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Groucho on 02 August 2008
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NJ5 said:
Groucho said:
Carmack doesn't even write the games at iD anymore -- he's a businessman, primarily. He likes the 360, because PC-to-360 porting is waaay easier than PC-to-PS3, and iD has made a large portion of their income, over the years, from engine licensing of their PC engine.

I'm sure the PS3 seems more difficult to him -- its the most unusual piece of the 3-way PC-360-PS3 puzzle he's trying to put together. If he was writing a PS3 exclusive engine from scratch, AND a 360 engine from scratch (i.e. not using MS'es DirectX APIs, but instead writing an engine from scratch, as he did with DOOM 1), I sincerely doubt he'd consider the 360 to be so superior to the PS3.

He's strongly biased. The 360 is easier for iD, because iD makes, and has made, PC games for eons, and all their programming staff was hired for that purpose. The PC, and from a Windows API viewpoint extent, the 360 architecture is very very familiar to him/his team. The PS3 is not.

If you're going to claim someone is "strongly biased", at least get your facts straight. He's the Technical Director of iD Software, so I'm pretty sure his daily work is still very directly related to programming (even if he spends less time at the keyboard than he used to, which may not even be the case).

Furthermore, he's much more likely to know the overall picture of multi-platform engine development than some of his programmers, who will be more concerned about their own modules and platforms.

 

Last I checked, technical directors don't spend any time programming, unless its a one-man show, and the title is just for kicks.  And he's the majority owner of iD as well -- I'm "pretty sure" he spends almost no time programming these days.  Meaning I know it for a fact, and you're welcome to believe what you like.  I'm a software engineer by profession, and I know very well what a technical director is and does.

For iD, the 360 is easier.  But that's the rub -- he's talking about it from the same perspective that many other PC developers approach it from (e.g. Valve, another example of "the 360 is better" mentality derived from a pure PC studio).  Every tool and app he, or his team, has written in the past decade has been with DirectX and a Windows-like OS.  If you *don't* think he's biased, I think you need to take a step back and look at the big picture.

I will agree with Carmack, up and down, that the 360 is much easier to develop for than the PS3.  I know this is true in my case, since I've worked on so many PC and XBox apps.  A developer's effective performance could be much greater on the 360, given some rigid prereqs, like a severe PC bias coming in, and no experienced parallel-thinking engineers.  Lately, however, both the 360 and PS3 architectures have become quite clear to me, and its obvious as to which one is superior, given the legwork to build an engine properly (for both machines, actually).

Claiming the 360 is a superior platform for reasons outside of the ease-of-development reason, however, is just plain folly.  I'm shocked that Carmack would say such a thing, actually, but since he did... I have to concede that he may not be as bright as I once thought, or that he's wearing some severely tinted eyewear.  I'm going with the latter.