mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
I decided to start a thread about what the Guerrilla Games dev team is talking about on another board. The following quotes are going to be questions from posters and answers from the devs. After reading please don't start a KZ2 isn't real or PS3 vs. Xbox 360 flame war!
GG dev: Nope, all in-house. London offices are making their own games which will be online on PS3. I can't say much, but I will say that Online is going bleeping great.
GG dev:
As for the E3 presentation, it was not running live on Dev Kits, as the final spec dev kits did not exist for E3. It was created to the specs of the PS3 and represents what we feel is achievable on PS3.
GG dev: Keyboard / Mouse support is a difficult one because of the balancing issues. First, you have to tune the game separately - once for controller and once for keyboard / mouse. Then, you also have the problem of keeping online fair - i.e. not letting the players using keyboard / mouse have an advantage over those using controllers in the same game.
It's a tricky problem - We do realize it is a requested feature, however we are not committing to anything at this time.
GG dev: Answer 1. Our experience as game developers
Answer 2. Yep!
Answer 3. I've seen some amazing effects done real time by not only Guerrilla but other PS3 dev teams. As these teams continue to push what the PS3 is capable of - then we'll see just what is achievable in real-time.
Answer 4. Not allowed to answer that one.
GG dev: Unfortunately, we can't confirm or deny this at this time. However, this is on the official suggestion list.
GG dev: The scale of the whole project has gotten tremendously huge and daunting. The team sizes have grown to such an extend I don't know at least 15 of the people here anymore. During Killzone 1 I knew if someone made a bug in a certain level I could go to the person directly and talk to them about it. I knew immediatly where they sat, what their MSN was and now I don't even know their first names....It is all very exciting and scary at the same time, and the risk-factor for all new games seems to have gone up quite a bit. But the chances for making things that were previously not possible due to hardware limitations is really cool
GG dev: Well, for KZ1 we had to code a lot for all the cores in the system (R5900, IOP, VU0 and VU1) and we spent a lot of time making sure the communications between the cores was as fast as it could be.
Now we're working with the Cell chip, which is a whole different ballgame. It's easier in some respect (easier to program for), but it's also a lot more complex, so a lot more cores to keep busy at the same time.
But in the end, yeah, programming a PS2's EE will give you a leg up programming for multi-core architectures, especially the Cell. Hope that answers your question! If you have any more, shoot!
GG dev: More of these low-level questions on the board. Yeesh, are you guys coders, or what?!? I think I have to err on the side of caution here, NDA's and confidentiality with regards to Cell are still quite tricky. Cell is definitively different from anything else. With parallelism people often think 'multithreading'. But how good will it be, running threads on tiny CPU's like the SPU's, really? It works, but it won't be optimal. If you think of it more as a network of small computers sending each other packets of data, it all starts to make a lot more sense.
We've had some good contact with the devs in Europe off late and we're planning gettothers[/B. We haven't had a lot of time yet to meet up with the US devs, but that's underway too. It's all pretty new to us too, we were close to Sony before, but never really part of the group. It's definitely cool being part of the gang, Sony has some really talented people working for them.
GG dev: Well, without getting in trouble - I can say that the PSP title is something I'm really excited to be working with the team on. Uh, don't know how much else I can say... Really, really excited!
GG dev: I can't tell you much more than you can deduce from the public specs from IBM, but I think you're on the right track. No SPE in the Cell is a slave to the system, so they can all move data around on the EIB. It would be wasteful for one SPE to use memory of another (why would you? each SPE has its own), but for physics you could have different SPEs doing different parts of the world - in parallel. Or you could have a few SPEs doing collision detection and others doing collision response.
Does that make sense?
On the massively parallel thing, there are actually developments in that direction. IBM has got something in development, called Octopiler (http://www.research.ibm.com/cellcompiler/compiler.htm), but I have not taken a look at it myself yet. But if you're on the case, you might want to check it out.
There's also loads of nice articles floating around on the net off late (on Gamasutra and other game-dev sites) about parallel programming, although most of the tend to be on threaded programming and not specifically Cell.
GG dev: I'm am so treading on the line of NDA here. Um... we as developers are very aware of the features Xbox has for it's online service, and many of these features are things we believe are neccessary for our games. We do 1st party games for Sony, but there are lots of 3rd party developers as well - and these are the folks that Sony Computer Entertainment as a whole has to work with to create any kind of platform-wide system like Xbox has.
We don't have much insight into what discussions take place with 3rd party developers and publishers - but I can at least say that the SCE World Wide Studios (of which we are a part) is very committed to providing the necessary online features in our future games. We realize the direction online gaming is going, and we very much want to provide these features in our games. How this will come about is not something we can talk about.
Unfortunately, that's as much as I can say without seriously getting in trouble.
So please comment on anything that sounds relevent to you about Killzone 2 or PS3 game development. Again please don't start a KZ2 isn't real or PS3 vs. Xbox 360 flame war!
Thanks for your time.
poster said:
GG dev: Nope, all in-house. London offices are making their own games which will be online on PS3. I can't say much, but I will say that Online is going bleeping great.
poster said:
GG dev:
As for the E3 presentation, it was not running live on Dev Kits, as the final spec dev kits did not exist for E3. It was created to the specs of the PS3 and represents what we feel is achievable on PS3.
poster said:
GG dev: Keyboard / Mouse support is a difficult one because of the balancing issues. First, you have to tune the game separately - once for controller and once for keyboard / mouse. Then, you also have the problem of keeping online fair - i.e. not letting the players using keyboard / mouse have an advantage over those using controllers in the same game.
It's a tricky problem - We do realize it is a requested feature, however we are not committing to anything at this time.
poster said:
GG dev: Answer 1. Our experience as game developers
Answer 2. Yep!
Answer 3. I've seen some amazing effects done real time by not only Guerrilla but other PS3 dev teams. As these teams continue to push what the PS3 is capable of - then we'll see just what is achievable in real-time.
Answer 4. Not allowed to answer that one.
poster said:
GG dev: Unfortunately, we can't confirm or deny this at this time. However, this is on the official suggestion list.
poster said:
GG dev: The scale of the whole project has gotten tremendously huge and daunting. The team sizes have grown to such an extend I don't know at least 15 of the people here anymore. During Killzone 1 I knew if someone made a bug in a certain level I could go to the person directly and talk to them about it. I knew immediatly where they sat, what their MSN was and now I don't even know their first names....It is all very exciting and scary at the same time, and the risk-factor for all new games seems to have gone up quite a bit. But the chances for making things that were previously not possible due to hardware limitations is really cool
GG dev: Well, for KZ1 we had to code a lot for all the cores in the system (R5900, IOP, VU0 and VU1) and we spent a lot of time making sure the communications between the cores was as fast as it could be.
Now we're working with the Cell chip, which is a whole different ballgame. It's easier in some respect (easier to program for), but it's also a lot more complex, so a lot more cores to keep busy at the same time.
But in the end, yeah, programming a PS2's EE will give you a leg up programming for multi-core architectures, especially the Cell. Hope that answers your question! If you have any more, shoot!
poster said:
GG dev: More of these low-level questions on the board. Yeesh, are you guys coders, or what?!? I think I have to err on the side of caution here, NDA's and confidentiality with regards to Cell are still quite tricky. Cell is definitively different from anything else. With parallelism people often think 'multithreading'. But how good will it be, running threads on tiny CPU's like the SPU's, really? It works, but it won't be optimal. If you think of it more as a network of small computers sending each other packets of data, it all starts to make a lot more sense.
We've had some good contact with the devs in Europe off late and we're planning gettothers[/B. We haven't had a lot of time yet to meet up with the US devs, but that's underway too. It's all pretty new to us too, we were close to Sony before, but never really part of the group. It's definitely cool being part of the gang, Sony has some really talented people working for them.
poster said:
GG dev: Well, without getting in trouble - I can say that the PSP title is something I'm really excited to be working with the team on. Uh, don't know how much else I can say... Really, really excited!
poster said:
GG dev: I can't tell you much more than you can deduce from the public specs from IBM, but I think you're on the right track. No SPE in the Cell is a slave to the system, so they can all move data around on the EIB. It would be wasteful for one SPE to use memory of another (why would you? each SPE has its own), but for physics you could have different SPEs doing different parts of the world - in parallel. Or you could have a few SPEs doing collision detection and others doing collision response.
Does that make sense?
On the massively parallel thing, there are actually developments in that direction. IBM has got something in development, called Octopiler (http://www.research.ibm.com/cellcompiler/compiler.htm), but I have not taken a look at it myself yet. But if you're on the case, you might want to check it out.
There's also loads of nice articles floating around on the net off late (on Gamasutra and other game-dev sites) about parallel programming, although most of the tend to be on threaded programming and not specifically Cell.
poster said:
GG dev: I'm am so treading on the line of NDA here. Um... we as developers are very aware of the features Xbox has for it's online service, and many of these features are things we believe are neccessary for our games. We do 1st party games for Sony, but there are lots of 3rd party developers as well - and these are the folks that Sony Computer Entertainment as a whole has to work with to create any kind of platform-wide system like Xbox has.
We don't have much insight into what discussions take place with 3rd party developers and publishers - but I can at least say that the SCE World Wide Studios (of which we are a part) is very committed to providing the necessary online features in our future games. We realize the direction online gaming is going, and we very much want to provide these features in our games. How this will come about is not something we can talk about.
Unfortunately, that's as much as I can say without seriously getting in trouble.
So please comment on anything that sounds relevent to you about Killzone 2 or PS3 game development. Again please don't start a KZ2 isn't real or PS3 vs. Xbox 360 flame war!
Thanks for your time.
