Squilliam said:
Its more the fact that custom programming has gone out the window. Developers use libraries of tools and they call them up by a function and they never rewrite them unless they absolutely need to. Btw, the memory management systems in the Cell are a real headache, the more cores they use the more painful it becomes to balance the workload. Unfortunately from the last time I heard about it, the SDK didn't automate a lot of even the low end balancing and it forced the developers to do it by hand.
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Hmm. I don't really find it as difficult as you seem to think it is, but I am one of "those" engineers, who has worked in the industry so long, that I don't find custom programming to a console's particular hardware to be unusual. I actually enjoy it.
However, many younger engineers in the games industry have trouble with everything from disposing of various features of C++ -- like virtual functions, which are incredibly handy for large team projects, but bad for performance on any architecture, unless you use them sparingly and are clever with your engine design, to debugging assembly code, which, hoenstly, will never be a chore that will just go away in simulation/3D gaming.
On the whole, engineers that have even written more than one game, let alone one from just the last generation of consoles, are incredibly rare in the games industry. For the most part, the majority of engineers in the games industry will have a *much* easier time with writing PC games, Wii games, or even X360 games, than PS3 games, as you are suggesting. There is great power in usability, and this is the major divide between the X360 and the PS3 -- getting a game to run "good" on the X360 and just "fairly good" on the PS3 is easy. Getting a game to run really well, on either console, is pretty hard.
I sit through meetings knowing that the PS3 ver sion of the game is going to suffer because of the number of bones in the character skeletons are too much for the 360 to handle, and still churn out a good framerate. I also sit through meetings where the 360 version is going to look worse because 256MB is all the texture memory we might want to use, or because the fillrate is just a bit too much for the less-flexible RSX to handle. I envy exclusive developers, like the folks who work on GT5, or Gears 2, because I know that they get to push their hardware to the limit... and that's pretty cool, from an engineering perspective. Pushing both to the limit, in a cross-platform environment is difficult, because you have to change the resources you use (like more detailed animations on one version, or better textures on the other), and having platform-independant resources is... well is pretty much a waste of time and money.
In the end, no console will be both (a) cheap, and (b) powerful without going the route of the PS3 though, in my opinion. If the PS3 had a flexible GPU, and maybe a flexible memory architecture, like the X360, the console "war" would be "no contest". That's the reason I'm confident Microsoft will sustain the X360 for 10 years, as they've claimed. Upgrading it means changing everything... and besides... Nintendo is where the threat is at. MS's goal has never been to be the best console maker... its always been to make sure the livingroom doesn't start to compete with the office PC.
