ps3 comment

[Cernos]

BTW, one other thing I forgot to mention is that Sony haven't even released finished off PS3 dev. kits yet making it extremely hard for developers to produce games for the PS3, with only 6months to launch that's really not good.

Yep, not healthy at all. A good game needs a development cycle of much more than 6 months. Obviously there's storyboard and preparatory graphics work which can be done before the technical aspects are put into place, but even so 6 months is a very short space of time. Looks like the first crop of games won't be anywhere near to close to getting the best out of the PS3 and probably just mildly improved PS2 ports.

Combine a very expensive console with a lack of games written exclusively for it for a significant period after launch and Sony may find that the PS3 isn't the runaway success the PS2 undeniably was. I think they may have fumbled the ball on this one, but the strength of the Playstation brand probably means they won't completely drop the ball.

[<ankh>]

I read that ps3 will be really hard to develop games with - even with the developers kit.

/Ankh

[Xest]

I read that ps3 will be really hard to develop games with - even with the developers kit.

/Ankh

Kind of, it's the Cell processor, you need to segment your game to make use of each core, I was somewhat bewildered to hear the XBox 360 dev. teams say the same on Wednesday that the 360 is much harder to develop for because of three cores but perhaps that's because I already understand multi-threaded programming quite well. When you have multiple cores you need to split the load between cores for example in the game Kameo on the 360 Rare put Audio on one core, Graphics on another and the rest of the Game stuff on the 3rd core. The issue is that you need to keep your seperate cores sync'd for example it's no use if the game logic on core 3 manages to end up 30 seconds ahead of the actual graphics rendering on core 2! The issue obviously gets worse with a 7 core Cell processor. One other thing to note is that keeping cores sync'd alone causes additional overhead over a single core system which is why 2 cores is never going to give you 2x the speed however it will give you a decent boost.

The other thing that may well be throwing a lot of console developers is having to deal with shaders now, shader support on the last gen. consoles was sat somewhere between minimal and non-existent.

Other than that the PS3 just uses OpenGL for rendering which is pretty standard so is the PS3 hard to develop for? No more so than developing any other multi-threaded system with shader support, i.e. PCs! What's really making it harder for console developers is that they're dealing with new console tech. - multiple cores, shaders etc. that they've not touched before whereas any PC developer will likely be pretty hardened in those areas nowadays due to the much more rapidly changing hardware technology.

[<ankh>]

Ahhh.. cheers! I don't care much about consoles so I never did check it fully

/Ankh

[Xest]

Heh, UK price of the PS3 is going to be £425, or $803 US. GL with that

[Shi]

Heh, UK price of the PS3 is going to be £425, or $803 US. GL with that

hmm lol....

btw, any news about backards compatibility for psx2 games?
Xbox 360 for the mom does is really crap, not many got support, unlike MS promessed.

[<ankh>]

The one I posted in the wii thread.

/Ankh

[Xest]

Kinda annoying that we always get shafted for an extra $200 in the UK over the US, noticed it on the new Apple MacBooks too, except there we pay $400 more.

The PS3 is meant to support all old PS2/PS1 games, seems a standard feature nowadays in consoles as the Wii is going to let you download all old N64, SNES and NES games and will play Gamecube games too.

[Ovi]

Chargeable downloads or free?

Either way it's a nice bonus

[Xest]

Not sure yet, I get the impression it's free as there's been no talk about cost but that does seem unlikely I'll admit!

It is nice, if not only because it means you'll be able to play the entire Mario and Zelda series through on a single console