-
Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!
Gabe Newell: 'PS3...it's another Sega Saturn.'
- Thread starter Izzy
- Start date
MightyHedgehog
Member
Jeffahn said:
:lol
Burger
Member
Essentially he's correct in saying that about the PS3.
MS and Xbox got it SO SO SO right with Xbox Live. Patches, friends, leaderboards, competitions et al. By having the online system as part of the Xbox Dashboard ensured continuity between games, which was one of the smartest things they ever did.
PS2's online system was abysmal, it's hard to believe they got it SO SO wrong. There was no connection to the customer, no continuity, nothing. It was absolute shit and I really hope sony fix it for the PS3.
MS and Xbox got it SO SO SO right with Xbox Live. Patches, friends, leaderboards, competitions et al. By having the online system as part of the Xbox Dashboard ensured continuity between games, which was one of the smartest things they ever did.
PS2's online system was abysmal, it's hard to believe they got it SO SO wrong. There was no connection to the customer, no continuity, nothing. It was absolute shit and I really hope sony fix it for the PS3.
Izzy, that's some remarkably misleading paraphrasing you've got going on there.
He doesn't address that comment at PS3 specifically at all.
His point is that the Saturn presented solutions to old problems (and Sony came in and presented a solution to relevant new problems at the time), and he feels the next-gen systems are presenting solutions to old problems, and are not helping him solve his problems: "how do we connect to our customers?", "get data from our customers, get updates to our customers?", "have closer relationships?", "how do we compete with the customer experience that you get out of being a WOW customer?. He said X360 wasn't helping him with these problems either.
He may have thrown in the "super complicated" descriptor as a side-swipe to draw a parallel, but that was not the main point of that part of the discussion. It was about how the systems aren't helping him at all with his most pressing problems, and he addressed that specifically with X360 too. If you want to consider his comments on architecture, also consider his earlier admission "Ive never written a single line of multithreaded code, ever". I've great respect for Gabe and he's been gracious enough to entertain multiple email conversations with me (and many others, just try emailing him, he nearly always responds), but one should be concious that his background is not rooted in parallel asymmetric architectures (which are not uncommon in consoles) when considering his comments.
Are consoles tough for programmers coming from a PC background? Sure. What else is new?
PS3's "open" online platform would be an easier fit for a proprietary third party system like Steam than MS's monolithic "unified under us" approach. So that's not his problem. Steam would not fit at all with MS's model, currently, as they require everything to be done through MS, whereas the whole point of Steam, for Valve, is that they want to bypass other third parties and go straight to the customer. Sony's model actually fits that from a business perspective. From a technical perspective, the other piece of the puzzle as mentioned by Gabe in that same interview is the hard disk, though I doubt Sony's position on that will be any different to MS's. So on each console he's likely going to be constrained to a subset of the userbase, even assuming he could get steam onto that console.
He doesn't address that comment at PS3 specifically at all.
His point is that the Saturn presented solutions to old problems (and Sony came in and presented a solution to relevant new problems at the time), and he feels the next-gen systems are presenting solutions to old problems, and are not helping him solve his problems: "how do we connect to our customers?", "get data from our customers, get updates to our customers?", "have closer relationships?", "how do we compete with the customer experience that you get out of being a WOW customer?. He said X360 wasn't helping him with these problems either.
He may have thrown in the "super complicated" descriptor as a side-swipe to draw a parallel, but that was not the main point of that part of the discussion. It was about how the systems aren't helping him at all with his most pressing problems, and he addressed that specifically with X360 too. If you want to consider his comments on architecture, also consider his earlier admission "Ive never written a single line of multithreaded code, ever". I've great respect for Gabe and he's been gracious enough to entertain multiple email conversations with me (and many others, just try emailing him, he nearly always responds), but one should be concious that his background is not rooted in parallel asymmetric architectures (which are not uncommon in consoles) when considering his comments.
Are consoles tough for programmers coming from a PC background? Sure. What else is new?
Burger said:
PS3's "open" online platform would be an easier fit for a proprietary third party system like Steam than MS's monolithic "unified under us" approach. So that's not his problem. Steam would not fit at all with MS's model, currently, as they require everything to be done through MS, whereas the whole point of Steam, for Valve, is that they want to bypass other third parties and go straight to the customer. Sony's model actually fits that from a business perspective. From a technical perspective, the other piece of the puzzle as mentioned by Gabe in that same interview is the hard disk, though I doubt Sony's position on that will be any different to MS's. So on each console he's likely going to be constrained to a subset of the userbase, even assuming he could get steam onto that console.
I think Gabe is making real points, but it's kind of becoming clear that he sees 360 and PS3 not as potential platforms for him to develop on, but as competition for Steam.
"Hay guys, forget the PS3, put your game on Steam! Your customers can download the game, get automatic updates, and a buddylist that never works! Where's my corndog?"
"Hay guys, forget the PS3, put your game on Steam! Your customers can download the game, get automatic updates, and a buddylist that never works! Where's my corndog?"
We should not dismiss what he is saying about the X360 and PS3. he is sayinbg it is incredible hard to work with them, debuggers arent helping much at all etc, especially doing doing trial and error approach when debugger is sitting there like a retard and doing nothing if what he says is true. This is probably true for a lot of experienced developers right now that are trying adapt to a completely new platform. I dont think he is bitching for the sake of bitching... It will be interesting to see how this develops in the near 1 year.
Burger
Member
gofreak said:
I fail to see how Steam would work via consoles. It would have to be implimented by some ammount at Sony/MS's end. I doubt either the PS3 or the 360 would allow you to insert a Steam disc and download valves games to the HD and run them, mostly for security reasons and content control.
Steam is fantastic for the PC world, but consoles ? I'm not sold.
PS3's 'open' system was shit. It made it harder for me, as a consumer, to access. So much so that I stopped using it.
Burger said:
I'm not discussing the user experience, the quality thereof etc., rather from a business perspective which would be more suitable. I'm not saying either system completely satisfies Valve's needs in every regard, but allowing publishers/devs to go straight to the consumer without having to go through sony or ms would be one hurdle they'd have to clear.
The issue of running code off the HDD is an interesting one, I'm not sure what the answer to that would be. PS3/Cell is supposed to have very strong digital rights management and soforth for downloads, though, which i guess could be extended to executable programs.
Syb said:
His comments were not reserved for Sony as Izzy's comments suggest. The full transcript should have been posted, and not cut to the point where he starts talking about PS3.
He seems to feel fairly similarly about all the systems in terms of what they're doing, or not doing, to address his (business) needs. In fairness to MS/Sony/Nintendo, though, the Steam model is pretty radical and new.
Ultimately, though, the market will dictate that he'll really really want to put his games on these consoles. Even if he wishes it could be easier for him, or if he could do it exactly the way he wants to.
fortified_concept
Banned
I think there are some interesting info in this interview:
1) PS3 to other consoles ports will be difficult
2) He's whoring Steam out like there's no tomorrow
3) He'll probably avoid next-gen consoles since he sees them as competition
1) PS3 to other consoles ports will be difficult
2) He's whoring Steam out like there's no tomorrow
3) He'll probably avoid next-gen consoles since he sees them as competition
I know enough about coding in assembly to know that multi-threaded register management is a huge bitch, especially when you have a ton of different components fighting for attention. Getting an entire team to communicate what needs to go where would be next to impossible if the SDK were shit; I'm hoping it isn't shit, but even if it's nice it will introduce new challenges. Still, it's not like the PS2 didn't have its own problems.
All of the "connecting to the customer" issues seem to be the type of problems that Nintendo is (talking about) trying to solve with their "all access" worldwide network interface with Revolution. (You could include Live with that, but I really find Live to be completely unintuitive as it is, and the next generation just seems to be complicating it rather than enabling users to connect more completely and automatically).
All of the "connecting to the customer" issues seem to be the type of problems that Nintendo is (talking about) trying to solve with their "all access" worldwide network interface with Revolution. (You could include Live with that, but I really find Live to be completely unintuitive as it is, and the next generation just seems to be complicating it rather than enabling users to connect more completely and automatically).
Juice said:
As relates to the next-gen systems, though, I would have thought this would be a bigger issue on x360 than PS3? Task switching isn't something you're apparently going to want to be doing a lot of on SPUs since there's a lot of state to save - you'll want to let a task finish wholly and then switch at least. So at any one time your registers on your SPU will proabably relate to one task/thread..a lot of people just aren't considering the SPUs to each be multithreaded.
gofreak said:
You do raise a good point, I'd say that's a reasonable assumption. However, I think what he's talking about is when some little non-intensive process that isn't being made aware of other threads is hogging time from something that really needs it (resulting in bizarre slowdown). I don't really understand his complaint too much either, because I would think that Sony's SDKs would really be smart enough to take care of anything so ridiculous for you. Sony has promised its development kit will be extremely development friendly, but it's pretty well understood the code you're pouring in is designed to be difficult to port to other consoles (and that just comes with the territory of being market leader in an age of tons of multi-platform games).
I know far too little about how the 3-core 360 works, but it's my impression that the developer tools take care of most/all of the hassle for you.
The Bookerman
Member
I know the answer, GABE sold out to Nintendo.
Yes that MUST be it.
Yes that MUST be it.
Forsete
Member
Apenheul said:
That is correct.
But I doubt things are as bad this time as they were when PS2 was released.
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20050901/jenkins_01.shtml
And so on.
fortified_concept
Banned
Yusaku said:
Well, he said it. And I don't think it's that simple.
MightyHedgehog
Member
Yusaku said:
AFAICT, he's not really bitching about multi-core designs, but rather asymmetric ones, such as Cell...where code has to be substantially different on SPE/SPUs from code that runs on the PPE. That and he's really not liking the next-gen development environment, in this case with PS3, I guess. PCs are going multi-core, but like X360, the design is symmetrical, making coding a bit easier to deal with since you can have the same code run on any of the cores. It potentially makes early parallelization efforts easier since you can take modified code and spawn tasks/threads off on to other identical cores in the design...something that cannot be done so easily with Cell/PS3 from what I've read.
Juice said:
I think possibly the easiest trap for a "junior" programmer to fall into with the SPUs might be memory management and memory access (and if we took his factor of slowdown as being literal, it certainly suggests that's the case..most big slowdown has SOMETHING to do with memory, be it bad cache behaviour or in this instance, poor LS management). The SPUs will take pretty much any type of code you want to give them AFAIK, but if you're not explicit about memory access and manage it intelligently, then you could see big slowdown. And obviously any system is only as fast as its slowest part, so if junior programmer X implements slow SPU code, it will slow down everyone elses too to some degree.
MightyHedgehog said:
This is all true, but it's worth noting that the differences between SPU code and PPE code (and it is explicitly different, with different compilers) mostly relates to SPU behaviour (and again memory access) than actual code syntax. The Mercury Systems guys actually talked a lot about how they were very quickly able to move code from a Mac chip to SPUs, because the syntax is very similar. But yes, you do have to have distinct code for them, so if you wanted to have the same code that could run on either the PPE or SPU, you would have to be maintaining two bits of code there. But I think also the idea with Cell is that a lot of your heavy lifting is going to be done exclusively on SPUs anyway..there are 7 of them and only one PPE, so it's unlikely you're going to be wanting to shift much between the PPE and SPU arbitrarily vs deciding in advance what's going to run where. Obviously between the SPUs, any SPU can handle any SPU code.
Juice said:
It seems to be the opposite in terms of port friendly. Because of the nature of assymetric design of the CELL it will be hard to port stuff from PC or X360 to it.. Hence it will also be easier to port code from CELL to X360 and PC as they are more symmetrical and introduce less bottlenecks when doing an inital fase of the port. Thus it seems that it would be a wiser decision to have the PS3 as the lead platform when doing multiplatform titles.
Shompola said:
I think this is true, and SPU code would need rewriting obviously. I think again the biggest issue would relate to the different memory architecture on the SPUs vs a Xenon or Intel core. Certainly just the code syntax between SPU code and PPC code could be awfully similar, your approach to memory is probably what would require the most significant time to change, And I guess this is also assuming you were using the SPUs solely as individual cores..things could get trickier if you start setting up multiple SPUs as a pipeline etc. to replicate that on other systems could be difficult.
From X360/PC to PS3 I think other difficulties could arise in the nature of the tasks being spun out to different cores in X360 and PC and how they'd match to SPUs. But thusfar, the usages we've heard of for second and third cores seem to be actually ideally suited to SPUs also.
From PS3 to X360/PC I think the biggest problem could be moving from X SPUs to (a smaller) Y cores, but that'd be an issue of scaling rather than of functionality. Which is possibly why I think Carmack fingers that as the "best" approach (not the perfect approach, there is none!). It would also probably happen to carry "happy" side-effects for Sony, which suits them fine no doubt.
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
radioheadrule83
Banned
Filter out subtle Steam reference/praises and he's got something to say. I like to see this kind of thing to be honest. Prior to new hardware launches, everybody in the universe is normally doling out cookie cutter statements of approval intended to help the hype (and therefore a potential market for their product).
If something isn't helping, people shouldn't tow the line.
If something isn't helping, people shouldn't tow the line.
WrathOfOtaibah
Banned
It doesn't matter. If it sells well, people will break their backs trying to get games out for it.
Prior to new hardware launches there are also plenty of people doling out cookie cutter statements of disapproval simply because they can't keep doing things the way they've been doing them if they want to support the new hardware. We have yet to see that Newell's comments are anything more than the same kind of FUD we've seen from developers at the start of previous generations.radioheadrule83 said:
It's too late for Gabe to be trying to argue for fundamental changes in these systems to fit his way of thinking.
MightyHedgehog
Member
Hmmm...even so, I'd rather have tons of disapproval about hardware and development environments, as that, at least, brings a sense of more realistic expectations rather than everything associated with something riding high on hyperbole that could never be real, anyway. The proof against such negativity would be technically-well performing titles...though I'm not even sure what that means, in the end.
Sort of a chicken-and-the-egg thing, eh? It's the same gambit many made for PS2...except that ended up costing waaaaaay too much for what happened for many in the short term.
The Experiment said:
Sort of a chicken-and-the-egg thing, eh? It's the same gambit many made for PS2...except that ended up costing waaaaaay too much for what happened for many in the short term.
Tim the Wiz
Banned
radioheadrule83 said:
Fuck'n A! I know its hard to get past the semi-hatred of Steam, but there is some truth to Newell's ravings. And frankly, it's midly refreshing to have someone expressing their true feelings, instead of the usual hype.
Tim the Wiz said:
We've had few developers be hyperbolic. But if they were, or were positive on the next-gen systems technically or whatever, you think they wouldn't be expressing their own true feelings?
Every dev is going to have their own opinion just as with anything else. The only truth that is there is his own truth, the problems he raises are of course valid, but they're not necessarily universal, certainly the "business" problems etc are not necessarily. And for some other devs, the architectural issues aren't as necessarily going to be as big for them as they would be for him. That applies to every dev, everyone's going to be in a different situation.
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
Wouldn't anybody have a problem with something that they have NEVER done before? The man said he never done mulithreaded code programming before, so ding it will be hard for him. So what other devs don't mind it as much and are working their asses off to prove people like him wrong.
Agent Icebeezy
Welcome beautful toddler, Madison Elizabeth, to the horde!
Mr. Shirt Stain is pretty upset about all this. 360 and PS3.
Given my experience with the so called "SDK" management of multiprocesses I'd expect anything but that. Especially with anything from Sony.Juice said:
Frankly I'm not looking forward to the greater abstraction they promise at all - chances are it will still have a stupid interface to work with and be much harder to get performing good then writting directly for the hardware - if good performance will be possible at all.
Tim the Wiz
Banned
gofreak said:
No. Perhaps my statement was a bit too broad. I meant it in the context that he is being totally frank in his words and not putting on the usual PR spin.
Frank the Great
Banned
It seems Gabe wants a revolution.
Chittagong
Gold Member
Gabe must be on a diet, would expain the recent crankyness
