@ Deneidez

Media Molecule devs are getting paid...



A recent headline:

"Microsoft To Give Students Dev Software For Free" (2008) This package includes XNA Game Studio, which is very high level and locked to Microsoft platforms.

Even the head of Lionhead, a company bought out by Microsoft acknowledged XNA is not the road to follow for professional games development.

There are many similar university related headlines. Maybe instead of me being paranoid maybe you are being blind?



For example Heavenly Sword, the thousands of onscreen warriors are handled by a SPU. Like the game or not, Lair's AI was running completely on SPU(s).

The PPU isn't poor, if you move near all the major workload onto the SPEs, there's more than enough resources left for the PPU to handle amazing AI as well.



I am a technology enthusiast, Sony could have been Philips or Panasonic, all things equal, it would not matter to me. I never owned a PS2 for example.

So taking your logic and applying it, what does Microsoft pay you?

@MikeB

So can you now admit that more work cost more money even when they are making PS3 game? :)

Well, why sony doesn't do this? Isn't this more like investment? And yes I have seen a lot of offers from MS, but mostly those have been for PC development. Giving visual studio for free etc. All that makes however sense and can be seen as investment. Still I haven't seen any lecture notes/class material that MS has provided.

And yes, XNA is more like a toy when compared to professional games development.

Yah, and I don't like visual studio. For me they can keep their crappy programming enviroment unless they will port it for linux, which I don't see happening soon or more likely ever.

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.

Actually Killzone 2 dev said this,

"Also having the CELL and SPUs means we can offload all of our physics processing to an SPU, or process AI using the SPU's."

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.

More detailed article the better. I preferably article on IEEE, ACM etc.

Nothing... Actually I hate MS as they are doing terrible job in PC world with their windows & dx. I mostly use linux, because I can't really stand windows. However I still have to use windows to play games on my PC so I had to use multiboot. I am just trying to be neutral and objective in console world. Its quite hard sometimes because one side is acting like religion and demanding for me to show my side, if I happen to say that I am on neither side they just throw me into enemy list.

As I have said before I don't own any consoles and I haven't even ever owned one. I might own someday PS3 or/and WII. PS3 mostly for programming/learning purposes and WII for my GF. However I have no plans for X360, because it doesn't offer me anything.

@ Deneidez

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.



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.



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."



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.

@MikeB

And PS3 needs more work to get the job done, which means developing for PS3 will cost more. You can't deny this one either. And when gaming business is what it is currently(Studies show that only 4% of games are profitable.) you really can't afford it. I still would love to see budget for LBP as its sales aren't that good atm.

This isn't what I asked. I asked why sony is so passive compared to MS. You sound too much like an ad when ever I ask things like this. So I guess your answer is that CELL is the holyness itself and its everyones destiny to know about it, because sony don't want to use the way of the devil by luring ppl to use CELL system. Give me a break!

If quotes is all you got, you have no usable information about this matter.

If its really this easy, why they don't use those more? Like it or not SPUs are not like super PPUs that can do everything better than PPU. They are cheaper, more dedicated and lack some ablities that PPU have. Why theres even PPU, if SPUs are so incredible?

Old or not, its all we got atm about this matter. You can try to spin it into any direction, but all anyone can trust are those dev notes.

Btw, is there a single exclusive AAA game on X360 that doesn't have 3rd party engine? :)

@ Deneidez

Not all the money a game costs goes to the programmers, not by a long shot. You just need to have a handful of good programmers, then you need talented artists both graphical and musician, actors, game designers, writers, etc. In addition you need good marketing and PR people, quality testers, managers, etc.

Really from the grand perspective, yes programmers if not resorting to pre-baked technology play a crucial role, but even then they are just a piece of the pie. Managers usually cost way more, no matter if they really do a good job or not (they also often take too much credit).



Luckily there's a PPU and a more ordinary graphics chip, else the platform would be a hell to adapt legacy game engines for. There would have been near no games until new game engines would be ready to be used.

Now it's a far more gradual process. I wouldn't say they (The SPEs) lack abilities, I would rather state they lack some non crucial conveniences.