered the knowledge of streaming content
I have learned my lesson with previous Bethesda games so I skip them until they reach the bargain bin. They know how to create amazing worlds and histories, but their code is crap. I have no problem with it when developer aknowledge there are bugs and they know it is their mistake and will try to do their best to fix them, but I hate when people blame it on the platform when other developers had done things more complex of what they aren't doing
Re:I've developed for the PS3. by non0score · 2012-08-31 04:06 · Score: 5, Informative

While I can attest the parent poster did actually develop for the PS3, I am sadden by the fact that he/she didn't get a chance to learn the tips&tricks of PS3 SPU programming that will, in all honesty, apply to all sorts of performance optimization work. Now to the parent:

For one, if you're worried about SPU local store memory size, there are tricks to do double/tripple/etc... buffering. There are also libs doing software caching if you're inclined. At the end of the day, you just have to realize that local store latency to main memory isn't all that different from an L2 cache hit on a "normal" CPU - they're both around 500-1000 cycles. Only difference is that for SPUs, it's manual work to DMA it over from main memory and syncing. But really, that's only 4 extra lines of code that you can wrap up into two macros.

But I think the real trouble isn't the hardware architecture, but your project's data layout. If the code accessing data all over the place (e.g. "over long distances"), then you're getting crappy performance anyway. It's not like the CPU has great prefetching (that you can't unwrap and do in the SPU anyway) or any out-of-order execution. So if you're just getting L2 misses all over the place (in your PPU), you're just stalling the CPU for those 500-1000, plain and simple.

If anything, the SPUs make you VERY concious about your data layout. At the end of the day, you're going to get much, much more improvement in speeds via good data layout (as a first step anyway) than, say, doing super-low-level assembly programming. The L2 latency wayyyyy outweighs the 10 cycles you're going to save on your tight inner loop after going to ASM. The real benefit of ASM is if you have all your data laid out in a way that you don't stall, then the throughput really matters.

For reference, people at my workplace have done AI updates on the SPU. They've also done full screen SPU post processing, animation (like you said), physics, etc...and even pathfinding! I'll even take your example. Do you need all 256k? Can you not cull out data on the PPU that you know won't be needed off hand? If you already compartmentalized each cell, then you certainly have enough information to work for a while on one cell. Then you can grab the potential references to each adjacent cell as you path to them and stream them in as you continue working. You can even predict which cells you need ahead of time and prefetch them, and discarding them when it doesn't look like you'd need them as you process more of your current cell. It's not like your A* isn't operating on triangles anymore, so you always have a finite set of triangles that you have to compute through before you can do anything else.

It really is all about the data, man.
Re:I've developed for the PS3. by non0score · 2012-08-31 04:34 · Score: 2

I don't know about "calling" anything. If people are still complaining about the PS3's Cell, they really need to get over it or learn "how it's done" and stop being ignorant devs. The real limiting factor is actually memory or GPU, which is really a PITA.

At my work, we're limited by the 360's CPU more than the SPU. We're data optimized enough to say that we're afraid of how underpowered 360's CPUs are. If anything, when the Cell came out, it was wayyyy more compute capable than x86.

Then again, you're saying that both suck, so I don't know how your posting is relevant to to the GP's post (or the original story). That and it seems like the article you linked to is obviously written by someone who doesn't know programming. Afterall, said article uses the famous Burn The House Down as reference, which says (emphasis mine):

Gameplay code will get slower and harder to write on the next generation of consoles. Modern CPUs use out-of-order execution, which is there to make crappy code run fast.
So yeah, crappy code will always be crappy code.
Re:I've developed for the PS3. by tlhIngan · 2012-08-31 04:43 · Score: 2

http://www.cracked.com/article_15748_a-gamers-manifesto.html
I've been posting this link since it came out. This was originally written on a website called "pointless waste of time". I guess cracked bought them. Anyway, point 1, 5 years ago called this:

Two, as developers have lamented, the guts of the new consoles are geared to make the gaming equivalent of dumb blondes. It has to do with the fact that both the XBox 360 and the PS3's Cell CPU use "in-order" processing, which, to greatly simplify, means they've intentionally crippled the ability to make clever A.I. and dynamic, unpredictable, wide-open games in favor of beautiful water reflections and explosion debris that flies through the air prettily.

Wow... that's a whole pile of steaming turd.
"In order" and "Out of order" just mean how the inter internal CPU treats instructions when executing them on the processor.
An in-order processor processes each instruction as it comes in - in order. An out-of-order processor searches through the instruction stream identifying instructions that aren't dependent on one another and to run those in parallel (super scalar architecture - more than one instruction executed at a time).
For example, your code may load a value from memory into a register, perform some arithmetic on it, then write it back to memory. The code following that may do something else - perhaps issue some I/O, but due to the way it's coded, they both use the same registers for the operation, creating an artificial dependency. An out-of-order processor will detect that, and while the load from memory is happening (loads take a little while), the processor can see it can do the other block (the one doing I/O) at the same time and executes it while the first part waits for the results to come back.
It's a way to make processors faster - in-order processors are simpler to produce and are smaller (no instruction buffers to scan, no huge banks of rename registers, and all the associated book-keeping hardware), plus are also much more predictable in operation.
It has zilch to do with AI or randomness. A smart AI can run on an in-order processor or an out-of-order one with no differences (other than ones due to processor errata). It will probably run a little faster on the out-of-order one, but that's it. Sure you could imply that a slower processor means your AI could be dumbed down so it runs "fast enough", but a dumb AI run on either kind of processor is still a dumb AI (which happens to run faster on an out-of-order processor).
And it also has zilch to do with wide open dynamic worlds. If you want randomness, you use a random number generator which either comes from randomness hardware, or you use a pseudo-random number generator, neither of which are affected by the processor execution type, other than because the in-order one executes more predictably (you can count clocks), ones based on CPU clock timers might be more predictable because a fixed number of clocks execute each loop. Maybe.
I don't think anyone can take that article seriously.

Re:The RAM is the issue. by RaceProUK · 2012-08-31 02:55 · Score: 4, Informative

The PS3 only has 256 megabytes of RAM compared to the 360's 512 megabytes.

It's not as simple as that - PS3 has 256MB CPU RAM and 256MB GPU RAM, where the 360 has 512MB shared by both CPU and GPU. In real terms, the memory available is more or less equal.

--
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun

Re:Huh? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-08-31 03:03 · Score: 2, Insightful

Warner Brothers has exclusive rights to make Lord of the Rings based video games. It is fully in their right to protest someone making such a game without their agreement. Before they bought Turbine, WB only had rights over a large subset of LOTR video gaming potential, now they have all of it.

Re:HTPC gaming by alantus · 2012-08-31 03:21 · Score: 2

It's a shame that PC games don't allow the user to control everything with a gamepad. I'm talking about starting the game, configuring settings, etc, just like in consoles. Not even in opensource games, I never see this.
That makes them impossible or inconvenient to play from a HTPC.

Re:Bethesda is just a shitty developer. by Tridus · 2012-08-31 03:21 · Score: 2

How many of those games are loading save files with as much persistent world state as Skyrim has?

Zero? Right then. You just have no idea what you're talking about. The PS3's design is fundamentally bad for a game like Skyrim. It's too complicated, too RAM starved, and the SPUs have access to so little memory that you have to use the main CPU for far too much stuff. Trying to cram more data into it now is what's breaking things.

--
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates

Re:Nonliteral copying by X0563511 · 2012-08-31 03:23 · Score: 2

Because JRRT and those who followed in his footsteps have already laid claim to various concepts. I am aware that copyrights are not identical to patents. But under copyright, the combination of "access" and "substantial similarity" implies infringement, and courts have held that "substantial similarity" includes similarity of nonliteral elements.

You both seem to be missing the point.

If it's not LOTR, then it's not LOTR and just some pretender.

--
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...

Re:The deadline by h4rr4r · 2012-08-31 03:44 · Score: 2

I agree, which is why I am tying future sales to past actions.

If more people did that then more revenue would be attached.

Re:Patch parity by h4rr4r · 2012-08-31 03:48 · Score: 2

Yes, portal 2 and many other valve games are patched far more often than the PS3 ports. I know this because I only bought the PS3 version as it included a free PC copy.

Something people miss about the PS3 by Sycraft-fu · 2012-08-31 04:42 · Score: 2

Is that the RAM is divided on it.

So consoles don't have a lot of RAM compared to PCs anyhow. I mean even when the 360 and PS3 launched 512MB wasn't a ton, and now of course it is just minuscule. However consoles have two tricks that PCs don't that help:

1) They don't have nearly as much overhead. A full blown desktop OS takes up quite a bit of RAM just to run, never mind all the background processes most users add on (IM client, virus scanner, etc). While consoles do have an OS these days, it is cut down a whole lot. So it needs much less RAM to run.

2) The GPU and CPU share RAM. On computers it is separate. Discrete GPUs have their own RAM onboard, of course, and even iGPUs don't share system RAM in terms of actual data, they grab part of it for their own use. With consoles they share the units share the RAM, so you don't end up having a copy of something both in main and graphics memory.

Well the PS3 doesn't do #2. It has 256MB for the CPU and 256MB for the GPU. They are separated. That means that while it technically has as much RAM as the 360, in reality it has less available.

This is because Sony honestly thought the Cell was going to be the GPU for the PS3. I have no idea why they thought that would work, but they thought that would be the case. Then midway through development they realized it wouldn't cut it, so they went to nVidia to get a GPU. nVidia was happy to accommodate them, of course, but given the short timetable couldn't customize the GPU fully. So more or less they got an nVidia 7900, which of course uses separate RAM.

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