Fun Stuff > CLIKC
Nintendo....Wii?
Switch:
Last night my roommate and I were discussing this on the ride back from a friends house.
We literally went, "Wii, Wii, Wii all the way home."
I liked the name Revolution, it made sense. The new controller forces game developers to tackle new problems and experiment. To start a gaming revolution. The old name was powerful and symbolic. Even with the chintzy poem Wii is still a made up word that makes me have to tinkle. It has no power.
patch:
i just object to the fact that wii is going to create a million lame jokes that creates a meme more irritating than chuck norris jokes.
more irritating because i like nintendo.
Switchblade:
--- Quote from: est ---I do take your point and I hope that it does work for them, but from the dev reports I've been seeing developers don't like it. If you were the head of a dev team/company which would you prefer to develop on, a system that is easy to make a game for quickly & looks good, or a machine that needs to be done "the old fashioned way" and is therefore more expensive in man-hours and cash to complete? If you look at it that way they are behind the ball before you even start comparing the system specs/units shipped, etc :(
--- End quote ---
Just so you're aware, I am actually on a games development and design course at uni, so I think my whole perspective on the PS3 is coloured by the possibility of my ending up making games for it some day.
The thing you have to understand is that when I say it's "harder work", I mean the machine itself has to work harder. The games developers, according to my logic, will either not notice a change, or else will actually have LESS work and difficulty to contend with.
Developers fall into two categories: programmers, and designers
programmers are the hard code guys. They're the ones who wind up writing all the C++ code on which a game engine runs. Not just that, they're responsible for creating the tools that the designers (mappers, skinners, animators, modellers, etc) use to turn all that code into a game.
For the designers, there is no visible change. You're still using an SDK provided by the programmers. You move objects and entities around, put them together, and come out with your finished product. It's not your job to understand how the machine code works, it's your job to use the tools you're given to produce a finished, artistic product.
Now, I'm no programmer, but I rather imagine that from a coding perspective, it's easier to tell the system to run everything off the CPU, rather than having to program in the subroutines that tell the machine where to send each individual process. Let's say you have a game that uses bump mapping, HDR lighting, a Havok-based physics system and 64-bit vertex shaders (alongside the hundreds of other processes). As things stand, a fair old chunk of the processing done by the CPU is actually responding to the code that tells it where to send each of those processes. the HDR is sent off to one section of the graphics card, the vertex shading to another, the bump mapping to a third, and the physics goes off to physics processing. usually, that's handled by the CPU, but nVidia are releasing joing phyics/graphics cards now.
I'm no expert, but to me it sounds easier to run everything on central processing power, rather than having the CPU shuffle and sort each of those processes off to its designated subsection of the system first, THEN process it, then send it back to final processing to be displayed. The system has to do far more, in terms of calculations per second, but from a coding perspective, I don't think it would be more difficult to do things that way - precisely the opposite. It'd be simpler, faster, easier and cheaper, because you drastically cut down the number of code lines the programmers have to write - which leaves them with more time to include the SDK features that the designers are asking for.
As far as I can see, it's a win-win situation.
--- Quote from: Catfish_Man ---You're incorrect. If you really want an explanation, I cooked up some diagrams and such a while back when I was researching it, and have some great links, but it gets pretty hairy.
Quick summary: The PS3 still has a graphics card, and it's still a fairly traditional one, but the processor takes the basic approach of taking off the last 10 years of design to make it smaller, and then hitting copy-paste 7 times. If your code vectorizes *and* multithreads well, it'll fly. If it doesn't... figure on getting something like what my laptop can do (1GHz G4). The launch titles are always somewhat rushed, so they'll likely be doing something like: PPE (the non-wacky core, 98% identical to an Xbox360 core) runs the game, SPE 1 (wacky vector core 1) decodes video, SPE 2 decodes audio, SPEs 3-7 sit idle most of the time. The real question of the PS3's power is whether game developers will be able to take anywhere close to full advantage of the SPEs before the PS3 is totally obsolete.
--- End quote ---
To me, this still implies less work spent shuffling processes about and more time spent on the core, which to me sounds like easier programming.
Feel free to correct me if I'm very very wrong, however.
Ozymandias:
Developers were pretty disappointed with the PS2's weird architecture. I terms of what you can do with the PS2, the graphics SHOULD out class the XBox and Gamecube. In terms of what developers were actually willing to do with it, they clearly don't. The only games that reach that kind of quality are SCEA games (God of War, Shadow of the Colossus). No one else wanted to put the time and effort into even trying.
According to many devs(Square was among the most vocal), the PS2 was enough of a hassle that they would've preferred to develop for someone else if it weren't for the PS2's sales numbers.
I see Sony making the same mistake twice here and losing a lot of third party support. Most American companies have already jumped ship to MS. If it weren't for the fact that Japan abhors the XBox, I imagine most Japanese ones would have to.
Catfish_Man:
--- Quote from: Switchblade ---Now, I'm no programmer, but I rather imagine that from a coding perspective, it's easier to tell the system to run everything off the CPU, rather than having to program in the subroutines that tell the machine where to send each individual process.
--- End quote ---
You'd be right. This is exactly why the PS3 is hard, though. Unlike most CPUs, the 8 elements of the CELL require explicit management by the programmer*. Kinda like having 7 mini-GPUs** in addition to the main GPU and the CPU. Personally I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of autoparallelizing compiler advances come out of research done for the PS3. :)
*or the author of the tools you're using. I expect licensing game engines/libraries will be very common on the PS3. The Havoc folks, or whoever do the heavy lifting to move library functions onto the SPEs, and everyone who uses their system gets the benefit "for free".
**the SPEs are more flexible than a GPU, but similar in principle in many ways.
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