Hmm… who would I listen to here?

Ubisoft developer who ACTUALLY programs/develops games for various platforms and have probably done so for a few years.

Or…

A Sony Employee who probably saw the sales figures are low and thought they need to limit damage control over this?

complex AI is a massive number of branches - i.e. “if foo then bar” type code. the cell is dreadful at branched code. there's a fair difference between splinter cell's “intelligent” enemy agent type people, and heavenly sword's cookie-cutter cannon fodder

Cheers for the link - went to the beginning of the thread and interesting stuff……

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2007/08/13/ps3-stress-test/

“”A lot of noise has been made recently about the reliability issues of one of our competitor’s systems. So, not surprisingly, some of our more ambitious PlayStation faithfuls decided to run their own stress test on the PlayStation 3. They put it in a freezer at zero degrees for up to 108 hours and they put it in a sauna at 120 degrees for up to 64 hours — all the while running games and Blu-ray Disc movies on it. Did it fail? Nope. Like the Energizer Bunny, it kept going and going and going. Probably not something you want to try at home, but our thanks to the guys at PS3 Vault for putting our system through the ringer" :)

Whats this got to do with whether the AI can be coded effectively tho Barrichello?.

TiG

TiG
Whats this got to do with whether the AI can be coded effectively tho Barrichello?.

TiG

I think he's having a cryptic dig at the xbox 360 thermal problems ;)

Lee @ SCAN;1181769
I think he's having a cryptic dig at the xbox 360 thermal problems ;)

Sounds like a diversionary tactic to me!

Lee @ SCAN;1181769
I think he's having a cryptic dig at the xbox 360 thermal problems ;)

TiG
Whats this got to do with whether the AI can be coded effectively tho Barrichello?.

TiG

Nope. I'm only reading from the link that was provided - try it.

Is the hardware not capable, or is it more that the developer isn't capable?

I suspect the latter.

what we need is the link to ubisofts blog where the comments were made in the first place!

nice comment stoo!!!

Oblivion's AI might seem a bit thick, but it's far more dynamic than most - path finding for eg. is particularly good compared to other RPGs.

And it seems to run great on a PS3 :/

Stoo
Is the hardware not capable, or is it more that the developer isn't capable?

I suspect the latter.

a little from column a, a little from column b

there are ways certain things have been programmed for decades. data structures and algorithms which have been honed for years, and so on. and the ps3's cell chip is phenomenal at certain types of code - which is why it has pounded everything else into dust for Folding@Home use. the 360 could never compete with the ps3, even with comparative install bases.

but for the way AI has been written for the past decade or so, cell is a poor fit - too much branching and pipeline flushing for the chip to cope, and even the main non-SPU core doesn't do branch prediction properly

to be fair, neural net stuff will be much better on the ps3 - but nobody's writing neural nets for game AI yet

Sounds also like: the dev tools aren't capable (column c?) - much could be done to make the job easier for the devs, and to optimize the (compiled) code for the target platform. Or does the PS3 require intricate knowledge of the architecture of the cell to code for? One hopes not..

dangel
Sounds also like: the dev tools aren't capable (column c?) - much could be done to make the job easier for the devs, and to optimize the (compiled) code for the target platform. Or does the PS3 require intricate knowledge of the architecture of the cell to code for? One hopes not..

fraid it does - there's only so far automatic optimization can take you, with an architecture like the ps3 where you need to put in your branch predictions by hand (x86-type chips do it implicitly, cell you need to say ‘i reckon foo will happen but i’m not sure)

it's an arch where you need intimate knowledge of the platform, much like the ps2 - which was one of the main reasons the ps2 had so much use fo 3rd party middleware rather than in-house engines, and why the same is happening with engines like UE3 on ps3

That seems.. simply terrible from a dev's perspective: no wonder people bitch about PS3 development.

That's a myth. PS3 is far far better in that respect than the PS2 - according to Oblivion devs at least - coding for the PS3 isn't any worse than for other systems now.

It's different, but not much more different than between the 360 and PC.

So Sony's dev kit is on par with MS' ? I must profess to being surprised..

No, the (software) dev kit from MS is better, but the underlying architecture of the PS3 is not the nightmare to code for that the PS2 was. Apparently the hardware dev kits for the PS3 were better than the xbox dev kits though.

Interesting.. although surely 360->PC must be a heck of a lot closer than 360->PS3 (same dev tools, directx parallels etc)?

dangel
Interesting.. although surely 360->PC must be a heck of a lot closer than 360->PS3 (same dev tools, directx parallels etc)?

that's largely the idea, as far as MS is concerned

It is closer, but it's not the huge gap for the PS3 that people expected. For instance it does use an nVidia graphics card and apparently the shader functions are basically written in the same way as for 360 and PC - you just don't have the dx authoring tools. Unlike the PS2 where the graphics stuff was quite strange.

Of course, some devs are finding it trickier than others - I don't know why that is, maybe their game engines happen to use something that's very different. I'm not into the console world enough to know the details - the only crossover I know about is Oblivion and that came out very quickly for the PS3 (was playable before the PS3 was even released over here).