Azih said:
Strawman, no one has said John Carmack isn't human or utterly devoid of biases of every sort.
The thing here is that you are ASSUMING that he is unreasonably biased in the case of multi vs single core cpus and using that huge logical leap as a foundation for all of your arguments.
As I mentioned above, I see a pattern developing here. So far, it's been two big-name Western developers (Carmack and Newell) that are heavily invested in PC development doing the all the griping about the new multicore machines. I'm not hearing this sort of doom-and-gloom rumbling from the Japanese dev community. Hell, it's not even a universal response on the part of
Western developers. Mark Rein and the guys at Epic don't seem to be angsting over the new hardware--if anything, they seem
enthusiastic. And they've been getting results--
impressive results, even at this early stage of the game. (UE3 was designed with multithreading in mind, something that doesn't seem to have proven insurmountable to the Epic crew.) That alone is enough to lead me to believe that this isn't just a case of Carmack and Newell 'seeing farther' than their contemporaries, of the two of them perceiving pitfalls that no one else can. So I'm forced to wonder:
Why are Carmack and Newell playing up the potential difficulty of coding for the new consoles, when other developers--ones that aren't venerated as coder gods--don't seem to be running into anywhere near the kind of problems you'd expect after hearing those two talk? And the one constant I see there is that the two of them
are partial to the PC as a development platform - are still invested in it, both personally and professionally - to a degree that a company like Epic isn't.
You're entitled to draw whatever conclusions you like from Carmack's keynote.
I feel there's an element of bias there that's coloring his perception of the new platforms, and that he's (unintentionally) overstating the potential difficulties of developing for multicore processors. Considering that most of the counterarguments I've heard here so far have amounted to little more than, 'He's a genius, so we must all defer to his opinion', I'm inclined to stand by my position.
Fight for Freeform said:
Do remember, that Western Developers are usually far better at creating engines than Japanese developers. Japanese developers main strengths lie in art direction and execution, whereas American/Western Developers strengths lie in creating engines (in all aspects, graphics, sound, networking, etc.).
So I would take these Western Developers' opinion far more seriously than any Japanese developer.
Just to name an example off the cuff, I was impressed with Team Ninja's Xbox output this generation, myself. AFAIK, their engines were developed in-house, and were pretty damn impressive technically, not just from an artistic standpoint. Japanese developers also tend to eschew middleware solutions in favor of coding engines for their games from scratch as a general rule, inefficient as that approach may be. So while
you may feel the word of any given Western developer supercedes that of a Japanese dev, I don't share your opinion. I think I've just explained my reasons for that in satisfactory detail.
Fight for Freeform said:
Who's word do you take over John Carmack's? Who would you trust otherwise? Who do you claim is not attached to any hardware?
Well, I just mentioned Epic above - they've positioned themselves as a major middleware provider for PC
and next-generation console hardware, and I daresay they'd have a little more perspective on things than Messrs. Carmack and Newell. (At the very least,
I'd take the word of the guys at Epic over the aforementioned gentlemen.)
Fight for Freeform said:
Your lack of answers to these questions are very telling about how much you know about the issue at hand.
I obviously know more than you've credited me for. About the only thing that's telling about that last sentence is that you're being unnecessarily patronizing and arrogant.
