Half-Life 2 developer Gabe Newell slams just about everything related to next-gen development, including Vista, Xbox 360, and PS3.
“… I spoke to some people at Microsoft, and as I said, I can’t point to a single feature in Vista that I care about that solves problems for us. At all. And I had the same conversation with the Xbox 360 guys. It’s like Xbox 360 doesn’t make my life any better, and in fact, it makes it a lot worse, as you’re telling me I can’t count on having a hard drive,” said Newell.
“There are incredibly few programmers who can safely write code in the PlayStation 3 environment. And I totally see why Sony wants people to write code that runs on seven SPEs and a central processing unit, because that code is never going to run well anywhere else,” he said.
Will the Nintendo Revolution end up being the easiest one to work with next time around? Perhaps!
I can’t comment on the newer game consoles but I will loudly complain about the trend in computers.
Why hasn’t someone come out with a truly user-friendly computer?
I use my 80 year old mother as the standard for what is needed in a computer. She emails, surfs the web and does occassional word processing. Soon she’ll be doing digital photos. That’s it.
But even after ten years as a user, she still feels helpless around the machine. She can’t install anything or trouble-shoot. Often she can’t even find files! My wife who has been using a computer since the 80s is just about as helpless. I don’t blame either of them, I blame the OS.
Why isn’t there a “Granny computer” that just does a short list of things but DOES IT FLAWLESSLY?
Duh. Buy her a Mac. (Mac Mini sounds -perfect- for her).
This seems a little silly – I can’t speak to his complaint about Vista, but his gripes with the 360 and the PS3 seem to be that they’re multicore machines. I’ve heard a lot of developes complain about this – they’re basically saying that games are inheritently single threaded and that all this multi-core stuff is just nonsense (they’re complains are a little more complexly stated than this, but the point remains).
Fair enough, but tough.
They’re going to have to get used to it and started thinking about parellelism in their designs. The march of procesor performance, at least in the near term, seems slightly derailed in favor of multi-core designs, rather than faster parts. If these developes want to take full advantage of the latest hardware, both in consoles (The Xenon and Cell CPU’s) and on the desktop (The newly announced dual core Pentium chips), they should spend less time complaining and more time rethinking.
“Clear Channel Communications” suck. They own a majority of radio stations in PA…Oh well, atleast I have Canada’s CHWO 740am at night….adult standards
I can understand why he would be upset about the 360. One of the benefits of developing for a game console, is at least the developers know what kind of hardware their dealing with, unlike a PC which could have any one of a million combinations of hardware, and their game needs to work on all those combinations. Now MS is throwing the “combination” wrench into the gears by making a console that might have this, might have that.
I pretty much agree with Gabe. On the other hand, hardware standards are always going to be an issue of manufacturing “one-upmanship” and licensing profits just like their having trouble settling on a HD-DVD standard. Thus, he needs to remember that the most important element to any piece of hardware is the availability of good software for it… so they should just stick to making the best games they can for the “best” gaming system. In a sense, the old addage, “Build it & they will come”. Hopefully, they will soon contribute to the adoption of Linux as a major gaming platform because I find the consoles to be inferior and limited gaming platforms. I doubt I’ll ever invest in a console and I know I won’t be upgrading to Vista. I just like the idea of being able to have the option to modify my games with the ingenius ingenuity of user mods that come with PC gaming.
Dylan Neild, do you design games? Code games? Design GPUs? I didn’t think so. It’s quite easy to tell game designers what they SHOULD do. But it’s much harder to be right about it.
It’s common knowledge that the second core provides “no appreciable benefit” to games:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25488
And that dual cores actually makes some games run SLOWER:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21930
You telling game designers to simply utilize the second core is complete nonsense. It’d be like me telling the automotive industry to make a car that runs solely on water. Sure, it sounds like a good idea, but the real question is whether it’s possible.
He’s got the nerve to talk up Steam? That’s the biggest steaming pile of shit anyone has ever created. I ran the Half-Life 2 demo and felt Steam did more to inconvenience me and cause problems than it did to give me a better experience.
When they launched Playstation 2 it was basically the same thing. No one knew how to code on it, and if you really look at it, there isn’t a huge upgrade from PS 1. Just a way for Sony to make some bucks on hardware. Multicore in itself is almost laughable. I’m sure once the bulk of the games come out for christmas on the xbox 360 you won’t see many more titles for quite a few monthes, let alone good titles until the next year.
I’ll keep my 500 plus thank you.
I can’t help but agree with Jeff. I loved Half-Life, Blue Shift, and Opposing Force. I was really excited about Half-Life 2 and paid to get it on the day it was released. (I even bought a new video card and CPU so I could play it better.)
Then I started hearing about Steam. How it converted all your old Valve games to the Steam format. That you had to be online to play. That you could not sell your games without Valve getting a ten dollar cut. That Valve could cancel your account for any reason and there was NOTHING you could do about it. In other words, with Steam the games you bought were no longer yours, they were COMPLETELY under Valve’s control and we could only play them at their discretion.
I found a sucker to buy my unopened copy and never regretted it for a second.
I am shocked at how the gaming press never raised any sort of fuss about Steam. They all treated their ass-fucking as the greatest thing since life itself. If you think the US mainstream press is bad, it’s nothing compared to the bias and fanboyism of the mainstream gaming press.
Ima Fish,
You can’t just add another CPU and magically have all programs utilize the additional CPUs. The programs have to be designed from the ground up to be multi-threaded (utilize multiple CPUs). Mulit-threaded operating systems have been available for over ten years. Had the game manufacturers done that from the get go, then adding CPUs via additional cores would most definitely have improved performance.
The catch? Designing mutli-threaded apps is not easy. They are harder to debug and it is harder to reproduce errors.
As far as the “raw” speed of the new CPUs, yes, the individual cores will not be as fast as the fastest single core CPU. However, they will not be far off. In addition, “speed” as you know is more than just benchmark tests. Running multiple apps that are all doing work *will* run faster that a single core CPU. It all depends on what you are doing and the quality of the application design.
As I said, if the game manufacturers had designed their games to be multi-threaded from the beginning, they would get a performance boost by going to muti-core CPUs.
Mulit-threaded operating systems have been available for over ten years.
On Playstation? On XBox?
if the game manufacturers had designed their games to be multi-threaded from the beginning
Beginning of what?
What are all these threads that should have been running? Enemy AI? Physics (gravity, etc)? Were CPUs up for this “in the beginning”?
Designing mutli-threaded apps is not easy. They are harder to debug and it is harder to reproduce errors.
If you are writing code for one platform, that may be worth the time/effort/money, but when you are designing a cross-platform project for PC, Playstation, and Xbox – it doesn’t surprise me that a developer would be pissed that the differences between platforms are becoming larger.
He could count on all Xboxes having a small hard-drive, not so with the 360. He had to hire people skilled at progamming Sony’s “Emotion Engine” for the PS2 – and now has to hire a different group to do PS3.
I’d be pissed too. 🙂
> > Duh. Buy her a Mac. (Mac Mini sounds -perfect- for her).
I should have expected a Mac person to say that! But those of us who own and use both Macs and PCs know this is mostly hype. Macs don’t even come close to the “Granny test”.
The closest I have to a “Granny computer” is my Palm Pilot. It can go months or even years without ever crashing and the software is usually simple and finding files is easy too. But, getting files and programs on and off is way too hard!
I have a PS1 and _THAT_ is easy to load programs. You just put the disk in and it runs.
My old Tandy 102 was the last truly easy computer I owned. (But it was too crash-prone.)
I am convinced that the computer industry could have a whole new massive boom in sales if they could come up with a computer that is SUPER easy to use and totally robust. (THIS DOES NOT DESCRIBE MACs!).
Here is what it needs to do:
1) Email
2) Web Surfing (including streaming media)
3) Word Processing (with basic DTP features)
4) Quicken (or similar).
5) Digitial Photos
6) MP3 player/organizer.
That’s about it!
Couldn’t someone design an OS AROUND these applications so that the dang computer NEVER hangs, gets viruses, loses files, etc.? And make it as easy as a Palm Pilot or a PS1?
We all know revolution will be the best….just 10 more days..youll all see…
mauahahahahahah