Reading Games

Am I the only one who is slightly perturbed by the price announcements by M$ this week about the 360, I mean, $400 just to have backwards-compatibility, and only one controller. I don't know, maybe I just need to accept that prices are going up, but I don't think so. That is just too much for me. I have decided to wait until the price drop to buy the 360. (i.e. sometime after the PS3 release)

Just the other day there were 2 pricing models announced. You should look into it. As far as I know it was 299 and 399 just announced. I don't remember what exactly each package gets you but I'm glad they announced the cheaper version.

You are right about the two prices. what you get with the higher priced on ($399) is the system with a hard-drive and patches loaded so that you can play popular XB games on it. the $299 system comes with no hard-drive and thereby no support for first-gen games due to the switch from Nvidia to ATI for graphics chipsets.

I'm a bit more concerned about the fact that the microprocessors for both "next-generation" consoles are quite possibly pretty underwhelming when it comes to actual real-world performance. Developers on both platforms have also expressed frustration with coding for the processors. Perhaps they will get used to the new paradigm or build reusable tools and libraries to ease the pain, but it seems like crippled developers is a hindrance to good game design. We'll see what happens...

Ewige Blumenkraft!

Developers on both platforms have also expressed frustration with coding for the processors.

At QuakeCon 05 John Carmack said the 360 had "the best development environment I've seen on a console". I'm not sure how serious Sony is about parallelism in the PS3 because parallel programming is such a huge pain in the ass.

Perhaps they will get used to the new paradigm or build reusable tools and libraries to ease the pain, but it seems like crippled developers is a hindrance to good game design.

Easy development certainly helps, but looking at the last generation of consoles other factors seem to decide which system succeeds or gets more developer support. When the PS2 came out, everyone said it was a bitch to develop to, while Nintendo went to great lengths in order to make the Gamecube easy to program. Now look which console is the undead corpse that refuses to die.

'Yeah, That's what Jesus would do. Jesus would bomb Afghanistan. Yeah.' - snowlion

Caveat: I'm speaking off the cuff here, these are just ramblings:

Carmack said in that same address that the Xenon chip's performance was roughly half what he would expect from an x86 chip. He said that eeking out good performance was going to require trying to take advantage of its multithreading ability, and that multithreading isn't always inherently the best paradigm for gaming. It sounded to me like he likes the lack of driver ambiguity, the SDK and the direct control that the 360 offers, but that doesn't mean the chip itself isn't a bear to program. That's OK, but only if the trade off is worth it: and that remains to be seen.

Moving from a heavily microcoded and deeply pipelined, branch-predicting, dynamically executing single threaded CISC platform to a shallow pipelined multithreaded, statically-executing RISC platform that requires branch hints is a culture shock to assembler programmers. Not only is the multithreading paradigm new and perhaps cumbersome for at least a while for the programmer, a lot of the things that the x86 chip did automagically (might) now have to be coded explicitly. I say "might" because I don't know if the SDK has facilities to help with some of these things. Even if it doesn't, I can see where such an architecture might encourage better discipline among programmers, and though writing code would be much more laborious, it could also be much more optimal (goes back to the whole RISC/CISC debate, though I know R/CISC is an oversimplification of the differences here).

It seems that the smart move would have been to use Athlon 64s. That way, they aren't presenting a culture shock to their developers, they facilitate co-development of PC and Xbox games from developers, and they might have an advantage over their competitor in terms of the mindshare of developers, which is important since they are the minority.

I'm a big fan of IBM's semiconductor business, but I'm not yet sold on the wisdom of Microsoft's move. I hope to be proven wrong.

Ewige Blumenkraft!

This post was edited by mclaincausey on Aug 25, 2005.

He said that eeking out good performance was going to require trying to take advantage of its multithreading ability, and that multithreading isn't always inherently the best paradigm for gaming.

Who hasn't done so already should read this article and cry. The thing is that singlethreaded processor performance has hit the wall two years ago. Any major speed gains we can expect from the future will only benefit multithreaded applications. Because of this I cannot blame Sony or Microsoft to move on to greener meadows.

'Yeah, That's what Jesus would do. Jesus would bomb Afghanistan. Yeah.' - snowlion

If I were even half interested in the Xbox 360, I'd be unhappy. But let's face it, it's the same old games that are totally unsuited for the platform. FPS is much better with a mouse, period. Then to top it off, they don't have any racing games that interest me... I mean, seriously... then there is the fact that it's Microsoft (can't say that's too important, they are starting to rub off on me lately, very happy with a few of thier decisions)...

But really, the xbox360 is just another rehash of a good idea that wore out ages ago, like, after the PS1. No, what I care about is the Revolution, the change, the future (dude, why isn't that thier jingle?). That's right, nintendo's platform. The day it comes out I'm getting a TV, an entertainment center, and the platform and a few release games. I also need to make a few freinds, yeah, that'd probably help... the party games are gonna be tits!

Seriously, with a bunch of freinds swinging around a motion sensitive controller like idiots... part of the fun can come out of the TV. That, to me, is gonna be the future of gaming. Bringing it back to the real world, at least, a little bit of it. Not abstracting the sword swing to Button A, or the fishing cast to button A, I mean... seriously... how realistic do you need it to be? The revolution is a good step in teh right direction. I can hardly wait!

I should be ashamed of myself.