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Halifax
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Post by Halifax »

overburn: I highly doubt that since it was much more expensive to produce in the past. Also Sony has brought out some loans to aid in development.
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JP
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Post by JP »

All PS3s have blu-ray and none of them will ever lose it as all games are produced on blu-ray so without a blu-ray player the PS3 is no longer a games machine!

PS3 also comes with wireless controllers (with motion sensing) and HD output all as standard. The 360 generally comes with wired controllers (no motion sensing) and no HD output as standard. So if you want to match the PS3 then you have to shell out extra which actually makes it more expensive than a PS3.

You may say 360 has rumble but PS3 will early next year as well in US and Europe (November for Japan), but apparently won't ship with the console, though i imagine it will eventually when the old stock's run out!
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FlyingIsFun1217
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Post by FlyingIsFun1217 »

JP wrote:Yup, I work for Sony so have everything I need for all PlayStation development. I'm very blessed :lol:
Sweet!

Can you get me a free PS3?

JK :P

Or am I? :shock:

FlyingIsFun1217 :D
Halifax
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Post by Halifax »

I'm not.

/me waits for his PS3, and devkit. ;)
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JP
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Post by JP »

I don't even own a PS3 myself as they used to cost too much, though they're more affordable now (especially with staff discount) i don't really play on my consoles much and have a PS2 and Wii anyway, both of which i've only bought this year so they keep me happy! I have just bought the new PSP though which i'm very much looking forward to using on a long train journey this weekend :lol:

I should be getting a free PS3 for myself around March possibly so i'll probably hold out until then! But unfortunately i can't get anyone else freebies ;)
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cassini
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Post by cassini »

Halifax wrote:First off the keyword was elite. Second off I have never even heard of the economy version, and third off you can find the specs for yourself because I am not going to start a PS3 360 flame war.
I just thought that since you said PS3 has wider range of features, but you did not listed any, it may be helpful to clarify what you meant.
About the turn “economy” version I apologizes if I offended you, I thought people will call the cheaper one the economy version because it cost less money. How would you call it?

My son has a 360, I played some games at 1280 x 720, My impresion was that, this resolution was normal HD, because we play on our plasma TV. What kind of HD does PS3 has that the Xbox360 does not.

Let us remember that Blu-ray is a media storage format with larger capacity than a DVD. but A blu-ray does not make the quality of a movies any better that the quality of the same movies in DVD format.
It is unlikely that for the foreseeable future video games will grow so big that they will require 4 DVD for distributions which is the ratio from a normal DVD to Blu-Ray capacity.
Halifax
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Post by Halifax »

Umm it's called the 60 GB version. No economy. It is the same PS3, just with a lower price.

Also, I had to do the research and discern for myself about the feature differences. They are widely available, and shouldn't be hard to find. JP provided you with some key ones above.
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JP
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Post by JP »

cassini wrote: I just thought that since you said PS3 has wider range of features, but you did not listed any, it may be helpful to clarify what you meant.
About the turn “economy” version I apologizes if I offended you, I thought people will call the cheaper one the economy version because it cost less money. How would you call it?

My son has a 360, I played some games at 1280 x 720, My impresion was that, this resolution was normal HD, because we play on our plasma TV. What kind of HD does PS3 has that the Xbox360 does not.

Let us remember that Blu-ray is a media storage format with larger capacity than a DVD. but A blu-ray does not make the quality of a movies any better that the quality of the same movies in DVD format.
It is unlikely that for the foreseeable future video games will grow so big that they will require 4 DVD for distributions which is the ratio from a normal DVD to Blu-Ray capacity.
The PS3s don't have fancy names attached to them like the 360, they're just described by the HDD size they're supplied with i.e. 20GB, 40GB, 60GB or 80GB depending on which country you're from some or all of those are available.

The PS3 can do all HD resolutions (as well as SD of course); 720p, 1080i and 1080p. Which of those you can display depends on your TV/monitor you use. The fact that you're playing on a plasma TV doesn't necessarily mean it's at HD resolution. It depends what 360 version you have but some don't have HDMI output so you can't get the best quality out of it.

I can definetly see games growing so large that they require more than 4 DVDs in the forseeable future. At the moment companies are struggling to fit games onto DVD for 360 but of course have no such issue with Blu-ray as they can go up to 50GB at the moment. Games are only going to get bigger as they will have much higher quality textures and models. Games take leaps and bounds pretty much every year so i would think the limits will be being pushed pretty soon for DVD. You could certainly use multiple DVDs but that's just a pain in the ass really!

Another bonus for the PS3 is its extra power it has. As far as i can tell the 360 only has 3 CPU cores in its CPU Processor whereas the PS3 has a single CPU processor and 8 SPU processors as well. I suppose seeing as the 360 came out so long before the PS3 you'd expect there to be more power in the PS3.
Halifax wrote:Umm it's called the 60 GB version. No economy. It is the same PS3, just with a lower price.
None of the PS3s are really the same... they have the same base features that i mentioned but some of them have memory card readers and some of them have full or limited backwards compatability and they all have different HDD sizes (but as you can change the HDD to whatever size you wish up to 320GB (current limit i think) that's no issue really!)

That's actually another bonus over the xbox is that it comes with a built in HDD which benefits developers as they know there's gonna be a HDD there but on the xbox there's no guarantee.
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cassini
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Post by cassini »

Well since you work for Sony, you probably know information that I do not, I am just a casual user.
I still do not understand how it is that if both consoles support the exact same resolution, mainly 720 and 1080, you say that the 360 does not have HDTV out.
About the Cell being better than the Xenon, I hear different opinions from developers about that.
It seems that the theoretical superiority of the Cell is very hard to exploit, while the Xenon it is much easier to achive.

About the name, I am sorry I offended Halifax by naming the lower price version the economy version. It did not occur to me that that was offensive.
I hope store clerks do not feel so offended if buyer start calling it something similar, because they might scare them into getting a 360 or Wii just because they have easier and fancier designations.

Let us not forget that XBOX has an option for HD DVD. So I assume that if games ever grow so large that they require more than one DVD, the publisher can easily produce two different packages for different options.
My guess is that by the time HD DVD or Blu-ray becomes mainstream media for movies and games, the life cycle of both the PS3 and the XBOX360 will be over, and both manufactures will have more information as to what use for next generation of game consoles.

And finally it seems like PS3 enthusiastic assume future functionality will only apply to PS3.
For example according to the specifications, PS3 comes with 256m of system ram and 256m of video ram, the Xbox360 comes with 512m unified ram.
Yet you say that in the future games will use larger resolution textures but for some reason you think that PS3 is better equipped.
Halifax
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Post by Halifax »

Sorry I was not offended.

Yes Gears of War was an example of pushing the disc size to the limit whereas Resistance would have been over the limit of a DVD, but nicely fit with extra GBs on the blu-ray disc.

Also I don't see why people are complaining about how hard it is to program the PS3. You just can't code like an "idiot". It seems that the idealistic view of some developers these days is that the more power it has, the more abstraction we can do, and the less we have to worry about our code.

Either way I don't see how it can be hard to program when MIT students learned the architecture, and programmed a realtime raytracer that got ~34-23 FPS(depending on the example) in only 3 weeks!

If you want some examples of some PS3 optimized code, and explanations on how to optimize for the SPUs then why don't you jump on over to Insomniac Games and check out the R&D. Decide for yourself whether it is too hard.
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cassini
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Post by cassini »

I believe this is the RayTracer made by the MIT team. http://cag.csail.mit.edu/ps3/blue-steel.shtml
I am going to say that you got me at a disadvantage there, since I do not have the qualifications to evaluate a good Raytracer from a bad one, And I do not know if Raytracers can be programmed on XBox and PCs also.
I just noticed they claims their Raytracer runs between 10 and 15 fps, and for what I can see in the video it shows 4 spheres hovering over a flat background, so it must be something very complicated.

About calling idiot the professionals that disagree with Sony and the PS3 enthusiast about the effectiveness of PS3 compared to Xbox360, I guess John Carmack would be among those idiots as well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PFUw29U4J8
I do not remember any XBOX, Wii or PC enthusiast calling the professionals that prefer PS3 over anything else idiots, but I guess that goes with the territory as well.
Halifax
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Post by Halifax »

Please interpret my sayings correctly. Coding like a "idiot" (note the quotations) is not being an idiot.

I am saying you are going to need to learn some things, you are going to need to fail a couple of times, and research things, to get the quality out of the Cell processor.

You can't just throw some unoptimized crap into the C++ compiler, and have it output this perfect little piece of optimized Cell code that is going to take care of all the SPUs for you, and handle all the multi-threading.

Either way, IIRC everybody was complaining about the programming of a PS2, am I correct? And how did that turn out?
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JP
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Post by JP »

Even though i work for Sony i don't really know much more about PS3 than most console gamers. Though admitedly i know less about 360 as i've had very little experience with it.

Most 360s don't have the HDMI output socket which allows you to use an HDMI cable to hook up for best quality with an HD TV. You can buy an HDMI output for 360 and i think the elite has one as standard but PS3s all have an HDMI socket as standard.

Programming for 360 is certainly perceived to be easier than programming for PS3. But the 360 has been around a helluva lot longer and so developers have learnt to program nicely for it whereas the PS3 has been around for less time so is still quite new and requires different techniques to get the most power.

Currently games made for both seem to look better on 360. That's because the developers know how to do 360 games nicely but are less experienced on PS3, so i reckon it'll change over time as developers learn how to take advantage of the PS3 more and their games will start looking better.

The 360 does have the option of getting an HD DVD drive, but as it's not standard the developers cannot guarantee that the people who buy their game will have it and so they can't really use it for their games. I guess they could do two versions of their game, one crammed onto a DVD and one on an HD DVD... but i don't think they can really do that as it would be a load of hassle to produce the two versions and could confuse or annoy consumers.

I suppose in the future, as prices come down MS may have an HD DVD as standard on all 360 models and then they could release games only on HD DVD but that would leave anyone who's bought one without, before then, in the lurch and forced to shell out for the drive if they wanted to keep playing new games.

All i was saying about the larger textures or better models and maps was due to the size increase of blu-ray over dvd, not over any memory differences between the consoles, which as you've pointed out is very little! :lol:
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Halifax
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Post by Halifax »

But IIRC isn't the cache huge in the PS3 SPUs? And aren't the registers 128-bit's wide? Which would mean:

128 128-bit register * 8 SPUs = 1024 128-bit registers, although mind you that 2 SPUs are off limits, so subtract 256.

And isn't the Xbox 360 architecture 64-bit?
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JP
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Post by JP »

yeah 128bit wide, they have a 256kb cache, not exactly huge but enough for the sorts of things you'll be carrying out on them i would think.
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