How the hell would you know Mike B- do you develop games for the PS3? Well I am certain that is a NOOO! The PS3 is a complcated machine with lots of technology where the majority of its power will not be used until later in the PS3's life when the full potential of the console is released with much better looking graphics in games. Game development for PS3 takes a lot of time and is expensive.

Rock_on_2008 said: How the hell would you know Mike B- do you develop games for the PS3? Well I am certain that is a NOOO! The PS3 is a complcated machine with lots of technology where the majority of its power will not be used until later in the PS3's life when the full potential of the console is released with much better looking graphics in games. Game development for PS3 takes a lot of time and is expensive.

I know various devs, sure the PS3 is a very advanced device and offers a lot of headroom to tap into, on this we agree. Like an Amiga was more complex due to being far more advanced than a PC was during the 80s for games development (you had to actually pick colors from a 4096 color palette, take stereo sound into consideration, possibly mouse control, multi-tasking tasks, etc). The most difficult and distinguishing aspect for the PS3 are the Cell SPUs, for the rest its pretty similar as compared to developing for a PC (maybe things like Blu-Ray disc streaming or Sixaxis support are additional considerations).

To quote Insomniac:

" "Isn't it harder to program for the SPUs?
No."

"But isn't programming for the SPUs different?
The SPU is not a magical beast only tamed by wizards.
It's just a CPU
Get your feet wet. Code something.
Highly Recommend Linux on the PS3!"

"Conclusion:

•It's not that complicated.
•Good data and good design works well on the SPUs (and will work well anywhere)‏
–Sometimes you can get away with bad design and bad data on other platforms
–...for now. Bad design will not survive this generation.
•Lots of opportunities for optimization."

http://www.insomniacgames.com/tech/articles/0208/files/insomniac_spu_programming_gdc08.ppt

Note I already stated back in 2005 there would be a learning curve for developers and difficulties with legacy game engines. It's not like this is falling down from the sky all of the sudden, this learning curve has been anticipated.

The PS1 was the easiest to program for in its generation since it had a straight forward CPU whilst N64 was a little harder with its co-processors and Saturn was the hardest with its two separate (not on the same chip as some have mistaken in forums) CPUs battling for IO. The PS1 also was not the most powerful of its generation.

The PS2 was the hardest to program for in its generation because it liked ASM code. GameCube had more straight forward hardware and XBOX was entirely a PC. PS2 was the weakest console of its generation.

The PS3 is the hardest to program for because the programmers must specify themselves how to allocate work to the SPUs. It is more automatic for the XBOX 360 and the Wii has straight forward upgraded GameCube hardware. PS3 has the most powerful processor of the lot.

But the thing is like everybody programmers are lazy and want things to be easy, but the only way to get more performance out of processors is going the multi-core way and specifying work more "manually". This means it is harder to code since running tasks in parallel as efficient as possible requires the programmer to carefully think about how he assigns jobs.

I read an University lecture on the future of processors and the way I understand it is the PS3's Cell is like a manual car. If you have ever driven a automatic car I am sure you noticed how it battles to find the right gear if you go up hill whilst with a manual car it is no big deal in getting the best performance. I am not sure that I described it clearly enough here but that is what came to mind when I read the lecture notes.

So developers are just going to have to get used to the fact that it is going to get harder to code (gulp...that means me too).

So it makes sense developing for PS3 first and then XBOX 360 and we have already seen the positive results from taking that approach.

But deveopers will surely take the easy (lazy) way out for years to come, so oh well.

@ gamerdtr

I think and hope companies won't have this luxury due to competition. The companies want to WOW! their customers, so I think with the PS3 becoming more important and PS3 exclusives as well as some cross platform titles being pushed much further there will be a huge push for devs to address software development more efficiently.

I think there are basically bigger and some smaller companies (like Housemarque) with very talented developers which will push the PS3 more and more. And then you have some bigger companies like Valve and ID Software who look at the PS3 architecture and then at their legacy engine and experience headaches thinking about all the adaptions required to make their engine competitive on the PS3.

And then you have companies lacking inhouse coder talent which are near fully dependent on middleware solutions, those companies will see benefits while the middleware matures, luckily most of the middleware providers do have good low level developers but they may also make platfrom specific sacrifices to suit easy cross platform portability for their engine (such as Epic, they seem to think their PS3 engine is mature enough already, for exclusive development being on par with other platforms like the PC is not good enough if more can be achieved).

ps1 and ps2 were without a doubt the easiest to program.

the opposite goes for ps3. but i think more devs r going to ps3 now..

300 games to hit ps3 this year. includes multi platform.

Magnific0 said: ^PS2 was not easy to program at first. One of the first developers to cry out loud about it was Resident Evil creators stating "the machine is so powerful that it will be difficult to budget or plan for the new techniques that would be required to program it"

Correct. It became easier later on as game engines matured. The same is the case with the PS3, every step foward is a step you don't have to take with future games based on the same (yet improved) engine.

However the PS3 isn't as hard to develop for as compared to the PS2 and the potential gains are much bigger! Essentially with building up an engine from scratch would not be that difficult to yield amazing results (but takes more time to yield any results, such games will take a long time to develop), some existing game engines are well suited to be adapted step by step, with this approach you can release ever increasingly impressive games in between game engine development milestones. Given unlimited resources, building from scratch would be ideal from a technical perspective, everything designing from the core up to run optimal on the new platform, but economically speaking redesigning step by step is often more economically viable. Insomniac has nearly completely redesigned their legacy game engine for Resistance 2, so with competent devs both approaches are viable to achieve groundbreaking results.

Magnific0 said: The launch lineup included many games showing jaggies, since they had trouble implementing anti-aliasing correctly. The first year not many games were launched, and besides a couple of exceptions they looked pretty much like PS1 games with a little more polished look.

It was that anti-aliasing had to be put in the game's code, instead of just using what was built into the GPU, like the GC and Xbox. Once developers caught onto that, the jaggies were no more than the other systems (but texture compression was out of the question). 

I think that the ps3 graphics are good and are only going to get better. remember how terrible the first ps1 games looked like compared to the later games. same for the ps2 aswell, a gud example is look at the first smackdown made on the ps2 compared to the last one made on the ps2 you will see what i am saying.

heres the links to prove it

http://uk.media.ps2.ign.com/media/882/882477/imgs_1.html

http://uk.gamespot.com/ps2/sports/wwfsmackdownjustbringit/images.html?om_act=convert&om_clk=gsimage&tag=images;img;4

you will be surprised at the difference