You have to love the search for simplicity among complexity. Strangely, again, the answer is physics.
26 Jul 05

I almost feel bad bumping the Ghost Wars interview off the front page. Don't worry you can still check it out Here.

Right now my internet connection is down (that means my phone is down as well). Obviously, I can't get this posted until I'm back online. Hopefully that will be soon.

Each of the next generation consoles has a plan to keep development costs from getting out of hand. Microsoft has the XNA development environment which should aid in production of dual 360/PC games. The down side to that is until multicore PC's are common (they're hardly a blip right now), much of the 360's processing power will go to waste.

Nintendo has an even simpler solution. They're sticking to lower resolutions (think 480i and 480p). They're keeping the same development tools from the Gamecube (think of it more as upgrading your CPU, graphics card and memory but the same OS). Mario's owners are also emphasizing pick up and play games that are fun for the whole family. That means a move away from nonstop eye candy.

Sony has the most interesting plan. At first glance, it may even be the best. They've bought a middleware company. They've used a standardized GPU interface (and Cg programming) from Nvidia. But the most important thing they've done is found a way for developers to easily use the power of the cell.

Before I go into that, I'd like to briefly explain why that's a problem. Even better, I'll let Gabe Newell do it for me. Check it out Here. As a brief summary, Newell explains that multicore game development is something no one has experience doing. Troubleshooting alone could become mind boggling.

Sony realizes it could be three or four years down the line before truly optimized implementations of multicore gaming code start appearing. So what does Sony do? Well, the strength of the cell is in doing parallel numerical calculations. It works best if those calculations have fewer interdependencies. What common high CPU demand calculations are commonly used in gaming and could benefit from parallel calculations. The obvious answer is physics.

Coincidentally, as I've mentioned before, the cell is similar in design to the proposed physics card AGEIA is working to design. So Sony licenses their SDK to be included in PS3 dev kits. Then they go to the other big physics SDK, HAVOK. They negotiate that SDK into dev kits as well. Then they finalize both agreements and announce them on the same day last week. I'm sure the competition helped keep Sony's costs down.

The great part for Sony is that they allow developers to continue to make games in the way they're comfortable while allowing them to still take advantage of the power of the cell through physics. Like I said, it looks like a smart move.

Jason