Sony claims PS3 was made deliberately difficult to program for.

Onyx Oblivion

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Sep 9, 2008
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YOU KIDS AND YOUR PROGRAMMING! Back in my day, we programmed the games we played ourselves...When you bought "Mario and Clank Fantasy Solid" the box said "Some Assembly Required"
 

Zer_

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MrGFunk said:
Jumplion said:
SuperFriendBFG said:
Indigo_Dingo said:
You're once again missing the context. The difference is between making something thats easy to develop for, is already known inside and out, and hits a low brick wall within 3 years, or having something that can be pushed to actually exceed the boundaries and make continual advancements.
No... Come 5 years from now there will already be a significant advancement in hardware and it will leave the PS3 in the dust. So much for a 10 year life span.
One word and a number. Actually 2 words and 1 numbers;

Playstation
Playstation 2
I was going to say wasn't development on the PS2 notoriously hard? The results achieved by some early on were impressive but for most it took some time.

To compare a release title to Okami, SOTC or God of WarII shows the progression that can be made.
Developing for the PS2 wasn't all that difficult. After about a year and a half the PS2's developers began to understand the architecture. The Cell processor is a completely different beast. An otherwise cleanly and bugless program could simply refuse to run on a Cell processor. This hurts development. Hell, a game that runs perfectly on the development kit could have a critical crash error on the actual PS3 hardware. This problem isn't rare either. The PS3 sees this issue a lot more often then the 360.

Usually with development kits you can get some performance issues when porting it over to the actual console, that's normal. With the PS3 hardware it's just a whole lot worse.

Almost all games are initially programmed and run on a computer. A lot of games also use engines that are developed for a PC game.

Compare CoD2 for 360 to CoD4 for 360 and you can see the progression that can be made. See whut I did thar?
 

Rezfon

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Indigo_Dingo said:
Booze Zombie said:
Okay, so you make guns harder to produce and maintain so they're higher quality, right? RIGHT?

I mean, look at the complicated AK-47... wait, no. The fanciful M4... no. The ultra-high maintenance Barret 50.cal sniper rifle... Damn it.
The harder something is to use, the less you want to use it. The weapons industry understands this, why can't a mega company get it?
The A-Bomb was really simple, wasn't it?
unlike the A-bomb, you get to keep using the weapon. I'd like to see someone try to re-detonate a detonated bomb

EDIT: the arguement also (kinda) proves why the XBLA is so popular for developers. The XNA uses C# which is a very good language to use in my opinion
 

Scottay

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Onyx Oblivion said:
YOU KIDS AND YOUR PROGRAMMING! Back in my day, we programmed the games we played ourselves...When you bought "Mario and Clank Fantasy Solid" the box said "Some Assembly Required"
The compition is over! give that man the prize!^^ But seriously saying that the PS3 is better but your going to have to wait till its at the end of a TEN year cycle because its harder to programme isnt such a selling point when you think about how expensive the console was. By the time your getting what you actually paid for in gaming terms the next next generations already hear and its time for a new console.
 

Baby Tea

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Sep 18, 2008
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Indigo_Dingo said:
You're once again missing the context. The difference is between making something thats easy to develop for, is already known inside and out, and hits a low brick wall within 3 years, or having something that can be pushed to actually exceed the boundaries and make continual advancements.
Yeah but then you're limiting the 'new' and 'exciting' to what can be done through raw power, rather then the the imagination and creativity of developers.

If Sony is purposefully making it harder to program for so that developers will constantly be 'learning' and making more 'power driven' games as they know more and more, then that presumes that the 'best games' are the ones that are the shiniest. Graphical presentation is all well and good, but when companies have to spend more money into programming a game rather then putting some of that cash into the creative department, then we're just going to end up with a pile of nice looking, 'same-old' crap with nothing new that actually pushes the industry forward.

And for those saying 'Well then we'd have shovel ware like the Wii!':
Then Sony can just put some quality control in place. It's their license and SDK! They choose who to give it to! If a company has a bad history of shovelware, then tell them to screw off. Nintendo could do the same thing, but they'd rather be diving into piles of money then worrying about whether or not the games suck.
 

Ajar

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Indigo_Dingo said:
Ajar said:
Indigo_Dingo said:
Grumman said:
Gee, I wonder what a game company, in the business of making games, could do with their time if they don't need to waste nine-and-a-half years learning to use the new hardware to its full potential?

I know! They could use their time to learn to make better games!
Except they can't - they already unlocked the full potential of the system in half a year, so all their games will look the same and there will be no discernable advancements.
This assumes that hardware configuration is the only factor driving game performance, which isn't true. It also assumes an equivalence between game quality and game graphics.

I like the PS3 and am quite fond of mine, but we don't yet have any reason to think that its graphics ceiling in gaming is massively higher than that of the 360. The PS3 has a theoretical CPU advantage, but while that advantage is clear in Cell-suited applications like Folding@home, it isn't at all clear how much of that theoretical performance will turn into real-world gaming performance. This was the case last generation, where the PS2's Emotion Engine had a theoretical FLOPS advantage over the Xbox's processor and yet there was nothing on the PS2 that equalled the best of the Xbox graphically.

My personal opinion is that the PS3 will eventually surpass the 360's graphics ceiling, but not by a particularly wide margin, and that it won't be enough to get anywhere near closing the installed base gap in North America.
You're assuming it already hasn't. Killzone 2, which Guerilla said on record uses 60% of the Ps3's Graphics potential, has far outstripped anything the 360 is capable of. And God Of War II looked better than anything on the Xbox.
If God of War II looked better than anything on the Xbox to you, it's because of the art direction, not because of the technical execution of the graphics engine. I thought Shadow of the Colossus was a beautiful game, but it lacked the dynamic lighting, soft shadowing, and normal mapping of Chronicles of Riddick on the Xbox, for instance. God of War II lacked those things as well.

I don't think KZ2 has "far outstripped" anything the 360 is capable of. KZ2 is the best-looking game on the market right now from a technical perspective, and it looks great, but it's simply the latest in a series of leapfrogging graphical improvements on the two consoles, from Gears of War 1 to MGS4 to Gears of War 2 to Killzone 2. I expect that by 2010 at the latest we'll see games on both platforms that surpass Killzone 2 graphically. I could be wrong, but that's certainly what's happened in previous generations and in this generation so far.

For example, as far as I'm aware, so far no developer has found an antialiasing solution on the PS3 that doesn't cost frames per second. That's why the PS3 version of Mirror's Edge has jaggies while the 360 version is fully antialiased.

I think the comments made in this thread by actual developers have been the most apt.
 

Rezfon

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Feb 25, 2008
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Scottay said:
Onyx Oblivion said:
YOU KIDS AND YOUR PROGRAMMING! Back in my day, we programmed the games we played ourselves...When you bought "Mario and Clank Fantasy Solid" the box said "Some Assembly Required"
The compition is over! give that man the prize!^^ But seriously saying that the PS3 is better but your going to have to wait till its at the end of a TEN year cycle because its harder to programme isnt such a selling point when you think about how expensive the console was. By the time your getting what you actually paid for in gaming terms the next next generations already hear and its time for a new console.
I heard (source not verifiable) that microsoft is releasing information on the new xbox at the end of 2009. If you follow Moore's law then making a ten year life cycle, especially with the PS3's technology, means that the technology in the console will be severly out-dated near the end of that cycle.
 

MrGFunk

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SuperFriendBFG said:
MrGFunk said:
I was going to say wasn't development on the PS2 notoriously hard? The results achieved by some early on were impressive but for most it took some time.

To compare a release title to Okami, SOTC or God of WarII shows the progression that can be made.
Developing for the PS2 wasn't all that difficult. After about a year and a half the PS2's developers began to understand the architecture. The Cell processor is a completely different beast. An otherwise cleanly and bugless program could simply refuse to run on a Cell processor. This hurts development. Hell, a game that runs perfectly on the development kit could have a critical crash error on the actual PS3 hardware. This problem isn't rare either. The PS3 sees this issue a lot more often then the 360.

Usually with development kits you can get some performance issues when porting it over to the actual console, that's normal. With the PS3 hardware it's just a whole lot worse.

Almost all games are initially programmed and run on a computer. A lot of games also use engines that are developed for a PC game.

Compare CoD2 for 360 to CoD4 for 360 and you can see the progression that can be made. See whut I did thar?
During the first 18 months of PS2's life wouldn't developers have had to get used to it? They didn't have much of another option until the Xbox came out.

I don't think it's the same comparison. Are you saying that COD4 is getting towards the peak of what a 360 can do?
 

Jumplion

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Mar 10, 2008
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MrGFunk said:
Jumplion said:
SuperFriendBFG said:
Indigo_Dingo said:
You're once again missing the context. The difference is between making something thats easy to develop for, is already known inside and out, and hits a low brick wall within 3 years, or having something that can be pushed to actually exceed the boundaries and make continual advancements.
No... Come 5 years from now there will already be a significant advancement in hardware and it will leave the PS3 in the dust. So much for a 10 year life span.
One word and a number. Actually 2 words and 1 numbers;

Playstation
Playstation 2
I was going to say wasn't development on the PS2 notoriously hard? The results achieved by some early on were impressive but for most it took some time.

To compare a release title to Okami, SOTC or God of WarII shows the progression that can be made.
That is true, both the Playstation and Playstation 2 were incredibly difficult to program for at first. Then later on the developers got used to it, and with the other two platforms being null void, the PS2's lifespan became what it is now.
 

Zer_

Rocket Scientist
Feb 7, 2008
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MrGFunk said:
SuperFriendBFG said:
MrGFunk said:
I was going to say wasn't development on the PS2 notoriously hard? The results achieved by some early on were impressive but for most it took some time.

To compare a release title to Okami, SOTC or God of WarII shows the progression that can be made.
Developing for the PS2 wasn't all that difficult. After about a year and a half the PS2's developers began to understand the architecture. The Cell processor is a completely different beast. An otherwise cleanly and bugless program could simply refuse to run on a Cell processor. This hurts development. Hell, a game that runs perfectly on the development kit could have a critical crash error on the actual PS3 hardware. This problem isn't rare either. The PS3 sees this issue a lot more often then the 360.

Usually with development kits you can get some performance issues when porting it over to the actual console, that's normal. With the PS3 hardware it's just a whole lot worse.

Almost all games are initially programmed and run on a computer. A lot of games also use engines that are developed for a PC game.

Compare CoD2 for 360 to CoD4 for 360 and you can see the progression that can be made. See whut I did thar?
During the first 18 months of PS2's life wouldn't developers have had to get used to it? They didn't have much of another option until the Xbox came out.

I don't think it's the same comparison. Are you saying that COD4 is getting towards the peak of what a 360 can do?
No actually. Let's face it, if people keep developing for old consoles no matter which one it is the games will inevitably look better and better. It has a lot more to do with art direction then the power of the hardware.

Saying games look better as a console's life cycle moves ahead is like saying gravity keeps you on the ground.
 

yourbeliefs

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Jan 30, 2009
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Making a format that's easy to program for is the key to success. I'm a programmer myself (not a game programmer) and while developing for something like VB is much easier and less powerful than something like C++, that doesn't mean that you can't make great things with VB. And yes, the quality of games typically improves significantly over time as developers learn the hardware, but if you're coming into the game late like Sony did, and you need a degree in advanced computer engineering to develop games for your system while your competitor apparently requires a "degree by mail" course to develop games of similar quality, it's going to bite you in the ass very quickly.
 

Fraught

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They're trying to say that the limit of the Xbox 360 has been reached, but PS3 still has a lot of room for advancing.

Although, I think that when they would've made it easier to program for, it should've used weaker hardware, which in return would've brought the PS3 to it's limit quickly, which would've meant that they would have to release a new console too quickly.

It's pretty definite that while Microsoft churns out another console, other people (owning the PS3) don't have to waste money, and can still play with the PS3, which (unlike the Xbox 360) hasn't reached it's limit.

I mean, read what Kojima said a few years back. The PS2 was one of the hardest systems to develop for, but look at how very, very much longer it has been on the market than GameCube and Xbox.
 

Zer_

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Feb 7, 2008
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Fraught said:
They're trying to say that the limit of the Xbox 360 has been reached, but PS3 still has a lot of room for advancing.

Although, I think that when they would've made it easier to program for, it should've used weaker hardware, which in return would've brought the PS3 to it's limit quickly, which would've meant that they would have to release a new console too quickly.

It's pretty definite that while Microsoft churns out another console, other people (owning the PS3) don't have to waste money, and can still play with the PS3, which (unlike the Xbox 360) hasn't reached it's limit.

I mean, read what Kojima said a few years back. The PS2 was one of the hardest systems to develop for, but look at how very, very much longer it has been on the market than GameCube and Xbox.
20 bucks says a new 360 game released within the year will shatter your whole "the games on 360 have reached the limit" argument.
 

Fraught

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SuperFriendBFG said:
Fraught said:
They're trying to say that the limit of the Xbox 360 has been reached, but PS3 still has a lot of room for advancing.

Although, I think that when they would've made it easier to program for, it should've used weaker hardware, which in return would've brought the PS3 to it's limit quickly, which would've meant that they would have to release a new console too quickly.

It's pretty definite that while Microsoft churns out another console, other people (owning the PS3) don't have to waste money, and can still play with the PS3, which (unlike the Xbox 360) hasn't reached it's limit.

I mean, read what Kojima said a few years back. The PS2 was one of the hardest systems to develop for, but look at how very, very much longer it has been on the market than GameCube and Xbox.
20 bucks says a new 360 game released within the year will shatter your whole "the games on 360 have reached the limit" argument.
Okay. Shall I give you my bank account number also?

PS. That means nuh-uh it wont. I'm not saying it because of that, and I haven't really read much about it, but wasn't there the news that Gears of War 2 used, like, 100% of the Xbox 360?
I know Killzone 2 uses 100% some of the video card (r smthn) and then it borrows 60% from the SPUs, but still.
 

goater24

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Using an analogy of a fire fighter: The stations directers go to a convention and buy shiney new hoses for thew crews wagon. They prssent them to the Chief with the following presentation...

'We have just invested all our money in these new hoses for you. They have a nosel thats half the size of the regular one and might take some time to get used to. You should use these to help tackle an inferno because it will make your crew work twice as hard thus improving efficiency. Sure we could have bought the ones with the nosel thats twice the size and pumped water quicker then ever before. But we thought nah, why would you want that? Your jobs not that difficult, and we thought you could use the challenge.
 

Woe Is You

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Jumplion said:
That is true, both the Playstation and Playstation 2 were incredibly difficult to program for at first. Then later on the developers got used to it, and with the other two platforms being null void, the PS2's lifespan became what it is now.
In the Playstation's case, it was much easier to program for that than it was to program for the competition (the Saturn AND the N64). The PS2 was hard to program for but since it was selling like hotcakes, it wasn't a problem.

You can probably see that neither of those apply here.

Indigo_Dingo said:
You're once again missing the context. The difference is between making something thats easy to develop for, is already known inside and out, and hits a low brick wall within 3 years, or having something that can be pushed to actually exceed the boundaries and make continual advancements.
You're assuming this silly stance that Sony is the only company that has made consoles that have had vastly better looking games towards the end of its lifecycle, when this applies to just about every stable gaming platform out there. The NeoGeo, the NES, the C64, the A500. I could list more examples here. Even the games on the first Xbox had a clear visual refinement through its lifespan.
 

Zer_

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Fraught said:
Okay. Shall I give you my bank account number also.

PS. That means nuh-uh it wont. I'm not saying it because of that, and I haven't really read much about it, but wasn't there the news that Gears of War 2 used, like, 100% of the Xbox 360?
I know Killzone 2 uses 100% some of the video card (r smthn) and then it borrows 60% from the SPUs, but still.
All Epic(fail) entertainment has to do is make a more efficient engine for a new game and they can get better results then GoW2 while using as much power as GoW2. Many games have used all the power any current gen platform has to offer for quite a while, the real advancement in graphics came from more efficient software.
 

Don't taze me bro

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TheNecroswanson said:
Couldn't tell you. Sony has a smaller tendency to murder their mascots. See: Master Chief, and every Nintendo IP.
Eh? You're looking past the multiple Ratchet / Jak and now God of War titles? Heck, they regurgitated sequels to their less memorable IPs like Forbidden Siren and The Getaway.

If the industry is looking like being sequel driven, then I'd like to see more franchises evolve like the step between Resident Evil 0 and Resident Evil 4.
 

SinisterDeath

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It makes sense if you understand the ps3.

In most comparison tests, the ps3 and 360 are equal.
The Cell Processor however, CAN be more powerful, like, 10x more powerful than the 360's cpu & GPU, if used CORRECTLY.

And that 'correctness' mostly has to do, with programming games, around the cell. They could have made it 'easy', so to speak, but that would make the 'total power' that the developers working on, less. Making it 'harder', will allow them to do 'more'...

Kinda think of it like this.

Its easy to carry a brick of gold up hill. But the reward is significantly greater, if you can carry several bricks of gold up hill. :p

Now, what Sony COULD have done, if its as 'deliberate' as the OP made it sound. They could have released 'advanced' tools for the 'advanced' games, and 'easy' tools, for the 'easy' games. ;)
 

Doug

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Insomniac55 said:
It really depends on what Sony is trying to say.

If they meant 'we made it difficult and puzzling to program for so that it would take ten years to figure out how to take advantage of what the hardware can do' that's bad.

If they meant 'In order to make it possible for the hardware to be properly exploited, the programming had to be complex' that's good.
They meant (A). There is NO reason AT ALL the programming has to be complex for it to achieve high/great quality graphics or gameplay. Even if it has to be complex on the assembly code level, the proper development tools can interface easily with the developers to make it easy for them to use.

Honestly, Sony are either extremely aggronant, or lazy, or stupid, I can't work out which.

Either they thought everyone would come to them from the developer side no matter what so they didn't bother with developer toolkits, or they where just too cheap to hire a team to work on one, or they where stupidly thinking it was a good idea to beat developers over the head for using the platform.

No wonder Sony, the company as a whole, is losing money badly if this is their logic. And as has been pointed out before, I don't think this is a Japanese thing because Nintendo made the smart move with the Wii.