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CES 2007: Words from id Software |
Listed in: PS3, Xbox 360, PC Gaming Tags: Game Informer, id Software, John Carmack, Microsoft, playstation 3 updates, Sony
Game Informer interviewed id Software's John Carmack and Todd Hollenshead about the QuakeCon, the state of PC Gaming, and the pros and cons of developing for the PS3 and the Xbox 360. The interview gets a bit lengthy so we'll just relay to you folks the juicy bits, and if you're interested about further details, you can make use of our source-link below.
Here's John Carmack on developing for the Xbox 360:
Microsoft has made some pretty nice tools that show you what you can make on the Xbox 360. I get a nice multi-frame graph, and I can label everything across six threads and three cores. They are nice tools for doing all of that, but the fundamental problem is that itÂ’s still hard to do. If you want to utilize all of that unused performance, itÂ’s going to become more of a risk to you and bring pain and suffering to the programming side. It already tends to be a long pole in the tent for getting a game out of the door. ItÂ’s no help to developers to be adding all of this extra stuff where we can spend more effort on this.
And here's his take on developing for the PS3:
WeÂ’ve got our PlayStation 3 dev kits, and weÂ’ve got our code compiling on it. I do intend to do a simultaneous release on it. But the honest truth is that Microsoft dev tools are so much better than SonyÂ’s. We expect to keep in mind the issues of bringing this up on the PlayStation 3. But weÂ’re not going to do much until weÂ’re at the point where we need to bring it up to spec on the PlayStation 3.
WeÂ’ll probably do that two or three times during the major development schedule. ItÂ’s not something weÂ’re going to try and keep in-step with us. None of my opinions have really changed on that. I think the decision to use an asymmetric CPU by Sony was a wrong one. There are aspects that could make it a winning decision, but theyÂ’re not helpful to the developers. If they make the developers say that Sony is going to own the main marketplace, letÂ’s make them develop toward this and build it this way, it would somewhat downplay the benefits of the Xbox 360 and play to the PlayStation 3Â’s strengths.
I suspect theyÂ’re not going to overwhelmingly crush the marketplace this time, which wasnÂ’t clear a year ago. A lot of people were thinking itÂ’s going to be a rerun of the last generation, and itÂ’s now looking like it might not be. IÂ’ve been pulling for Microsoft, because I think theyÂ’ve done a better job for development support, and I think they have made somewhat smarter decisions on the platform. ItÂ’s not like the PlayStation 3 is a piece of junk or anything. I was not a fan of the PlayStation 2 and the way its architecture was set up. With the PlayStation 3, itÂ’s not even that itÂ’s ugly--they just took a design decision that wasnÂ’t the best from a development standpoint.
The short of the long of it? Carmack thinks that both consoles are hard to develop for. He's not saying that both consoles are trash, he's just saying that they're not developer friendly. He notes that at the least, Microsoft has tools that make it all look easier, and that with the PS3, the architecture isn't even ugly, it's just that the design decision that Sony made wasn't the best from a development standpoint.
Via Game Informer
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He is saying that with MS help...they readily Acheived High Performance on the 360 CPU...But the PS3 Cell Will take time for Developers to Adapt.
This is a Time-Based Issue...They will Get Used to the CELL archticture...as The CELL will Be Further Improved and Enter New Applications...So sooner or Later the Will have to Get the Grip Over it.
This is the Case with Every Revolutionary Design..its Hard at First...and SONY should try Making it Easier On developers with Tools.
Hopefully,Sony will Share Some of its Love with 3rd Party Developers...Now that Sony,s 1st Party is Already in the Right Direction.
Remember...Easy is Good...But that Doesnt Mean it Has More Power..its Just Easy :)
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i'm just 16 and these aren't the games i gew up with but i've played these for houres because of their fame.
My favourite game by id is doom3 which was released in 2004 or so.
id rulz, microsoft rulz, sony sux but i'll be buying this peace of playstation this time
let's see what the next next-gen consoles will be
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http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t+70056
Sweeney- "Looking at the long term future, the next 10 years or so, my hope and expectation is that there will be a real convergence between the CPU, GPU and non traditional architectures like the PhysX chip from Ageia, the Cell technology from Sony. You really want all those to evolve in the way of a large scale multicore CPU that has a lot of non traditional computing power as a GPU has now. A GPU processes a huge number of pixels in parallel using relatively simply control flow, CPU's are extremely good at random access logic, lots of branching, handling cache and things like that. I think really, essential, graphics and computing need to evolve together to the point where the future renderers I hope and expect will look a lot more like a software renderer from previous generations than a fixed function rasterizer pipeline and the stuff we have currently. I think GPU's will ultimately end up being... you know when we look at this 10 years from now, we will look back at GPU's being kinda a temporary fixed function hardware solution, to a problem that ultimately was, just general computing"
He sees the Cell Processor as the Future in Which Processors are Headed.
He also Said they Prefer Nvidia Cards Over ATI,s[this will be important]
This is the man who Participated in the UE3 that made Gears of war...and the Upcoming UT2K7 for the PS3
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The xbox 360 for me is dreadful. Sure Xbox Live is the most amazing service ever. But seriously though the 360 doesn't have a lot of good exclusive games apart from Halo, Fable and Gears of War. And it hasnt had a good release in the past 6 months apart form gear of war. Sure it has a bundle is good games but nothing special. Even Halo 3 isnt as good as it as been hyped up to be. It little things that make the 360 annoying, such as no HD-DVD playback unless you buy an add-on, and no upgradable HDD that you can do straight away without waitin for microsoft to make one. Even the fact that games can't be put on HD-DVD disks annoys me as games may start to come on 2 disks in the future. I think that the 360 for what it is, is overpriced seriously. It doesn't have wireless internet out of the box, HD playback out of the box, and Xbox costs you £40 yearly (which isnt a lot but is annoying) on top of your broadband fee.
The Playstation 3 recently as had a lot of bad press, but this is over its price. People find ways to critize a console when it costs a lot because.... well it costs a lot. But people are forgetting the features that the PS3 is offering for the price. Such as Blu-Ray playback out of the box, upgradable HDD (up to 300gb) out of the box, Free Wireless online play out of the box, and Linux for hackers and people out of the box. Sony has offered all this and people begin to forget it. Sure Sony has lost some exclusive but not important ones, and its no like you still can't get them on the PS3 anymore. In fact most people forgot its exclusives it has left! Here is a list of up and coming games for the PS3 which are amazing in my personal opinion:
PS3 Exclusive and up and coming Games:
-Coded Arms Assault
-Devil May Cry 4
-Eight days (SCE)
-Final Fantasy XIII
-Final Fantasy Versus XIII
-Formula One (Published by Sony)
-Grand Turismo 5 (Published by Sony)
-Heavenly Sword (Published by Sony)
-Killzone 3 (SCE)
-Lair
-Full Auto 2: Battlelines
-Genji: Days of the Blade
-Metal Gear Solid 4
-Ratchet and Clank 5 (Published by Sony)
-Motor Storm (Published by Sony)
-Resistance: Fall of Man (Confirmation)
-Ridge Racer 7 (Confirmation)
-The Getaway (SCE)
-Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom (SCE)
-Warhawk (Published by Sony)
-Unreal Tournament 2007
-Silent Hill 5
-GTA IV
-Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier (Published by Sony)
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Jhon Carmack is one of the BEST programers for the past 15 years.
When doom3 came out it was unherd of And it shocked everyone. Just like unreal3
What he says is proably true.
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There's many things not to like about the PS3 other than price.
1. No DVD upconversion any time soon. This is because it will hurt blu ray sales and $ony needs that bad. Like how converted video on the PSP can't be played full resolution (320x240 instead of 480x272) because it would hurt UMD sales but that was a failure anyway.
2. Still not seeing any 1080p 60fps games like was promised and no 720p to 1080p upconversion for TVs not supporting 720p. Old HD TVs are nearly useless with the PS3 because they only get a 480p signal.
3. Sixaxis interference issues. What did sony blame that on? Computer bluetooth use nearby? Computers were using bluetooth before the PS3 but I guess they forgot about that. The PS3 is supposed to replace the computer right?
4. No upscaling on backward compatible games either and picture quality worse than the PS2. Will a firmware update fix that? If it's anything like the PSP, firmware updates will focus more on sony's security rather than useful features for the user.
5. Online! Where to begin? For $4.17 a month, choose from 160 games to play against 5 million users. All games support full voice chat, you get video conferencing, unified friends list, only one username and password needed, downloadable HD movies without the HD-DVD add on, and awesome technical support. With the PS3 it's free, but there's only 20-25 games to play against maybe half a million users. Everything else is an XBOX live ripoff and generally thrown together at the last minute. The selection of demos and downloadable content is pathetic.
6. Profitability for developers. Why does that matter? MORE AND BETTER GAMES. Better development tools for lower costs. More familiar architecture for faster development. Far more units sold for more potential sales. Bad press scares away developers. Microsoft had some at first, but everything has been resolved since. Disapointing sales and reduced demand for the PS3 after a very short time. Yes this can change but it's an upward battle. I'm seeing a lot more excuses from Kaz, Ken, and the others than announcments for improvments or innovation.
7. Absolutely no proof whatsoever the PS3 is better for gaming. At least for things that matter, that is. Very large games on the PS3 can be only one disc. That is the only proven advantage over the 360 and with sony's track record for making promises they can't keep, how can anybody believe them at this point? The 360's graphics can't be touched, and the PS3's hand me down games from the 360 look exactly the same. That's not what sony promised! Someday when "the potential is harnessed," the graphics may be able to match the 360's.
Well that's what I came up with for now more to follow when the fanboys respond. I'm waiting....
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-Carmack:
"Bahh I hate the Playstation because I don't understand it! The 360 is setup so similar to a PC and so I love it! Yeah! MS FTW!!!"
--
The more I read interviews with this guy the more I feel that he's a played out PC dev who refuses to evolve with the times and work on hardware outside of the PC or 360 which consequentially has tools and methods of programming for that are very similar to the PC.
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"The more I read interviews with this guy the more I feel that he's a played out PC dev"
Says a nobody on a games forums. The truth is, the more you read interviews with John Carmack, the more you don't like the fact that he doesn't say what you want him to say about the PS3.
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He is just saying it like it is...the fact is that both systems use Asymetrical CPU's and multiple threads, he is just saying that this is something that hasn't been investigated enough and it will be a hurdle to get programmers in the "mult-thread" way of thinking when it comes to programming, because they have been doing mainly single thread programming for decades and just getting into dual....let alone 6 threads.
So he is saying that mult-threaded code is hard to make, but MS makes it "alot" easier to handle and deal with, but it is still far from perfect.....and Sony is making it even harder....
THEN if you read this article
http://dpad.gotfrag.com/portal/story/35372/?spage=1
You will see his statement that the 360 architecture IS designed more elegantly then the PS3, and that throwing random powerful parts together doesn't mean it's going to be better....
Anyways, Carmack is the shiznit....
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then, the ps3 version looks and runs sucky because it basically like trying to run win 95 apps emulated on a mac.
Anyone seen EA's Games lately? It's the same thing with all of them except for Fight Night. And guess why, because they actually too time to semi-remake the game.
Conc.
even though the ps3 has physically much more power, it sucks because some lazy a$$es never bothered to reprogram the thing. Developers should either pick a system or man up and to the extra programming it takes to port to a PS3. Because pc programmers like Carmack will probably have a hissy-fit and leave the buisness when PC's start adapting to similar technology.
Other thoughts_
If you want to see a fair comparison, try Epic Games' GoW and UT2007 when it comes out. Since they have both have been built from the ground up on their perspective systems.
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What Carmack is really saying is he'd rather work with the system where he has to do less to get good performance, and has tools that make doing it a bit easier. Carmack isn't stupid by a long shot, but there are plenty of other outstanding developers out there as well who may be willing to work a bit harder to bring their vision to life.
As far as being more elegent, don't make me laugh. You really need to go off and read somemore before trying to pass yourself off as technical.
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It's also interesting how Carmack has evolved over the years. He used to be a 'guerrila programmer' in the industry, fighting the fight against Microsoft and waving the OpenGL banner against Direct3D. Now, he's making a love nest with Bill Gates over the clearly status quo design of Xbox 360? ---If there's one thing life shows you is that it can take you down a strange path of complacency as you age. ...Anybody for Doom4 or Quake5?
If the point he's trying to make is that Sony needs to get in gear and provide better development support, then well said. However, he HAS to know the shockwave in the industry his comments are going to have. And he deserves the 'smackaround' PS3 fans give him for it in return.
In looking back at all the years of playing iD games, you know I probably spent more time in the cfg files and in the console changing around OpenGl shadowing features, etc. in the hopes of eeking out 15 or 16 frames per second ---essentially doing the optomization iD should have. Maybe I should have been playing Unreal more instead of Quake, since Epic did take the time to optomize their game.
Yes, Doom3 was a great tech demo (depending on how much console-tweaking you had to do on your system); but the real irony was when Valve completely blew it away 3 months later with the fully optomized and far superior Half-Life 2.
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The fact is, whatever you may think about iD games, people listen to John Carmack because he knows what he's talking about, and is usually correct on such issues, as has proven to be correct in the past, even when few gamers on forums agree with him (as if the opinions of gamers on forums actually matter ;)).
For example, read the comments from Valve's Gabe Newell on next-gen hardware;
http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option+com_content+task+view+id+510+Itemid+2
Note: This link may break when posted here, so change all '+' characters to equals), or follow the link to the article from here;
http://www.igniq.com/2005/07/gabe-newell-expresses-next-gen-console.html
There's much more from Gabe on next-gen consoles if you search the next.
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Is that really too much to ask kevin?
Also, have you ever heard of paragraphs? Fullstops? Commas? Capital letters?
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Check His words At IGN:
http://pc.ign.com/articles/754/754798p1.html
"There's no massive pull for me for DX10," Carmack told Game Informer. "[Enemy Territories:] Quake Wars is definitely not DX10." Carmack added that he felt a move to Vista is unnecessary at this time
Well...if He Hates DX10...then He Definently Hates the Cell Processor,This One Wants to Go Back to The Dayz of Doom1
And Doom1 was a Great Game mind you :)
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Saying John hates DX10 is like saying Kojima hates 1080p just because he said he doesn't care about HD at all.
Carmack says it's not necessary for THEM at this time, but you can be sure that his next-gen game ENGINE in developement will be making full use of DX10 features and perhaps beyond (depending on when it's ready).
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Cell is like having 8 processors with 6 ghz (even when at 3.2 ghz) compared to the "dual core" which is in fact just nothing more than really multithreading. Also current processors are 64 bit, cell is 128 (think graphic wise on game systems which would be like n-64 compared to about gamecube).
Sorry people, Cell IS for the better deal with it John Carmack is getting lame, Id is getting annoying and full of themselves and Unreal knows what they are saying, they've been around almost as long as Id.
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LOL. What a naive little sucker you are. They could tell you the earth is flat and you'd believe them.
>>"Also current processors are 64 bit, cell is 128"
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/
"The Cell Broadband Engine%u2122 (Cell BE) architecture is a new processor architecture which extends the 64-bit Power Architecture%u2122 technology."
As you can see, it's 64-bit not 128-bit you fool. And it's not "like having 8 processors with 6 ghz". It's one main core with 8 specialiased additional cores for arithmetic (7 active in the PS3, 6 available for games), all at 3.2Ghz.
John is right, and I'm sure the Unreal devs would agree, even though they haven't said it publically, choosing instead to talk of the strengths of each.
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http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2141558/specs-revealed-cell-processor
"The 64-bit processor has been in development by IBM, Toshiba and two Sony divisions for four years and is expected to outperform its rivals due to having eight processors crammed onto a single piece of silicon."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit
"Sony, IBM, and Toshiba begin manufacturing of the 64-bit Cell processor for use in the PlayStation 3"
Search the net and you'll find many more references. So next time, try remembering that 'facts' you've read from fanboys online are usually wrong!
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You are *****ing retarded dx10 Pc's are allready more powerful than the ps3 ever was.
Also it takes a pc to make a game, then when you code it for a consol. the xbox360 is much eazer to this ,than the ps3.
the fanboys that get mad have no clue
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