...  Without Killing Your Studio...

Valve Slides

Please download the PDF first, is here:

 How To Go From PC to Cross Platform Development Without Killing Your Studio

 OK, I wanted to post this while ago, but I thought "maybe is a bad idea, a lot of people take this things really bad..."

Talks about some serios issues, like putting the Consoles some steps below the PC s (Several to be honest)...

Lacks of memory, lacks of power, slow dev time...

It comes from valve, so is not some kind of Indie new dev, is valve...

Some interesting points to take in account for cross plataform games...

"This Is a High-Level Talk"

Consoles are like PCs...

A PC
    + Closed Platform
    + Manufacturer QA
    + Limited Memory

    = Console

Problem:
    Game Runs Out Of Memory.

    PC: Slowwwwww
   
    Console: Crash and burn baby!!!!!!

Memory
    Memory is critically strict.
    The #1 reason levels get changed.
    The later you wait, the more drastic the cuts.

Reduce.
    Budget your textures / models  / meshes  carefully.
    It’s easy to just  downsample all  your textures...
    But you can get  much better  results with careful  targeting.

Panic.
    If all else fails... split levels.
    Remove characters.
    Decimate textures.
    Downsample animation.
    Dealing with memory sooner will spare you all these painful measures.


Multithreading (Source Engine)
On the 360:
    50% performance improvement just from queuing graphics functions.
    4x increase in framerate with full implementation.

On the PS3:
    Game wouldn’t run otherwise!
    Our game already had a client/server split.

Avoid chasing pointers all over memory.
    Especially critical on PS3.
    SPUs have only 256kb of memory.
    Random memory access is huge stall.

All the power of the PS3 is in its Cells.
    The PPU will be always saturated.
    General C++ code does not run well on SPUs.
    Code memory is tight.

I would post this on the normal forums, but it will put more gas on the fire..

About the points, well we know how the lack of memory is the main problem in the consoles, the hard time trying to port code to the PS3, the easy one putting on the 360, and probably the end of the discussion about some members and "the power of tha cell vs pcs (Ejem, Crysis, ejem)"... maybe the lack of memory is the biggest hit, but is more there, so any further discusion, will be nice if you read it first and understand it...

This is not the absolute truth but is a nice start...

Ok it makes much more sense if you click the link.

I think most people would agree it is much eaiser to develope for the PC.