PS3 Harder To Develop For …Yeah, If You Go Multiplatform

Why are we still hearing about this? Thought the smart developers already learned the system.

Wait… who are the smart devs?

I would add Team Ninja to that list, Jawknee. Not only did they convert a highly optimized 360 exclusive to PS3 (NGS2), they made it look more detailed and ran at a higher res too. That's a rarity from multi-plats. Especially when they were ported over from 360. Bayonetta suffered much harsher treatment.

Hayasashi-San also said that any dev who complains that the ps3 is hard to program for should just get out of the business.

Thig about Valve,though, is that up til Portal NT ONE of their console ports had cut it on any console. thye made a hell of a lot of noise about how the PS3 was pnats and the PSN commuity wasn't as good as Live's when asked about L4D coming tio PS3 and happily ignored the FACT that it represents just about thew worst value for money EVER on the 360.

In runs at a low FPS than on PC, it's way below the PC version (compared, say, to the gap between Mass Effect PC and 360 it's WAY behind Bioware's efforts in making the gap as small as possible and it's the same with most multiplat devs)in every technical area, it hasn't got any mod support(and considering the paucity of content on the disc you NEED mod support to make L4D fun after a few days let alone weeks or months) and the actual on disc content is just appalling in terms of value when compared to just about ANY other full price retail game. consider this: I bought L4D on PC and 360 to play with two sets of mates. On PC I paid £18(Steam)and two weeks LATER I paid £45(most expensive console game for me this generation)and couldn't, that week, find it any cheaper without buying used. Then consider the lack of mods,lack of single player beyond light training for the MP/co-opand the lack of reasonably expected quality for a C to 360 port and my FAVOURITE ever developer who'd been making TONS of pro 360 noise seemed, to me, to have let "their" boys down and as I was one of them I was a bit miffed.

Valve have yet to convince me in ONE single way that they even care about making console games and if we're still waiting for EP3 or HL3 itself BECAUSE of L4D2 which should, no matter WHO they bought to support it's release this week,have been an expansion costing ten quid tops, then it's no justice and massive gravy train with no effort for Valve. There were, and are, better sodding mods than L4D2 ever was if you had the PC version of the original anyway.

Whatever, point is Valve didn't ever care for the PS3 and just because EA wheeled him onto Sony's stage changes little-the've never made a decent value console game in their lives and aren't about to start whikle we pay full price for Portal2 as it's another game, though the quality gap was much more bearable between console and PC versions, with ZERO replay value and little ACTUAL value as a result yet, you guessed it, we paid more for it again on console. Sure, they offered a bonus of the PC game free with it but if you don'town a PC that's BSD anyway plus who'd WANT to replay Portal2 just for better textures or resolution? Once you do the puzzles the game's dead, isn't it?

I guess i'm at a point with Valve where I think that they either need to get enough staff to actually make their games and make them outstanding places other than PC OR just give up with the watery console versions already. Gabe, I love your fat arse and your company and it's games but I hate the way you treated PS3 owners to years of ridicule for ZERO reason(and amateurishly as all hell)and despised the way you coned us 360 owners it thinking you were on "our" side just so we'd support your sub standard(yes, tOB was awful for PS3 but the 360 version was still weaker compared to it's PC brethren than virtually any other PC/360 game released around the same time-look at Gears1 for example)ports without thinking and without comparing them to PC. They even managed t have a lot of 360 fans singing their praises for it too-and that;'swhat broke the camel's back for this angry little gamer.

They're meant to be one of the "good guy" devs and listen to gamers but the whole console thing this gen with valve stinks of making the easiest money they could and being tools about it all the whie to boot. Jus make with the sodding HL Gabe and stop prmising console gamers stuff if you won;'t be bothered making it to a decent standard or at reasonabe prices considering the gap in features they always have to bear.

I wouldn't EVER buy a Valve game for consoles again unless a lot changes and advise anyone with a PC capable of even close to 360/PS3 standards(,most PC these days then)that the should follow suit.vave have to show they care enough about console gamers before console gamers should care about them. Those unprofessional outbursts they made about, not just PS3 but it's GAMERS were really bad and if they weren't even making great 360 games why on Earth did the World turn cartwheels when Gabe was forced onstage with Kaz and Tretton the other year?

I'm sorry but I'm angry because I LOVE Valve and love their games and feel everyone should get a chance to play them but, currently, can't feel happy telling console gamers TO buy them. If iD can ,seemingly, get it right then surely a similarly talented dev like Valve comfy with an engine which doesn't even push hardware on PC these days should cope too, no? If not then why not? I STILL feel that money I dropped on L4 for 360 and what makes it worse is the feeling that Gabe KNOWS how shonky heir console output has been yet still had the nerve to make out PS3 and Sony were the things holding them back-if that's the case then why were their 360 ports so weak? Arggh, sorry I'm that annoyexc I'm ramblng and repeating but, Christ, why did Valve have to make themselves look ike tools over all this?on;'t they get the fact a lot of us on every system were big fans not just of their games but the way they do business and,used, to bother talking to us and even listening sometimes? You get the sense, mind, that the conversation with console gamers was only ever one sided with Gabe,sadly.

Ignorant developers who make comments like this don't even deserve to be in the industry. If you'd rather develop for the easier piece of crap system, go right ahead. What this really means is, our game might suck because were too lazy to start development on the ps3 & port it to the 360.

He wasn't mentioning the Wii.

…i'm confused.

Last edited by kevinater321 on 7/20/2011 12:16:12 PM

No the Wii doesn't come into this because the said games aren't on the Wii.

Soul, I still like the Wii. 🙂

Last edited by Jawknee on 7/20/2011 12:44:33 PM

I don't think anyone had any idea what you were talking about.

Guernica, you should get out more.

This? Again? Oh good grief.

Look folks, I've been working in computing for 25+ years, and I've programmed on so many different platforms I've lost count, but this is just total BS. The PS3 is not a pain in the…. to deal with, nor is it inherently harder than the 360 or the Wii, or for that matter the PS2 that preceded it.

It is however different from both the PC and the Xbox360. It seems to me that numerous western developers have this very PC/Microsoft centric focus that basically labels anything that does not fall into that classification as a pain in the a$$.Whatever you want to say guys, the truth here is that you're lazy and ignorant if that is truly what you think.

The fact is that when moving a game from the 360 to the PS3 there is a lot of effort required to do the port because the two are completely different architectures both in hardware and software. The 360 development environment uses the PC dev standards as a crutch to let PC devs quickly transition to the 360. It's no coincidence that as Microsoft essentially controls that environment on the PC, they can do the same on the 360, and no you won't find that on the PS3, because MS owns the dev environment it uses and won't license it to Sony.

But this really is complete trash. I am really shocked that any self respecting software developer would say this kind of thing, because if they are really competent developers they know enough to know that their comments are rooted in the difficulties in porting a game from one platform to another when you are not experienced with the new target platform.

There is nothing inherently difficult about the architecture or the software environment with the PS3, the difficulty is that you have to re-think your game engine because unlike the 360 where you have three cores all the same and can just rely on the compiler and hardware to assist in dispatching multiple threads and processes, the PS3 has 1 PPC core and 6 available SPUs which use their own instruction set. They are hugely powerful, but you actually have to plan on using them. You can still rely on the compiler to an extent, but you have to change your game engine to stop relying only on the PPC core (as it would on the 360) and push some of that work out to the SPUs. However because the PS3 is designed to offer the maximum performance, the hardware allows the developer more choice in how to allocate tasks and processes, but the price for that flexibility is that the developer has to be more attentive to laing out how the tasks and processes should be allocated and/or dispatched at run time, they cannot simply rely on the compiler and hardware to do it for them.

But really, at the end of the day, all of this talk is just avoiding one simple thing, when you start working with a new platform that you have little to no experience with and are porting a large piece of software from a very different platform under tight timelines, you are going to feel the squeeze, and the learning curve is going to be steep. That is true whether you're going to PS3 from 360 or to 360 from PS3. Though, going from PS3 to 360 is a little easier, you are not able to tap as much performance from the platform.

But, yet again, we have a whiny developer who's not able to instantly learn the PS3 and complaining. God, it reminds me of the freshmen at university trying to figure out how to access an code for the university mainframe.

Ah well, no real surprise here since the story comes from Eurogamer – a publication not unknown for it's blatant bias and controversial headlines to generate hits. Sometimes it seems that such stories emerge at about the same time as something good happens for Sony or PS3, almost as if someone was trying to muddy the waters with some good old fashioned Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD).

Last edited by TheHighlander on 7/20/2011 12:09:28 PM

In Eurogamer's article, the developer had a hard time fitting the game in the PS3's memory. That was it.

Seriously, what would we do without you Highlander. You really are the coolest member here. Keep it up man.

I'm just going to make an educated guess and take all the developers' (who have complained over the years) word over TheHighlanders..

Have you actually programmed in a PS3 enviroment though? These guys are still developers at the end of the day, they've dedicated alot of time & effort to get to where they are; they know what they're talking about. Pretty sure every developer said that the PS3 was hard to programme for at one point or another (albeit most at the start), even overally so. Wether theres any truth to that I couldn't say, but then I've never worked on the PS platform.
So no offense but if you indeed haven't worked on the PS3, then how are you to judge if it is harder or not to work on? I know your smart so maybe I shouldn't accuse you of not knowing, but… yeah I'll wait for you to answer first 🙂

Im sure the Xbox fanboys will always try to make a big deal out of the fact that the PS3 is harder to develop for than the 360, but I stopped caring what the fanboys think years ago. People that hate the PS3 will always hate the PS3, and people that hate the 360 will always hate the 360. PS3 is my console of choice because I like its exclusives, its reliable, even the quality of multiform games that use PS3 as the lead platform, and I like the free online, and even just the PSN community over the Xbox Live community. I have my reasons for choosing the PS3, and I really don't care what people think of my choice, it's MY choice, not theirs.

Amen.

I thought this was 2011 not 2006/2007… You're telling me there are still some developers crying about how "difficult" making games on the PS3 is?

That's hardly the point.

The best of the best is on the PS3. That's the only statement the machine needs to make.

It doesn't matter how difficult something is initially. If you work hard and put some real effort into it, you will improve over time.

These devs complaining about how hard it is to work with the PS3 are most likely just inexperienced. Look at Valve.They said the same thing before they even worked with the console. But then they made Portal 2 and it turned out to be one of the best multiplats on the PS3.

@World: If you mean untrained on this specific platform we agree. And the more it differ, the more pain it will be to write effective code. This may be why some multiplats runs best on the xbox (afaik).

@Ben: That may or may not be so but regardless, that's the reward. It may still be a pain to develop for.

Last edited by Beamboom on 7/20/2011 12:59:01 PM

I think the exclusives are the cream of the crop because the first party developers only know playstation hardware. Naughty Dog for example is no stranger to all 3 Playstation platforms, so in a sense they could have a "1 up" on other multiplatform developers- or developers who are used to the PC.

I know nothing about programming, so I'm not going to speak to it, but that was your point, wasn't it Beamboom?

@Highlander: I agree in all you say about how one react to things that differ too much from what you are experienced with. Isn't that essentially what they say anyway?

But creating software with multiple, independently running threads (that's how I understood your text) is immensely more complicated than a more linear approach to problem solving.
Drifting off topic now, but if there is *one* argument to use Java versus C++ programming, it's Java's memory and thread handling.
Multiple threads are, simply put, a *major* pain in the ass.

@Ignitus: That makes sense to me – it *is* a pain when the memory is a bottleneck. But how do Xbox differ in that respect?

@Jimmy: Well, yeah something like that 🙂 If you know the ps3 architecture well (and obviously, if you are owned and sponsored by Sony you will) then sure things are easier. But in the large picture that's just a tiny fragment of the entire developer pool.

Last edited by Beamboom on 7/20/2011 1:19:27 PM

Highlander: No of course, but having threads running independently on separate cpus (please correct if I am mistaken), and not child processes running their own threads (that's what I mean by more "linear" approach, maybe "hierarchical" would be a better choice of words) sounds like a *major* pain to me!
(NB NB! I know *nothing* about writing software for the ps3. I am only able to relate to this subject purely from a traditional programming perspective. I just want to re-state that.)

But regardless of the finer technical details (*lovely* discussion High, but I feel we're sliding beside my main point here) the bottom line is that I just want to voice the idea that maybe, just maybe they *do* have a valid point.

In a console world that seems to become more and more multi plat it's not *always* an advantage to create a platform that differ too much from the norms.

Last edited by Beamboom on 7/20/2011 1:34:23 PM

@ Beamboom.

Though the 360 and PS3 on paper have the same amount of RAM (512MB)in the real world the story is different.

On PS3 you have two separate memory pools of 256MB each. One for graphics and the other for main memory. The problem lies in the OS memory foot print.

The PS3 OS memory foot print is around 48MB that is stored in the main memory pool. So that leaves around 208MB of available main RAM memory, plus 256MB of graphics RAM equals 464MB of available total RAM, though on two separate memory pools that you must manage in you code.

On the 360, there is just one 512MB memory pool and the OS memory footprint is around 32MB, so the available RAM memory is 480MB.

As you can see the difference between the two lies in that the xbox has more available RAM than the PS3 for developer use and it is simper to manage because it is just one memory pool instead of two.

This is the reason more developers are using the PS3 as lead platform.

If it fits in the PS3, it will surely fit in the 360. That's the reason moving a proyect from PS3 to 360 is easier than moving from 360 to PS3, in PS3 there is less available RAM and you must go thru the aditional effort of managing two separate memory pools.

I hope I explained myself.