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Forums - Gaming - If PS3 is hard to port to, then just make on the PS3 first....read

twesterm on 04 January 2009

Psh, we've been saying that for a long time:

[Source MTV Multiplayer Blog]

‘Ghostbusters’ Developer Prefers Working On PS3 First
Posted by Patrick Klepek on 5/2/08 at 2:39 pm.

We’ve seen many developers struggle with multi-platform development this generation. Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 are different technical beasts. Complications with the wildly popular Unreal Engine 3 middleware have made things even more difficult.

Terminal Reality, the studio behind the upcoming “Ghostbusters,” spent a lot of time evaluating each console before moving forward with their first next-generation game, Terminal Reality president Mark Randell told MTV Multiplayer at a Sierra media event last month.

In the end, contrary to most teams this generation, they decided to make PlayStation 3 their lead development platform for “Ghostbusters.” Here’s why.

 

Randell explains the technical reason behind their decision. “The multiprocessing model of the PS3 is not a general-purpose model,” said Randell. “It simultaneously uses one main processor and six specialized co-processors: the Synergetic Processing Units, or “SPU’s.”

That’s not the case with Xbox 360 and traditional modern PCs. “[Those platforms] share a general-purpose multiprocessor coding model,” he continued. “The 360 uses three general-purpose PowerPC processors, and most current PCs use between one and four Intel or AMD processors.”

The end result: Terminal Reality believes that moving a “Ghostbusters” game developed on hardware with specialized processors (PS3) to general processors (Xbox 360, PC) is much easier than doing it the other way around. Many studios, however, have chosen the other way around, with the PS3 version lagging in performance up until the last few months of development. Or, as the case with a number of mulit-platform games released in 2007, never catching up.

Randell’s team might spend a more time on technology early on, but the ease in porting means they avoid having one platform perform better than the other, he argues.

“We’ve found that writing for the PS3 first and then porting to the 360 and PC is a much simpler and more efficient procedure,” he concluded.

Even though PS3 development is notoriously difficult, most projects still lead on Xbox 360. We talked to one developer doing exactly that earlier this week. Unlike Randell, he believed you just need the right team. You’ll hear his thoughts on Monday.

***Have a hot tip? Is there a topic that Multiplayer should be covering and isn’t? Maybe you’re a developer who disagrees with this approach. Drop me an e-mail.

Filed Under: Ghostbusters, PS3, Xbox 360


 

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MikeB on 04 January 2009
Squilliam said:

A game for both the PS3 and Xbox 360 cannot generally:

  • Be larger than 6.8GB
  • Use more memory than the PS3 has available
  • Be more than either the CPUs of the PS3 or Xbox 360 can handle
  • Use graphics techniques which are incompatible on either. Deferred rendering is one such nono.

Luckily then that they are so similar in performance.

Overall the PS3 has memory advantages as it has a default harddrive for caching data (compare with virtual memory on a PC) and better bandwidth.

The 360 Arcade model is most problematic for designing current multi-platform high definition games. The Cell can handle everything the Xenon does (although the code has to be properly designed, refer to earlier quotes as examples).

Deferred rendering would be possible on the 360, but it's far too weak for that. Some GPU techniques on the 360 are incompatible with the doing this on PS3 directly like it is done on the 360, however indirectly everything can be implemented through the Cell (that means having game engines which are partly pretty different on both platforms).

There are other considerations such as a multi-platform game cannot rely on motion controls. Specs wise the PS3 is far more powerful, but the 360 is powerful enough for decent multi-platform high definition games.

Regarding 2008:

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/43916.html

"And the winner is.... "Playstation 3"!

The tides have truly turned in 2008. Developers finally up to speed with the Playstation hardware, so multi-platform games are on equal footing.

Then you have to look at the exclusives for each platform. When stacking up the PS3 holding releases against those of the 360, there's really no contest in quality and quantity"

Regarding 2009, the gap between PS3 and 360 exclusives will widen. IMO this process is going to continue for years and later PS3 games will not look like as if these games were designed for the same platform as PS3 launch games.

 



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

Squilliam on 04 January 2009

@ MikeB with regards to PS3 vs Xbox 360 development my philosopy is 'wait and see' rather than 'speculate and hope'.

2009 is still fresh and until the end of this year we won't see the true reality of the situation until it actually plays out. In the end it will probably come down to the quality of the developer making the games fun, so I doubt that anyone could really say that a game has been made significantly more fun due to some minor technical detail.



Tease.

Snake612 on 04 January 2009

I think 3rd parties just dislike sony these days.



TO GOD BE THE GLORY

rubido on 04 January 2009
MikeB said:

Some more quotes:

A PC/360 developer responded to this presentation (developer for the PC/360 game Prey):

"Sure you can just about get away with bad code now on the 360"

"Regardless of managed memory or cached memory, the concepts and methods Mike has presented is highly portable. In the case of cached memory, that method results in optimized cache locality and cache utilization (something extremely important when multiple threads are sharing L1 on a single core, and multiple cores are sharing L2), and a predictable way to optimally prefetch. Good data locality, minimal sync points, branch elimination, and vectorization are all required to be able to extract great performance out of the 360 as well."

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=47057

Nostromo (Neogaf, games developer)

"Using PS3 as a 'lead platform' is the right thing to do if you are going to make a game that has to run on 360 and PS3. The reason is very simple: on PS3 designing your data structure in the proper way is paramount to achieve decent performance (and to scale up..), while your PS3 friendly data will be also 360 friendly data in the vast majority of cases.
This is a big win cause you will definitely be able to get the most from BOTH platforms."

There are more you can find quoted in my Neogaf thread, but I think that's enough for now.

Sure... but none of the quotes you posted back your conclusion. You can put as many quotes as you like. If they don't imply your conclusion, it is still false.

EDIT: and I saw NJ5's post. But you are still quoting yourself. I asked for a source because what those developers mentioned is mostly true. There is something that bugged me a little and I would like to see what was actually written and not how you rewrote it.



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NeoRatt on 04 January 2009
Snake612 said:
I think 3rd parties just dislike sony these days.

 

That doesn't happen for no reason.  It would have been a lot easier for third parties to clutch onto the PS3 this generation.  Something has happened between this generation and the last one.  And it is not only Microsoft spending dollars to get them.   It has to do with a lot of things like cost to develop.

If you want to develop a new game that your not sure on how the market will take to it, and you have $10 million to make it, will you choose a platform that you know it will require $10 million to build on and has 27 million install base and it is firm firm date to ship, or would you make it on a platform where your costs may be $12 - $15 million for a console that has a 19.5 million install base and in development that it takes an extra 3 months to figure something out on the platform? 



goddog on 04 January 2009

hmm that would work, but it also costs significantly more to develop it on the ps3 to start.... the issue should be is cost of developing on the ps3 then porting to the 360 cheaper then developing on the 360 and porting to the ps3... Im betting the latter is true



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Million on 04 January 2009
KylieDog said:
Capcom say they make games for PC then port to both PS3 and 360 from there. Apparently is much easier than creating for either console than porting to the other.

i should hope that no deveeloper isn't literaly deveoping on the ps3/360 , game pads 'n all.