Xbox 360 will be difficult to program for?

Retr0gamer

Article from eurogamer:
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=59906

Basically Tomonobu Itagaki from Tecmo is complaining that it will be difficult to program for the xbox360 due to the 3 core processor. He compared it to the Sega Saturn which was a nightmare to program for because it was so difficult to get the two main processors to work together and each had to be assigned a separate task. This lead many developers to use only one of the processors.

It could be even worse for the PS3 which has an even more complex multicomponent processor.

1huge1

wow nintendo must be very pleased, with this and all the anaylsts saying it will get second place (though as we all know analysts can easily be wrong)

this is interesting though sony and microsoft will just pay for all these companies to make games for them

danniemcq

according to the "our colony" video that was released a while back (do ya remember it do ya!) Dave Luehmann from Microsoft Game Studios the amount of power will allow the programmers to do so much that they never dreamed before, therefore maybe that is where the problem lies in the fact that they just don't know what to actually do with all that power???

KdjaCL

Msft be making those Directx tools for it i would doubt it will be difficult in anyway if anyone can make a game for a PC quite easily enough.


Kdjac

Retr0gamer

If it really is a 'saturn' scenario I suppose all hope isn't lost. One core could be dedicated to just physics while the other maybe to snazzy graphical effects. I remember Sega saying that even with their most impressive saturn games they could only get 80% of the power of the saturn. The architecture should a lot more easier to work with than the saturn but it seems to me that a lot of power is going untapped in at least the initial sleection of games.

danniemcq

anyone wantin to see the ourcolony thing here

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=223886BW

the ourcolony site seems to be messy at the minute

Syth

How much low level stuff do console game programmers have to do? Are there no compilers available that can take care of both cpus?

steviec

Consoles have always been difficult to program for. And while multiple cores are fairly new it's becoming clear that they're the way forward for both consoles and PCs so it's something developers are going to get used to. Games lend themselves fairly well to multithreading I would have thought. I know from my very very limited experience of making little 2-d games I've made threads to handle different things, and that's on a single core desktop, it just seemed like the most natural way. Physics should be being calculated at all times. AI should be being calculated at all times. There's 2 cores at work while the third does everything else. They need to synchronize with eachother and communicate with eachother which is the hard bit but it's not like console game developers have ever shied away from something that was a little difficult.

BloodNinjaCult

middleware will sort most problems for developers, in the medium term anyway.
I wouldn't start stressing too much, the second wave of games on both new format's should use a large % of each machines power. As for Nintendo, Ice Climbers should run perfectly.