MikeB on 23 November 2008
@ Deneidez
So can you now admit that more work cost more money even when they are making PS3 game? :)
I don't get your point. Of course more work costs more. They built up their game engine from scratch, of course that takes time and effort. But is there really a pre-baked game engine out there suitable for a game like LittleBigPlanet and what it offers? The technology focus of the game is a physics based platform game environment and user content creation, there's no other game like that available that I know about.
Well, why sony doesn't do this?
The Cell is open and well documented, university students learn a lot of low level stuff from its design. You even can learn a lot with just Linux on a plain standard PS3.
Hardware designers and software designers can benefit a lot getting familar with its design. Programmers will learn ways to get the most out of other platforms as well, being more efficient, smarter ways of doing things, how to best handle parallelism, etc.
Sony and IBM did a lot to enhance the general knowledge base amongst student programmers. I don't think they want to go the same road as Microsoft has taken with trying to lure potential game developers into low knowledge requiring easy abstracted solutions only locked to specific platforms. Of course about every programming student has a PC and far fewer a PS3.
Instead of just saying how about showing some reliable articles that show this stuff? And I didn't mean poor as a bad, I ment more like poor thing has too much work to do while game is running.
I have some quotes:
"In Heavenly Sword, the Cell enables incredible numbers of enemies to be on screen at one time. The trick is that Cell treats entire regiments as a single unit of artificial intelligence when they are at a distance; as they draw closer, Cell gradually divides the army into smaller and smaller groups, so they eventually become individual troops with unique fighting styles and tactics."
On beyond3D a dev went through some more detail on how they used the SPEs, but I had a hard time finding these comments.
(Lair) "Not a specific S.P.U. Our S.P.U. code works dynamically, so we are not locking up one S.P.U. and saying "OK, you are the A.I. S.P.U., but we instead say, "OK, here are these 15 things including A.I." We run them on the S.P.U., and the code automatically distributes them."
However when we look at their dev notes(yes for example that picture that has been in this thread also) their AI is/mainly is on PPU only.
Well PPU code is ported to the SPUs gradually, you can decide to move some things above others first. Probably those parts which provide the best gains or are most easily accomplished.
That chart is a bit old now, it may well be out of date.
