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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Carmack: "PS3 Better Than Anything... Except 360"

MikeB said:

Before people getting upset with what I wrote above I would like people to read the perspective from Mike Acton of Insomniac games, a games console programmer:

http://www.develop-online.net/features/181/QA-Insomniacs-Mike-Acton

http://www.developmag.com/interviews/175/QA-Insomniacs-Mike-Acton-Part-2

He addresses a lot of points I have been advocating since many years before that interview and I agree 100% with his given perspective there.

IMO Microsoft had a lot to do with the point Mike Acton addresses above. Microsoft has indeed bribed many university corporate managers to try to influence the industry and push through their dominance. This also by providing students and universities with free development tools. In the end Microsoft of course wants new developers to become familiar and even dependent upon the solutions they provide, actually the more dependent the better. For example if XBLA fully ties you to their platforms/solutions they will do everything they can to facilitate this.

I understand Microsoft is a commercial company, but this not at all helps with the education of more knowledgeable and free thinking programmers and developers from the grand perspective.


Just a word of advice. Many people on here MikeB would give your comments and quotes more credibility if all the ones you favoured were not from PS3 only developers. It makes your arguement entirely one sided.

I'm just pointing this out to you. Having sat back recently, the world of BS on the internet is alot clearer.

Whagt it looks like in this thread, is you putting down world reknowned leaders in graphics, and promoting developers who have never been reknowned for it.

The guys who have always provided the top graphics have come from ID Software, Crytek and Epic Games. Putting these down like you have just fuels this entire threads arguements.

This is all just a bit of advice for when you next post a comment.



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kowenicki said:

he is allowed an opinion, like everyone else...



Exactly. This doesn't need to turn into a flame & console war.



PSN: Saugeen-Uwo     Feel free to add me (put Vg Chartz as MSG)!

Nintendo Network ID: Saugeen-Uwo

Iveyboi said:
kowenicki said:

he is allowed an opinion, like everyone else...



Exactly. This doesn't need to turn into a flame & console war.


The problem surges when someone tries to establish blatant propaganda as facts. MikeB, I'm pointing at you.



mchaza said:
Booh! said:
snfr said:

So the PS3 version of Rage will look inferior, I'm calling it!

Anyway, nothing against his opinion. I guess many developers favour one console, and there is nothing wrong with it.
Although I think he should have given a reason why he prefers the 360...


He gave it a few days ago, he prefers DirectX over anything else.

open gl ftw 

He actually said DX is better, but he is sticking with GL because it's not so much better that it's worth changing over to.

OpenGL is actually not that bad. It had a rough patch when DX9 came out that it's pretty much recovered from. Even the newest Radeon drivers aren't that hopeless any more. A lot of people hated GL 3.0 when it came out (me too), but I like it now.

I would like to actually see Rage being played on a PS3 though. Every video I have EVER watched as has Willits playing on X360.



Kynes said:
Iveyboi said:
kowenicki said:

he is allowed an opinion, like everyone else...



Exactly. This doesn't need to turn into a flame & console war.


The problem surges when someone tries to establish blatant propaganda as facts. MikeB, I'm pointing at you.

Well I will just quote Mike Acton then, an oldschool knowlegdeable programmer:

"Do you think that old programming practices have caused people to fall into bad habits that make working on modern architectures harder?

It's interesting, because I think that probably the oldest programming methods are the most relevant today. It's the habits over the last five or eight years that are struggling, and it's interestingly the people that are more recently out of school that are going to have the most trouble, because the education system really hasn't caught up to how the real world is, how hardware is changing and how development is changing.

The kinds of things that they're teaching specifically about software as it's own platform is teaching people to abstract things and make them more generic - treating software as a platform, whereas hardware is the real platform - but performance, and the low-level aspects of hardware, aren't part of the education system. People come in with a wrong-headed view on how to develop software. And that's the reason why Office 2007 locks up my machine for two minutes when I get an e-mail.

So you think universities should be putting more emphasis on parallel and heterogeneous processing?

I think we're finding that in the past couple of years universities have started to address parallel processing - MIT and Georgia Tech both have good programmes - so we're starting to see trends there on that. As far as low-level programming, yeah, I'd like to see that covered - you have a lot of people leaving school now who not only have never written any assembly but don't even understand how it works in general.

They use a high-level or compiled language, and it’s like a magic box to them. But it's something that as a professional programmer you should know - it should be part of the job description - and I think fundamentally what's missing is an understanding of hardware and how it works and how it fits into the programming ecosystem. So maybe what they should be blending is an electronic engineering degree along with a computer science course."

Certainly you don't honestly think yourself to be more knowledgeable on this subject than Mike Acton is? And I challenge any games programmer posting on VGChartz to claim otherwise!!



Naughty Dog: "At Naughty Dog, we're pretty sure we should be able to see leaps between games on the PS3 that are even bigger than they were on the PS2."

PS3 vs 360 sales

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MikeB said:

Before people getting upset with what I wrote above I would like people to read the perspective from Mike Acton of Insomniac games, a games console programmer:

http://www.develop-online.net/features/181/QA-Insomniacs-Mike-Acton

http://www.developmag.com/interviews/175/QA-Insomniacs-Mike-Acton-Part-2

He addresses a lot of points I have been advocating since many years before that interview and I agree 100% with his given perspective there.

IMO Microsoft had a lot to do with the point Mike Acton addresses above. Microsoft has indeed bribed many university corporate managers to try to influence the industry and push through their dominance. This also by providing students and universities with free development tools. In the end Microsoft of course wants new developers to become familiar and even dependent upon the solutions they provide, actually the more dependent the better. For example if XBLA fully ties you to their platforms/solutions they will do everything they can to facilitate this.

I understand Microsoft is a commercial company, but this not at all helps with the education of more knowledgeable and free thinking programmers and developers from the grand perspective.

Wow, how you extrapolated all that to basically saying Carmack can't crunch assembly because he only knows high level programming shows you are full of shit.  A lot of Carmack's techniques for getting Wolfenstein and Doom running at their frame rates were programmed from the assembler level, and were a large part of the techniques they used back in the day (ModeX/320x240, unrolling loops, profiling, etc).



MikeB said:
Kynes said:
MikeB said:

Before taking his comments too seriously I think there are some crucial aspects you need to understand before giving value to Carmack's opinions.

Carmack was amongst the first of a new breed of game programmers with a decreased knowledge of computing technology. Before this most top game programmers needed to fullly understand what they were doing and how the actual hardware they were working with really operates.

Carmack grew up in the age of technologically very obsolete IBM compatible computers running a very flawed and featureless operating system called MSDOS (which was based on stolen source code of an almost equally flawed operating system called CP/M). There were more advanced systems out there like Apple's GUI based operating systems and more importantly with regard to gaming the Amiga computer which especially shocked Apple's head of Macintosh development at the time for its far ahead of its time functionality and multimedia power.

Quoting Apple's at the time head of Macintosh development regarding the past: "When the Amiga came out, everyone [at Apple] was scared as hell." Apple could not figure out how Amiga Inc could have created the Amiga computer which allowed advanced features such as a fully pre-emptive multitasking 32-bit GUI-supporting operating system with the ability to display thousands of colors and output high quality stereo audio at a time when CLI-only PCs could only beep and like the 2-color soundless Mac could only run 1 application at a time. The Amiga went on to become very popular in Europe as a multimedia and games plaform and for advanced niche markets which required more advanced systems such as at NASA for rocket telemetry, the special effects movie industry and early efforts with regard to virtual reality experiments (including military simulators). The IBM compatible PC took a long time to match the Amiga's capabilities and the underlying architecture was so very obsolete it was really a hell having to operate those systems directly.

But eventually simpler computer languages were developed which more and more hid the underlying obsolete flawed x86 PC architecture from a new wave of less knowledgeable programmers (compare this to translators). Fast forward to today you don't per se need to understand much with regard to computing technology to create a game with many multi-featured pre-baked development tools. For example basically even you don't need to understand anything with regard to computer technology, understanding the underlying architecture to create a fully featured game in for example LittleBigPlanet 2 and the true knowledge of many game “programmers” today don't really extend far beyond this.

John Carmack first received much credit with the release of the very popular game "Doom" at the time. This game greatly helped to put the IBM PC on the map as a gaming platform. This was some 8 years after the release of the Amiga platform. Many consider Doom as one of the first and most advanced FPS games ever for its time, although neither of those two statements would be correct: For example there was already a very advanced virtual reality FPS game called Dactyl Nightmare build with Amiga technology predating even Carmack's Wolfenstein 3D. Unlike Wolfenstein 3D, Dactyl Nightmare allowed multiple hight levels (going up stairs), included stereoscopic 3D graphics, motion control sensors for both hand and head tracking (for example allowing the gamer to bend his arm around pillars hiding behind them or looking above or below you by turning your head) and 4 player network play with realtime spoken microphone communication. (Dactyl Nightmare include Death Match and Capture the Flag modes, game modes still popular today).

Despite the facts Carmack received a lot of praise as Doom was one of the best games for in the home at the time, this despite technologically there were already far more advanced games and this technology significantly predates the arrival of Doom by years. Until the arrival of Doom the Amiga basically reigned home computer gaming and of course he was asked if he would create an Amiga port of his game. His reaction was that it would not be possible and this today underlines his technologically incompetence at the time as the easily portable source code of Doom was released to the public and now runs on Amiga computer configurations older than oldest compatible PCs can run the game (actually meanwhile those nowadays also run Carmack's Quake, which needed a far newer top level PC configurations to run than Amigas can through at the time available upgrades).

So IMO it's very important to understand where he comes from and the kind of games developer he actually is before giving too much value to his comments. A person like him needs technology familiar to him and requires not too much knowledge of how the platform actually operates (simplifications and abstractions).

Then how do you explain the Quake 3 normalize function trick in ASM with a magic number Carmack used? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root

 

Come on, Carmack is a billonaire because he is one of the best in what he does. You are only a end user, one that discredits anything that doesn't fit your agenda.


Quake 3 is an easily portable high level programmed game. It's even ported to AmigaOS4, MorphOS and I was indirectly involved through the Phoenix Developer Consortium in porting the game to QNX Neutrino.

The port to AmigaOS4 only took 1 developer a few weeks, it provides nothing specifically hardware optimised. Actually I know the programmer who ported the game to AmigaOS4 pretty well (I did dozens of interviews). Usually he is working on more difficult tasks such as operating system kernel development and development tools laying the foundation to make ports possible. The kind of programmers I have ties to include developers who actually design operating systems and development languages. These are the sort of people who really understand the fundamentals of the hardware well.

MikeB, is this high level? This function is the most used in the Quake3 program, used to normalize vectors, needed to draw all the polygons:

float Q_rsqrt( float number )

  {

       long i;

      float x2, y;

      const float threehalfs = 1.5F;

 

      x2 = number * 0.5F;

      y = number;

      i = * ( long * ) &y; // evil floating point bit level hacking [sic]

      i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); // what the fuck? [sic]

      y = * ( float * ) &i; y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); // 1st iteration //

      y = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) ); // 2nd iteration, this can be removed

 

      return y;

  }

In this function, Carmack uses int operations and bit level operands to solve a sqrt, due to the lack of flop computational power in early x86 processors. Can you tell me with a straight face that this guy isn't a fucking genius? Please stop spreading FUD now, shill.



MikeB said:
Kynes said:
Iveyboi said:
kowenicki said:

he is allowed an opinion, like everyone else...



Exactly. This doesn't need to turn into a flame & console war.


The problem surges when someone tries to establish blatant propaganda as facts. MikeB, I'm pointing at you.

Well I will just quote Mike Acton then, an oldschool knowlegdeable programmer:

"Do you think that old programming practices have caused people to fall into bad habits that make working on modern architectures harder?

It's interesting, because I think that probably the oldest programming methods are the most relevant today. It's the habits over the last five or eight years that are struggling, and it's interestingly the people that are more recently out of school that are going to have the most trouble, because the education system really hasn't caught up to how the real world is, how hardware is changing and how development is changing.

The kinds of things that they're teaching specifically about software as it's own platform is teaching people to abstract things and make them more generic - treating software as a platform, whereas hardware is the real platform - but performance, and the low-level aspects of hardware, aren't part of the education system. People come in with a wrong-headed view on how to develop software. And that's the reason why Office 2007 locks up my machine for two minutes when I get an e-mail.

So you think universities should be putting more emphasis on parallel and heterogeneous processing?

I think we're finding that in the past couple of years universities have started to address parallel processing - MIT and Georgia Tech both have good programmes - so we're starting to see trends there on that. As far as low-level programming, yeah, I'd like to see that covered - you have a lot of people leaving school now who not only have never written any assembly but don't even understand how it works in general.

They use a high-level or compiled language, and it’s like a magic box to them. But it's something that as a professional programmer you should know - it should be part of the job description - and I think fundamentally what's missing is an understanding of hardware and how it works and how it fits into the programming ecosystem. So maybe what they should be blending is an electronic engineering degree along with a computer science course."

Certainly you don't honestly think yourself to be more knowledgeable on this subject than Mike Acton is? And I challenge any games programmer posting on VGChartz to claim otherwise!!

Please tell me where do Mike Acton contradicts anything Carmack has said, or discredits Carmack.



youarebadatgames said:
MikeB said:

Before people getting upset with what I wrote above I would like people to read the perspective from Mike Acton of Insomniac games, a games console programmer:

http://www.develop-online.net/features/181/QA-Insomniacs-Mike-Acton

http://www.developmag.com/interviews/175/QA-Insomniacs-Mike-Acton-Part-2

He addresses a lot of points I have been advocating since many years before that interview and I agree 100% with his given perspective there.

IMO Microsoft had a lot to do with the point Mike Acton addresses above. Microsoft has indeed bribed many university corporate managers to try to influence the industry and push through their dominance. This also by providing students and universities with free development tools. In the end Microsoft of course wants new developers to become familiar and even dependent upon the solutions they provide, actually the more dependent the better. For example if XBLA fully ties you to their platforms/solutions they will do everything they can to facilitate this.

I understand Microsoft is a commercial company, but this not at all helps with the education of more knowledgeable and free thinking programmers and developers from the grand perspective.

A lot of Carmack's techniques for getting Wolfenstein and Doom running at their frame rates were programmed from the assembler level

Don't know but from what I heard Wolfenstein 3D wasn't hard to port to Amiga.

In any case I will withdraw from this discussion. I meant no offense to John Carmack at all I even stated his company's Doom was one of the best games of its time...



Naughty Dog: "At Naughty Dog, we're pretty sure we should be able to see leaps between games on the PS3 that are even bigger than they were on the PS2."

PS3 vs 360 sales

MikeB said:
...

Don't know but from what I heard Wolfenstein 3D wasn't hard to port to Amiga.

In any case I will withdraw from this discussion. I meant no offense to John Carmack at all I even stated his company's Doom was one of the best games of its time...

You withdraw because you have been uncovered as a shill. Your lies are here for everyone to see.