[Deepblue]

You know what? Halo still looks good compared to a lot of the newer games. I find that somewhat interesting.

[IceFire]

Originally posted by Deepblue
You know what? Halo still looks good compared to a lot of the newer games. I find that somewhat interesting.

I think its like Blizzard games.  WarCraft 3 wasn't all that groundbreaking in the graphics department when it came out but they spent a damned long time making sure it looked bloody fantastic for what they had to work with.  The interfaces, the units, and everything is crafted to a very high quality.

The same I find from Bungie.  They always adhered to making sure things were top notch in every aspect. Top level quality of artists.  Other games have flashier graphics but they usually don't have quite the same art design.  So while the graphics are technically amazing, they lack the artistic element that can make a good game engine look great.

[Bobboau]

Originally posted by aldo_14


It makes a great deal of sense to have multiple cores in a pure games machine IMO; there's an inherent parallelism in the way they have to structure games nowadays, I believe; different threads for physics, rendering, AI, etc.

what happens if you are half way through drawing something when the physics decides to move it, or AI is trying to find the most important target when it gets blown up.

very messy.

[WMCoolmon]

Indeed, it means all sorts of checks to make sure the object in question has been processed by the core gameplay stuff.

I can only imagine the utter hell pointers must be.

[aldo_14]

Mais naturellement.

But that's why you have sempahores and locks and soforth.  I can't think of a good way to do it entirely sequentially in a single thread, at least.

[Scuddie]

There are a few things you guys are forgetting.  XBox360 has three dual thread cores, and PS3 has one master core with 8 slaves.  Logically speaking, those are two entirely different setups.  XBox360 will supposedly need checks after each cycle to verify that the six threads are valid.  Programming in this fasion would indeed be a nightmare.  PS3 supposedly will not need to do that, as all the SPEs are controlled by the master core.  However, it is the utilization of the 8 SPEs that will be a nightmare (the odds are a few SPEs wont be used).  

Two different structures, two different nightmares.  But then again, I could be completely wrong.

[WMCoolmon]

"Double the threading, double the fun!"

[aldo_14]

"Three times the hair loss!"

I've often wondered about good ways to preserve thread independence, myself; quite often I've ended up in situations where it's slow to sync thread operations, and I've tended to look at ways in which I can minimise deadlock, inconsistency and soforth (as well as work stuff, I was trying to write a flexible side-scroller shooter a while back).

'tis frankly a pain in the arse.  Especially as best practice design can be a bit slow, at least with Java (which has an inherent slowness anyways, of course).

[pyro-manic]

I'll just leave the coding to the code-monkeys to figure out. I don't care how it works, as long as I get some decent games to play.

[phatosealpha]

So, what's really the worst case scenario?  We can expect single threaded games for a while, with the GPUs pulling the majority of the weight, but what's the worst that can happen long run?  Something along the lines of using the cell's central processor to do all the gameplay and AI and physics, 1 spu to do fancy explosion physics, and 8 to decode real time ads for in game TVs?


.....uh....maybe I shouldn't give them any ideas, huh?

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by phatosealpha
So, what's really the worst case scenario?  We can expect single threaded games for a while, with the GPUs pulling the majority of the weight, but what's the worst that can happen long run?  Something along the lines of using the cell's central processor to do all the gameplay and AI and physics, 1 spu to do fancy explosion physics, and 8 to decode real time ads for in game TVs?


.....uh....maybe I shouldn't give them any ideas, huh?

More & more games will likely be either developed for a single platform, or multiple platforms with performance concessions made for compatibility (perhaps via middleware).  I'd imagine it'd cost a bit more to develop games, leading to less originality (dependence on known brands, sequels, etc - think EA).  Possibly even more film licenses as it's been suggested CGI models can be almost directly ported for use on the new consoles.

So basically the same as usual.

[Grug]

It's interesting because I'm looking to move into the gaming career or something with computers & creativity.

I've always longed to want to know how to program 3d stuff myself, but these days the maths involved are starting to scare me away from that particular field. I'm more likely to pursue an artist or Designer role.

Hell, I'm still trying to get my mind in the right frame of mind for learning. Uni starts next week and I'm still fairly slow-minded. I hope I can pick things up again... =S

At least I've got a year before I select a major. So I can try and figure out if I want to brave the maths or not...

Realistically, I'd just like to have have some knowledge about 3d programming and stick with the designing part...

[Mefustae]

Originally posted by aldo_14
More & more games will likely be either developed for a single platform, or multiple platforms with performance concessions made for compatibility (perhaps via middleware).  I'd imagine it'd cost a bit more to develop games, leading to less originality (dependence on known brands, sequels, etc - think EA).  Possibly even more film licenses as it's been suggested CGI models can be almost directly ported for use on the new consoles.

So basically the same as usual.

On that front, i'm going to be really happy with the Revolution's said ability to play basically every single Nintendo Title, possibly as far back as the Nes! Screw new games, i'm going to be veeeery happy playing the entire Legend of Zelda series on a single platform without the crappy issues that come up with PC Emulators...

[Deepblue]

I personally could care less about all of those old games. I am interested in the Revolution's new franchises as well as the rumored abilities of the Revolution controller (hot & cold response mechanisms, haptic feedback, etc.).

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Grug
It's interesting because I'm looking to move into the gaming career or something with computers & creativity.

I've always longed to want to know how to program 3d stuff myself, but these days the maths involved are starting to scare me away from that particular field. I'm more likely to pursue an artist or Designer role.

Hell, I'm still trying to get my mind in the right frame of mind for learning. Uni starts next week and I'm still fairly slow-minded. I hope I can pick things up again... =S

At least I've got a year before I select a major. So I can try and figure out if I want to brave the maths or not...

Realistically, I'd just like to have have some knowledge about 3d programming and stick with the designing part...

Work your arse off in your spare time on what you want to do.  Biggest mistake I made at uni was realising what I wanted to do, and how to go about it, after choosing my course.

[Styxx]

Come on, multithreading is ridiculously simple if you start your project already considering it as a multithreaded one. It's much more likely that they're having trouble with obscure and badly documented APIs than with the actual concept of multithreaded software. Unless they're terribly bad software architects and programmers, which is unlikely (well, not all that unlikely considering the hackish nature of most game programming done nowadays).

[WMCoolmon]

Code: [Select]

char OutputData[] = "Hello, world!";

for(int i = 0; OutputData[i] != '\0'; i++)
{
   char buf[2];
   buf[1] = '\0';
   buf[0] = OutputData[i];
   printf("%s", buf);
}

Of course that's in C. A textbook example of C++ would involve templates, derived custom classes, and overloaded stream operators.

[Deepblue]

Heh. I made a "Hello, world!" proggy in VB a while back.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Styxx
Come on, multithreading is ridiculously simple if you start your project already considering it as a multithreaded one. It's much more likely that they're having trouble with obscure and badly documented APIs than with the actual concept of multithreaded software. Unless they're terribly bad software architects and programmers, which is unlikely (well, not all that unlikely considering the hackish nature of most game programming done nowadays).

Load balancing across either 3 or 9 processing units, I reckon, would be the primary difficulty.  IIRC that was what pissed off a lot of PS2 developers (balancing a number of pipelines in that case, I believe).  I would imagine they are having to control which PU hosts which threads (obviously you're having more threads than PUs in any non-trivial case), and more importantly balance use of local cache, pipeline, etc.  

(Incidentally) IMO that still falls under the multithreading category.