F bethesda and whatever team ported Fallout 3

[goddog]

Impulsivity said:

Squilliam said:
This is a reflection on both Sony and Bethesda. In this case I would say that they were both lacking to some degree.

Sony - They made an architectural choice so they have to live with the results, both good and bad. It was up to them to make the tools to bridge the gap, which they haven't done yet.

Bethesda - If you believe Shio, this game will sell more on the PC than consoles but in any case its primary platform is PC and it was up to them to ensure that the game is good on every platform they release on. But still they may not have had the resources to fully devote to the PS3, for example the Farcry 2 port took 3 programmers on the 360 and 14 on the PS3.

In spite of its flaws its still an excellent game, so really if the choices were Fallout 3 on PS3 (with flaws) or no fallout 3 on PS3 im sure the former is a better possibility especially if you don't want to hear about the two 90+ WRPG exclusives released towards the end of 08 which pwn exclusively on the 360.

 

    Basically what Sony did is provide a powerful scaleable system with no net.  There are very few presets and a lot of the code has to be custom.  That means no, devs can't just plug in the stuff they were using when they were making games that run on one pentiun 2 back in 1995 and expect it to work well.  Very complex processes like parallel processing need to be encompased to get good performance and a quality title.

   On the other hand the 360 is more or less like porting a game to a PC with inferior hardware (not the WORST hardware like an EeePC or something, more like what was current about 4 or 5 years ago at the high end).  The 360 was designed with that in mind in fact.  It uses the same direct X architecture and the same shortcuts that come with it.  It doesn't take a whole bunch of custom coding and there isn't a lot to dealing with the processors.

   At first it seems like MS made the right choice, but there are a few big advantages to Open GL and giving the developer more control.

   The first is that, while it makes it harder for bad code made by unskilled programing teams (back to the no net point) because you can't just slog through it and get something decent like you can with Direct X, there is a big gain to capacity and performance for those who know what they're doing.  If a dev team actually uses the full 8 processors in parallel effectively they can create graphics and game enviornments on par with much more current PCs.  A great example of this is Metal Gear solid where the 8 cores were used very effectively and the results were amazing.  It is unlikely that MGS4 is anywhere near the peak, when you have 8 processors the only real limitations is how efficient your code is.

   Another advantage is in customization.  While not having a lot of options is great for reaching a consistantly decent level of performance it is at the same time a cap on whats possible.

   Yes the PS3 being more complex does lead to some bad ports, but it also leads to games that would be more or less impossible on the 360, largely due to the more complex (and more powerful) PS3 architecture.  It's all in the developers ability level and whether they choose to get more familiar with the hardware.

   The system though, is not very good for porting things, Ill admit that freely.  It works FAR better when the PS3 is the primary console for the game since so many decisions (as to the games scale, the games code ect) are dependent on that.  Knowing MGS4 was PS3 only freed Kojima from a lot of considerations that have bogged down releases like GTA4 (limited draw distance, worse textures ect) when they decided to go multiplat.

 

3-5 years ago huh, so i guess tri-core 3.2ghz powerpc chips are 5 years old..... oh wait single core 2.ghz were top end then... oh 3 years ago you say DC/2.5ghz.... still not the same. or do you mean server level tech, in which case, yes there were power5 chips on market, where the chip in the 360 is from the power4 series, but if you go that rout the ps3 is based off the power 4 series 2 (though far more radically changed) the wii is power2 though with all of mods to trick it out it is quite powerful for its mhz rating that is one of the bonuses of ppc over x86, the ability to do more with less raw power, something intel is trying to do now