Chris Hecker:
It pains me to say this but I recently just took a job at EA. However, I worked for Will on the game you just saw, so.. [laughter] Im going to rant about How Sony And Microsoft Are About To Screw Your Game Design. Look, how are we going to get where gameplay, graphics and physics are all evenly well balanced? At the moment were the 120lb weakling, except nowadays his right arm here, graphics, is enormous.
So, as you know, graphics and physics grind on large homogenous floating point data structures in a very straight-line structured way. Then we have AI and gameplay code. Lots of exceptions, tunable parameters, indirections and often messy. We hate this code, its a mess, but this is the code that makes the game DIFFERENT. Here is the terrifying realization about the next generation consoles: Im about to break a ton of NDAs here, oh well, haha, I never signed them anyway.
Gameplay code will get slower and harder to write on the next generation of consoles. Modern CPUs use out-of-order execution, which is there to make crappy code run fast. This was really good for the industry when it happened, although it annoyed many assembly language wizards in Sweden. Xenon and Cell are both in-order chips. What does this mean? Its cheaper for them to do this. They can drop a lot of cores. One out-of-order core is about four times [did I catch that right?Alice] the size of an in-order core. What does this do to our code? Its great for grinding on floating point, but for anything else it totally sucks. Rumours from people actually working on these chips straight-line runs 1/3 to 1/10th the performance at the same clock speed. This sucks.
We hope Nintendo doesnt follow Sony and Microsoft on this, although they totally flailed this generation so anything could happen. Think about batchable designs and simulationy systems. You wanna just write the gameplay. You could just do PC games. Luckily due to the power of Will Wright, our game is a PC game! [laughter]
