Valve Says PS3 Complexity Hinders Game Development

[Johnmw]

I remember a thread about this yesterday. But, in all honesty who cares about valve games on the 360. Their really on worth their salt on the PC.(due to the huge amount of mod support from the community) Besides they look pretty awful on the 360 in comparison.

i'm not sure what kind of system you are playing on, but I was pretty sad when I saw TF2 on the 360 and realized that my $1500 spend in the last four years was being outperformed by a $150 dvd player. It offers Full HDR, Very High textures and High level models. Unless you are running a DX10 system, a GeForce 280 and 4+gigs of ram (and the picmip, hwmmodels and hwmcvds commands) I don't think you're getting a huge improvement over the 360 except in frames per second, which are lacking - 360 seems to run at just under 60.

sorry really have to take issue with this - You must have got criminally ripped off. I have a relatively cheap self-built system ( i built it it didn't robotically build itself) and it can run ring rings around my 360 in every department except start-up time. Don't get me wrong I love my 360 but i dislike anyone misrepresenting the power of any system as it just provides fanboys ammo for flamewars (not accusing Samoan of fanboyism)
On a more relative matter: It's only one developer, admitably one of the best, and they haven't said that they won't make any games for PS3 merely that its a pain to do.
Cue the song fanboys claiming halflife sux and the 360 fanboys gloating and gaming as a whole suffering.

 

[murphy7801]

"The complexity of the PlayStation 3 hinders quality game development."

I don't agree with that statement. Uncharted was one of the best games I've played on a console in years. Developers can obviously make great games when they desire to do so. What the guys at Valve should say is this - "The complexity of the Playstation 3 hinders us from developing quality games." It doesn't bother me either way. I've always preferred Valve games on the PC. They never felt right on a console to me.

um its a sony owned studio they had no choice weather to work with the ps3 weird programing or not. and i think you ignoring the basic facts why do think ps3 keeps getting released later on some games im mean the reason gta4 was delayed was the ps3. its awkward and my opinion is that sony shot itself in the foot because of this.

 

[murphy7801]

"The complexity of the PlayStation 3 hinders quality game development."

I don't agree with that statement. Uncharted was one of the best games I've played on a console in years. Developers can obviously make great games when they desire to do so. What the guys at Valve should say is this - "The complexity of the Playstation 3 hinders us from developing quality games." It doesn't bother me either way. I've always preferred Valve games on the PC. They never felt right on a console to me.

um its a sony owned studio they had no choice weather to work with the ps3 weird programing or not. and i think you ignoring the basic facts why do think ps3 keeps getting realized later on some games im mean the reason gta4 was delayed was the ps3. it awkward and my shot it self in the foot because of that.

Gonna back that up?

And thats rather irrelevant as to whether they had to or not, according to Valve they would have failed either way. The fact that they succeeded proves Valve wrong

well its not just matter if it can be done matter of if it can be done cost effectively the ps3 causes alot delays on releasing a product like oblivion was later fallout 3 later im mean there is a noticeable list. the thing for valve they would have dedicate alot man hours to get it working which cost money which there not sure they would get back secondly the people to be putting in the man hours are be delayed from working on other valve projects so just not a good business option for studios

 

[murphy7801]

"The complexity of the PlayStation 3 hinders quality game development."

I don't agree with that statement. Uncharted was one of the best games I've played on a console in years. Developers can obviously make great games when they desire to do so. What the guys at Valve should say is this - "The complexity of the Playstation 3 hinders us from developing quality games." It doesn't bother me either way. I've always preferred Valve games on the PC. They never felt right on a console to me.

um its a sony owned studio they had no choice weather to work with the ps3 weird programing or not. and i think you ignoring the basic facts why do think ps3 keeps getting realized later on some games im mean the reason gta4 was delayed was the ps3. it awkward and my shot it self in the foot because of that.

Gonna back that up?

And thats rather irrelevant as to whether they had to or not, according to Valve they would have failed either way. The fact that they succeeded proves Valve wrong

well its not just matter if it can be done matter of if it can be done cost effectively the ps3 causes alot delays on releasing a product like oblivion was later fallout 3 later im mean there is a noticeable list. the thing for valve they would have dedicate alot man hours to get it working which cost money which there not sure they would get back secondly the people to be putting in the man hours are be delayed from working on other valve projects so just not a good business option for studios

Fallout 3 was not later.

the dlc is though

 

[Ancientgamer]

To be perfectly honest Valve has been quite lazy last several years. They've complained not only about the PS3 but even learning how to do multi-threaded and multi-core programming in general. Which had been around in programming long before the PS2 even came out.

Their game development has been laughable. Neither Half-Life expansion was done by Valve, Opposing Force was done by Gearbox and I can't even remember who did Blue Shift. They just converted Quake World Team Fortress over to their Quake 1/2 engine and called it Team Fortress Classic. Counter-Strike was not their game to begin with. The original Team Fortress 2 was supposed to come out at the same time as the original Unreal Tournament and the game had a much grander scope than what was released 8 years later. Instead it became a laughing joke upon release considering there was less content in it than their initial remake of Team Fortress! On top of that every update to Half-Life broke several mods which is what kept Half-Life going for so long.

Half-Life 2 seemed to me mostly a glorified physics demo, they just loved the gravity gun way too much. The game didn't even ship with multiplayer, even basic deathmatch until several months later. On top of that there were few maps that shipped with it. To make matters worse they continued to use Worldcraft/Hammer as an editor and did nothing to really update it. Working with static meshes and materials was a total pain in the ass.

Both Portal and Left 4 Dead were not done by the Valve development team. Instead they bought the respective teams and have now consumed part of them into their main office and threw away the rest.

Steam was a total train wreck for the first several years. The Friends list never worked and connections would constantly drop. They finally got their acts together although several HL mods were permanently broken when they forced the players to use Steam over WON.

Now as far as the PS3 being difficult to program for it's certainly different in some respects to PC and 360 development, but in others it works rather similar. The primary memory model used by the PS3 is closer to a PC than the 360 where it has separate system RAM and video RAM, the 360 has a shared memory pool between all hardware. The big difference in memory on the PS3 is that the SPE's on the Cell use local storage instead of cache. The difference is in local storage the processor only has direct access to what's in there. Cache on the other hand works more like a small table you place tools on when you're done with them but you'll need them again. Problem is you have to share that table with several other people working so tools get put back away and they're not always on hand because the person who put it away saw you hadn't used it in a while. The local storage on the other hand is like bringing a small toolbox into your work area so you need bring only what you need but no one's going to put it away when you're not using it.

The individual parts that make up the Cell processor are not new. IBM, Sony and Toshiba basically what had already been created and just put them in a different configuration to solve the cross memory usage of multi-core processing. I'm sure the 360 multi-core processor was designed to solve the same problem, such as having all 3 processors have separate L1 cache but share a common L2 cache so the same functions wouldn't require being executed always on the same processor. The processor types between them are different but similar code can be designed for both. The Cell uses a single PPU ~3.2 GHz for general computing plus 6 SIMD(Single Instruction Multiple Data) processors at about 3.0 GHz designed for brute force algorithms over large data sets(which games contain a lot of). The Xenon(360) processor uses 3 ~3.2GHz dual hardware thread processors probably to give a bit more flexibility at the cost of processing power.

The major difference between the two comes down to their SDK's. The 360 was designed with the intent of using DirectX which has its good things and bad things. The PS3 uses a lower level graphics API that takes a bit more work to get up and running but is much closer to the hardware. It has an OpenGL-like API but it is considered by most developers to be useless for anything other than prototyping. It uses the Cg shading language for shaders which is very close to the HLSL used by DirectX(the languages initially were the same as they were created jointly by nVidia and Microsoft, for legal purposes they have two different names Cg being nVidia's and HLSL Microsoft's).

But even with their differences there are several middleware solutions that totally abstract the hardware and native SDK's for both platforms including the Unreal Engine and Gamebryo(used in the making of Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout 3). I'm sure Valve has made more than enough money to license an engine(they did it with HL 1 and based a lot of what they learned when they made Source off it) so basically it comes down to either laziness or just stupid hatred. The argument that it would be a waste of time to make it for the PS3 because has a smaller audience is completely invalid, both have user bases that well exceed 21 million as of the end of 2008 and the 360 just reached the 30 million mark so the PS3 isn't too far behind.

So all in all Valve needs get off their attitude or lazy ass, go on over to Insomniac's website where they post article after article on PS3 game programming secrets(all freely available to the public), go over to IBM.com and check out the numerous articles on the Cell processor over there and check out several popular game programming forums and do their homework. Else they're missing out on potentially %20-%30 more revenue per title!

Just reposting the (mostly) lovely post, since it's being covered up by the ever increasing amount if bile and garbage fanboys on both sides seem to come up with.

 

[Drakulla]

Well said, Sony should take that in mind and stop going out their way to overly complicate things.

 

[murphy7801]

Well said, Sony should take that in mind and stop going out their way to overly complicate things.

seconded

 

[murphy7801]

"The complexity of the PlayStation 3 hinders quality game development."

I don't agree with that statement. Uncharted was one of the best games I've played on a console in years. Developers can obviously make great games when they desire to do so. What the guys at Valve should say is this - "The complexity of the Playstation 3 hinders us from developing quality games." It doesn't bother me either way. I've always preferred Valve games on the PC. They never felt right on a console to me.

um its a sony owned studio they had no choice weather to work with the ps3 weird programing or not. and i think you ignoring the basic facts why do think ps3 keeps getting realized later on some games im mean the reason gta4 was delayed was the ps3. it awkward and my shot it self in the foot because of that.

Gonna back that up?

And thats rather irrelevant as to whether they had to or not, according to Valve they would have failed either way. The fact that they succeeded proves Valve wrong

well its not just matter if it can be done matter of if it can be done cost effectively the ps3 causes alot delays on releasing a product like oblivion was later fallout 3 later im mean there is a noticeable list. the thing for valve they would have dedicate alot man hours to get it working which cost money which there not sure they would get back secondly the people to be putting in the man hours are be delayed from working on other valve projects so just not a good business option for studios

Right, because there's no middle-ware or any kind of prebuilt engines that Sony gives out for free to developers interested in working on PS3 projects, may not be what Valve wants, but they can easily reverse engineer such a thing to learn all they need to know about the PS3, they're just too lazy to do so. Waaaahmbulance ordered for Valve!


Morne

right valve use there own engine and have been before the ps3 came out reverse engineering for ps3 is not easy by any means unless your living in the world of microsoft money. im leaving this thread to many fan boys with no understanding about coding and business sense.

 

[Xvito]

So... They're lazy and make extremely overrated games. Is this really news?

 

[GonzoGamer]

I'd rather Valve stuck with the PC anyways.
That's where they're best.

Yes the games are best on the PC (if just for the mods) but I don't think they can afford to give up the console market completely.

Doesn't some dbag or another from valve come out and ridicule the ps3 every month? Is it really still newsworthy or as relevant as it was when the system released? Lately, it doesn't seem that the ps3 needs valve like it did when it launched. It also makes me wonder why they haven't been able to figure out how the thing works yet? I understand it's more complicated but it's been out for a while now and plenty of other companies are releasing some really great games. I know they're trying to make sony look stupid but as time goes on they're starting to look like the morons.

 

[murphy7801]

"The complexity of the PlayStation 3 hinders quality game development."

I don't agree with that statement. Uncharted was one of the best games I've played on a console in years. Developers can obviously make great games when they desire to do so. What the guys at Valve should say is this - "The complexity of the Playstation 3 hinders us from developing quality games." It doesn't bother me either way. I've always preferred Valve games on the PC. They never felt right on a console to me.

um its a sony owned studio they had no choice weather to work with the ps3 weird programing or not. and i think you ignoring the basic facts why do think ps3 keeps getting realized later on some games im mean the reason gta4 was delayed was the ps3. it awkward and my shot it self in the foot because of that.

Gonna back that up?

And thats rather irrelevant as to whether they had to or not, according to Valve they would have failed either way. The fact that they succeeded proves Valve wrong

well its not just matter if it can be done matter of if it can be done cost effectively the ps3 causes alot delays on releasing a product like oblivion was later fallout 3 later im mean there is a noticeable list. the thing for valve they would have dedicate alot man hours to get it working which cost money which there not sure they would get back secondly the people to be putting in the man hours are be delayed from working on other valve projects so just not a good business option for studios

Right, because there's no middle-ware or any kind of prebuilt engines that Sony gives out for free to developers interested in working on PS3 projects, may not be what Valve wants, but they can easily reverse engineer such a thing to learn all they need to know about the PS3, they're just too lazy to do so. Waaaahmbulance ordered for Valve!


Morne

right valve use there own engine and have been before the ps3 came out reverse engineering for ps3 is not easy by any means unless your living in the world of microsoft money. im leaving this thread to many fan boys with no understanding about coding and business sense.

And Insomniac has an entire website, setup for the proliferation of PS3 coding knowledge. IBM.com, has multiple pages and FAQ's setup for Cell designing. Most, if not all, of Sony's 1st parties are more than happy to assist developers whenever needed. There's no reason Valve can't use their own engine, nor am I asserting that they use someone elses, simply to look at the damn thing to understand what it is they apparently are unable to do themselves. It makes NO business sense, when the PS3 community represents an additional ~30% revenue for any game Valve makes. Period.


Morne

um no your fan boy you cant see reason.
1. micro cores have squat ibm can do
2. not all the sony coding tricks are even remotely cross compatible
3. extra 30% game revenue unlikely the figure would be that high plus cost of getting to work my make it a very slim profit margine
4. the people who would spend converting across to work on the ps3 are being diverted from other projects thus pushing back release dates on other products thus depriving them of money
and having a team of people just to convert products to ps3 not feasible unless your a massive company which valve isnt
5. sony often pays people to bring there products to there system counter act the additional cost of converting them across
6. ps3 dlc is hard work and dlc is starting to become a real money maker
7. sony have admitted this as a problem themselves so dont know why defending them
8. getting a product to work on the ps3 could be real effort for small companies who are using an engine to publish on the 360 and pc which are a bigger market combined
9. printing disks for the ps3 cost more thats another hidden cost cutting into your profit margin
10. alot engines provided by sony are not great if you want to release your product on other system and are hard to taylor to your needs on the cheap

 

[Rezfon]

It's like I'm watching two busses filled with brain dead retards run straight at each other while helicopters piloted by trolls spray rocket fuel down, and I just can't help but STARE at the retarded bullshit in front of me.

quoted for truth. It's really quite sad isn't it

 

[Jumplion]

I think it's because he will always defend PS3, in ANY case. You say a bad word about PS3, and he will jump on you, blindly trying to fight people disliking his favorite console.

Everyone knows that he's the biggest PS3 and Sony fanboy on the Escapist.

Again, I say to that; so? Does that somehow justify people going "LOLOLOLOL INDIGO'S A FANBOI!@#!#" and mouth off to him, stating as idiotic things as he does sometimes, and not even read any of his replys that was already made and assume off the bat that whatever he's saying must be retarded.

People hold a bias to him, and while that's not totally unexpected, it gets to the point where even when he makes a valid point he's still beaten down and then he gets riled up and goes back at them.