So what exactly is your Sony-paid salary MikeB? I ask because im thoroughly convinced I could do the same job your doing for much less than what they pay you. I may not like Sony much after they trojan-horsed Blu-Ray into the PS3, but i'll gladly lie to peoples faces about the PS3's technical specifications if Sony will pay me too, honestly I have no conscience.

So:
Deny all the PS3's limitations to the death.
Fail to recognize any possible Sony oversights with regard to trying to make the PS3 a gaming computer.
Be ok with lying to circumnavigate the fact the in some technical aspects the Xbox 360 is a superior gaming platform than the PS3.


Now is their anything else in your job description i'm missing? Its just I'd like to be informed before I send in my application.........

@ starcraft

Time to grow please.

The PS3 is far more powerful technically, but if you write your game specifically for the XBox 360 you may run into some problems porting the game in full quality to the PS3, as you may have to do a significant amount of redesign of the game engine.

Also XBox 360 / PS3 mutliplatform games are unlikely to ever push the PS3 to the max, as they will most often likely to stick to 5.1 audio, not use the harddrive, keep the amount of data to fit on a DVD as well, not use to much of the SPE processing potential to keep the game portable tot the XBox 360, not make too much use of the Sixaxis, etc. So many potential sacrifices are likely to be made, IMO it's companies like Insomniac, Naughty Dog and Guerrilla Games which will break new ground without having to worry about common cross platform strenghts and weaknesses. Just look at R&C: TOD and Uncharted already!

Hahah Clap Clap Clap Starcraft :)

Mate, Ubisoft, Midway, Silicon Knights and other developers have spoken out about the PS3's insufficient memory (not to mention game delays regularly attributed to the PS3's lack of memory and frame rate issues, often these delays are for PS3 exclusives). In all honesty mate at some point you have to allow reality to penetrate your extremely fanboyish perceptions of the PS3's gaming capabilities. The Cell is no doubt very powerful, but it is in no way optomised for gaming. The PS3's main limitation is memory, but it also just lacks general gaming optomisation, unlike the 360's very customized and targeted gaming console. Of course the 360 has a significant limitation (not now, but yes in the future i'm sure) in it's lack of storage.

Fortunately, these consoles respective major limitations each have an easy fix. The 360's lack of storage will be rectified for most games by using multiple DVDs and allowing hard drives to be necessary (we all know its coming). The PS3's lack of memory will easily be fixed later in the generation by......er..wait.......OH F*#K!!!!

MikeB wrote:

To clarify with regard to the potential sacrifices, some sacrifices would rather relate to additional production costs than real problems relating to cross platform developement:

- With regard to 7.1 audio it should be no problem to create 7.1 audio for the PS3 version and downgrade the quality to 5.1 audio for the XBox 360.

- With regard to harddrive usage, you could use this but you would still have to worry about the game core running well enough on the XBox 360 core. Thus you cannot make your game dependent on this approach.

- With regard to Blu-Ray you can add additional levels and such, but the same issues arrise as with regard to the harddrive. If you break up your game using multiple DVDs publishers will have to take into account additional costs, probably mainly relating to game design, you will have to adapt the game and probably duplicate much of the game on the discs to create a more seamless user experience and prevent too much disc swapping. This is less an issue with highly linear games but for a game like God of War 2 which would take up at least 14 CDs (instead of 1 DVD) this would be very annoying, likewise as with other games which allow you to revisit prior locations. For games more non-linear games like GTA and OBlivion this will present to be a problem.

- With regard to SPE processing power, it would be easily possible to create additional effects for the PS3 version, but you will have to take into account some things, like in Heavenly Sword you have thousands of enemies on screen at once and to recreate this on the XBox 360 would be problematic. So this more relates to game complexity rather just added bells and whistles.

- With regard to Sixaxis usage, you will have to worry about this functionality being playable well enough with an analog stick as well. For example in R&C: TOD you can control ratchet while simultaneously controlling tornados as well as being able to move the camera position, such an approach wouldn't be an option.

@ starcraft

If so, they probably didn't adapt their game engine well enough to suit the PS3 hardware yet (don't use enough Blu-Ray and harddrive streaming, don't use the SPEs). The problem is really their legacy game engines they need to adapt.



It's actually very well suited and powerful for any type of multimedia. The 68000 processor was designed for computer systems like the Amiga and Macintosh, but was also used by the most powerful game consoles and for the most impressive arcade games of its time. It's a myth that the Cell processor wouldn't be well suited for advanced game engines, it basically comes down to being able to perform many complex calculations and the Cell is very powerful for this.



Streaming game engines.

Streaming game engines would theoretically be possible on either console, but in reality are difficult and costly to implement. Furthermore, please stop for a moment and consider what you just said. You just faulted each and every developer that has questioned the PS3's memory and frame-rate issues. Due to the glorious anonymity of the internet we don't know who you are or what you do, but I supremely doubt that you are in a position to usurp the intelligence of each of these developers with regards to the PS3's technical capabilities (unless of course my Sony-employee joke was actually true, but then we would encounter the issues of bias and credibility).

As for the SPE's, greater numbers of game developers are now questioning their ability to add to a game's technical quality. Common complaints include the extraordinary amount of to and fro that has to go on before data gets to post-processing and the limitation of having only one core processor to co-ordinate the efforts of the SPE's, as opposed to the three Xbox 360 cores working in tandem to create six separate processing threads.

At the end of the day Sony has included two primary products in the PS3 hoping to boost them in markets OTHER than the games industry by increasing their exposure and economies of scale (Blu-Ray and CELL). In doing so, they have created a machine that is not optomised for gaming, with my personal opinion being they thought they'd get away with it due to their previous consoles dominance.

And to address your earlier comment that Blu-Ray allows the streaming of more data than DVD (you were discussing memory, so I assume you meant simultaneously rather than 50gb to 9gb), the Xbox 360's DVD read speed can be optomised to 16X, whereas the PS3's BLu-Ray drive can only be optomised to 2X. It is true that these speeds are measured on different scales, but tests have indicated that actual streaming speeds range from a slight Xbox 360 advantage, to relative comparability.

@ starcraft

Fingers crossed, ironically this could help the PS3 versions of cross platform games. It would raise the bar with regard to common strenghts and weaknesses.

With regard to some childish people posting here, I rather you do your best to give in depth counter perspectives and reasoning, instead of resorting to name calling or cheapshots, IMO this makes yourself look like a fanboy instead.

I have written many technical articles and discussed many issues with hardware designers and programmers, that's where my interests for the PS3 stems from. For example I never owned any of the home consoles of the previous generation. I love to explore how operating systems function, but game engines and gaming hardware have become ever more complex, advanced, multi-functional and thus interesting as well for me.

@ starcraft

I am Mike Bouma, almost 31 years old, my girlfriend is 21 and studies pharmacy, I'm a Physical Therapist as well as former tech writer & reporter, editor at OSNews.com and some other tech related websites. I have been part of developer consortiums and have been an advisor for various smaller and larger tech companies. I do not work for Sony, nor IBM, but I have been well informed by some of their best technical specialists.

 Now that I've been given a face, can we have a respectful conversation and while we're at it tell a little bit more about yourself as well? How old are you and what do you do?

This then presents a problem Mike Bouma. Why is it that your examination of the PS3's capabilities are routinely at odds with those of multi-platform developers, as well as inconsistent with the repeated and widespread delays and frame rate issues present in supposedly the most prolific and brilliant exclusive games?

The problem appears to be Mr Bouma, that you are quite simply a fanboy. Your ownership of consoles in the last generation (or lack thereof) doesn't necessarily contribute to a sense of bias towards one console in this generation. I too do not own any of the last generations consoles, but of all of them most readily had access to my neighbour's PS2, which I liked immensely. I have not once seen you admit that the PS3 has technical faults, or that some of its features clearly lack gaming optomisation. Whenever their is an issue with one of the consoles games, or a game (read, every PS3 game in existence) fails to look like Sony claimed CELL-based games would, you attribute it to lazy developers or to the Xbox 360 version dragging down the PS3 edition.