| binary solo said: The only place I think he went a bit wrong was here "in theory you can do a lot more, but that's where you come to the difference between theory and practice. And given an infinite amount of development time on there, you can craft a program that's gonna work more efficiently on the cells there than on two additional processors on the 360." Now I'm no programming expert but I gotta figure that's a little hyperbolic. No one so far has managed to do on 360 what Naughty Dog, Guerilla and Santa Monica Studios have done on PS3. And, well, unless those guys have invented worm holes or time travel they seem to have achieved what Carmack suggested would take an infinite (or to put it more mildly an unreasonably long) development time. So ND getting 3 games out in the lifetime of the PS3 each improving on the last, and Guerilla getting 2 games, again the latter improving on the former suggests the developers with the right tools aren't finding PS3 to be a major struggle. |
With the arrival of the PS3 you basically heard of conflicting views from developers. You had those who thought the PS3 was horribly complex and those developers who stated the PS3 isn't hard to develop for at all. Basically the developers with a background in games development on console (pre-XBox systems) would find the PS3 not hard to develop for at all and those developers with solely a PC gaming or XBox gaming background would find the PS3's design horribly complex.
The PS3 is easier to develop for than the PS2 or older Nintendo systems, such developers often really went deep into understanding the underlying technology to push the most out of these systems. The PC method of games development was usually extremely inefficient. Basically the used foundating operating system Windows is a huge resource hog to begin with killing a lot of potential CPU cycles and memory usage which could be used for applications and games instead. On top of this you have highly simplified and abstracted programming languages, development tools and game engines which are not optimised for any specific computer configuration (too many different options for consumers to take into account). In addition to this the operating system, tools and game engines at the time were horribly obsolete and inefficient for modern multi-processing. All in all PC gamers only use a small percentage of their PC's true hardware potential. All things considered there is a huge learning curve involved for such PC developers when introduced to PS3 technology.
That's not to say there aren't challenges for console game makers as well. On the PC you see gradual microstep advancements each year. On the console you see major leapfrogging regarding technology advancements every 5 to 10 years. Understanding the underlying hardware will not be hard for such developers at all, nor would it be difficult to port their existing assets, but suddenly they have so many new features, CPU time and memory to their disposal that it still takes many years to take full advantage of the hardware (development of many new game engine components are needed).
