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[kaching]

has Carmack ever said anything positive about any Sony platform PS1-3?

Sure - he said iD themselves are developing a game for the PS3. All else being basically the same (still doesn't like the way Sony architects and supports their hardware) it's the only thing that's changed and it's a positive.

 

[ManaByte]

SNES Wolf 3D really must have had some kind of story behind it.

I think it's pretty clear. Giant rats that bled milk.

 

[Pellham]

What?!?

Do you guys(Americans), even think that sounds correct?

americans make up words all the time, deal with it

 

[GreekWolf]

americans make up words all the time, deal with it

Unpossible!

 

[HokieJoe]

Not surprise at his comments. He's a PC developer who is now coming to grips with multi-core development. Unfortunately for him this is the future. There are limits to the amount of GHZ you can physically get out of a processor. The best way to deal with it is through parallel processing.

Multi-threaded development is actually simple, the problem comes when sharing data between those threads and thinking asynchronously (order is undetermined). Games are perfect for this type processing. Physics, Particle, AI can all be separated talking to each other though a synchronized bus. I think the reason most developers in the gaming world fear this concept is simply due to lack of experience in it. Sure it hell to debug but we have been developing parallel processes for more than 30 years and the tools and patterns are there. This industry just needs to familiarize itself with it.

To be honest the fact that MS provides all of these IDE dev tools and frameworks helps productivity but it definitely doesn't help much with performance. It adds a performance hit and the layers of indirection make it harder to fine tune it actually (have any of you ever dealt with MS studio using VB or VC++ ). MS dev tools used to be the joke of server development world however .net is making things a bit better now. I haven't explore their latest offerings as of late but true performance nuts like Naughty Dog would kill themselves at the thought of using a cluttered dev environment.

You guys should check out www.cellperformance.com for some enlightenment.

At this point, in the dev community's apparent state of understanding, simpler (read abstraction) is better. I'm sure once everyone gets the hang of coding for parallel processing that coding closer to the metal won't seem as intimidating.

 

[PleoMax]

Some of you guys are unbelievable, ppl like the Professor who probably never even wrote a line of code are...taking credibility out of John Carmack with basis for arguement that since he is a Pc dev he is a lazy dev.

Wtf, it's john carmack.

 

[Azih]

Sorry to bump this but I just spent about an hour going through the slashdot forums response to the Gamasutra article and it was pretty damn interesting since there's always a few people on slashdot who have direct experience with the technologies in question arguing with each other.

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/11/0354247

good stuff if you enjoy watching really technical discussions.

 

[turkification]

where the **** is enemy territory: quake wars?

 

[XiaNaphryz]

Some of you guys are unbelievable, ppl like the Professor who probably never even wrote a line of code are...taking credibility out of John Carmack with basis for arguement that since he is a Pc dev he is a lazy dev.

Wtf, it's john carmack.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure Carmack has no issue coding a multi-threaded application...in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if some of his older engines were one of the first to have MT support. I mean come on, the 360 itself is multi-core, and we've seen multi-core configs in the PC world forever on the development side.

Sorry to bump this but I just spent about an hour going through the slashdot forums response to the Gamasutra article and it was pretty damn interesting since there's always a few people on slashdot who have direct experience with the technologies in question arguing with each other.

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/11/0354247

good stuff if you enjoy watching really technical discussions.

Yeah, I was following that last week, some interesting reading there.

 

[TTP]

Sorry to bump this but I just spent about an hour going through the slashdot forums response to the Gamasutra article and it was pretty damn interesting since there's always a few people on slashdot who have direct experience with the technologies in question arguing with each other.

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/11/0354247

good stuff if you enjoy watching really technical discussions.

Care to sum it up for the lazy

 

[Azih]

Care to sum it up for the lazy

The most interesting tech heavy discussion happened between some dude named seebs and some dude named xebo314. Xebo314 had a lot of theoretical knowledge but seebs is some sorta hardcore insider and used that to back up his view that:

FWIW, I have a PS3, which I am using to do Cell development. It really is very impressive... And it also really is a lot more work than a more traditional multicore system. The decision to specialize an extra time here reflects Sony's PS2 design (crappy CPU with two very impressive and non-interchangeable vector processors to make up for it), and I think it also reflects Sony's arrogance; they simply assume that, of course, people will be willing to spend twice as long developing software on their system to get a noticeable but not earth-shattering improvement in performance.

bolded for maximum fanboy fodder.

Also an interesting thread where they make comparisions between the PS3 and the Saturn.

Random miscellaneous stuff includes:

the revelations that there are a lot of Nintendo fanboys in Microsoft Game Studios (as both companies are in Redmond),

some dude mistook John Carmack for John Romero and got lynched

there was a pointless nerd slapfight on whether everything in computers is binary or not

and to end off they spend quite a lot of time laughing at the guys at
http://www.ps3forums.com/showthread.php?t=52467

This thread has been one of the funniest things I've ever seen. All the PS3 fanboys are bashing Carmack for his comments about Cell, despite the fact that it's quite clear none of them program at all, let alone program on asymmetric CPUs.

Hilarity ensues as people who would have been lauding Carmack to the skies if they'd seen only his gripes about the 360 CPU attempt to prove that he's totally irrelevant and afraid of learning about technology.

Disdain mainly brought about due to comments like

Which is why he's a sack of crap and all of his games sucked thus far (except for Gears anyways) Doom 3 was uninspiried, Quake 4 was uninspired AND felt the same as Doom 3, Unreal 2k7 looks like it'll have a lot on it's hands going up against the 40-player Resistance


I pay attention to the game industry and read up on everything I can.

 

[ninge]

Which is why he's a sack of crap and all of his games sucked thus far (except for Gears anyways) Doom 3 was uninspiried, Quake 4 was uninspired AND felt the same as Doom 3, Unreal 2k7 looks like it'll have a lot on it's hands going up against the 40-player Resistance


I pay attention to the game industry and read up on everything I can.

hahahahahaha

 

[PepsimanVsJoe]

No hating on Romero please. I respect guys who wear their hair really long.

 

[Hitler Stole My Potato]

and to end off they spend quite a lot of time laughing at the guys at
http://www.ps3forums.com/showthread.php?t=52467

Wow. That place is like the bizzaro world teamxbox.

 

[XiaNaphryz]

Wow. That place is like the bizzaro world teamxbox.

Nah, there's an equivalent online forum for any platform really. Some just have more visibility than others.

 

[DonasaurusRex]

Common, as in the 360 architecture is more like that of a dual core PC

..isnt the 360 on the Power PC architecture with MS specific optimizations/ommisions? X86 and PowerPC are two different ISA's. And a tri core 6 threaded chip isnt much like a chip die with two cores.

 

[inpHilltr8r]

It's still more like a dual core x86 than Cell is.

 

[MidgarBlowedUp]

I respect what John Carmack has to say about PS3 development because he made so many games for the PS2 that really pushed the hardware to the limits.

/sarcasm

 

[Fafalada]

The decision to specialize an extra time here reflects Sony's PS2 design (crappy CPU with two very impressive and non-interchangeable vector processors to make up for it)

Except that every console in recent history (cca. 12 years) followed the same "Sony's" design - ie. Crappy cpu with this or that units attached, to "make up for it".
And the only thing any of that "reflects" is the drive of marketing departments to push paper-spec envelopes.

Also an interesting thread where they make comparisions between the PS3 and the Saturn.

It's amusing how every Playstation gets compared to Saturn (and lambasted for it) even though there's very little in terms of any real similarities.
Meanwhile - we have hardware that is actually really similar to Saturn in design and approach (NDS), and if anything people think it's "easy" for developers, simply due to the fact they have no information about it, so they just fantasize it.
Definately something to be said for Not revealing your hw specifications to consumers.