Sucker bet.

"He says that the Cell is "really, really powerful" but foreign to many"

Haha, like my China Inf!

Damm! Naughty Dog and Insomniac must be some talented bastards if Volition's can't push out a game that doesn't push the limits. Feel sorry for them.

Looks like im buying SR2 for 360.

Sounds to me they are in the "last remnant" boat. Where they where developing the game before sony started really giving a helping hand. So now they are playing catch up.

As long as they are getting the support from Sony I say good show. I can't wait to play it the game!

"We couldn't just couldn't get our heads around the Cell technology"

Translation: Our programmers are too lazy or unwilling to learn something new.

I don't remember who exactly admitted this, but as I remember it goes along the lines of the people who made the hardware for the PS3, basically kept it to themselves as long as possible? Or was it that there was no communication between software and hardware makers....Well the thing to remember is that this complaint isn't exactly new or anything.

Still looking forward to this game btw.

"only have a life span of five years"

Yeah because thats a stupid amount of time............

Lastrite: In case you haven't noticed, multiple cores and threaded architectures is pretty much where CPU/GPU technology is going right now. So even if the PS3 has a 5 year life span, the multithreaded/multicore programming APIs are going to become the standard, probably with next gen consoles. So they can complain about it now and sit on their asses with 10 year old DirectX APIs, or they can get in gear and start figuring things out and get ahead of the game.

Secondly, as pointed out above, I don't buy the excuse. Insomniac and Naughty Dog (and a whole lot of others studios) must have the best programmers in the world if they can do it. Not one complaint from any of them.

thought it may be "tough to crack" the people at insomniac and sony's first party have clearly shown it to be doable and more than that i've read articles on how they make alot of their coding and tricks available for other developers...guess these guys didn't read that one.

I like how it's the devs fault for not being good enough. Why does the Cell have 8 SPUs? Why does the PS3 have 256mb of ram?

These are Sony's design decisions that affect everyone working on it. Sony/IBM/Toshiba screwed up on chip design.

I fully acknowledge that multi-core design chips are the future, but that doesn't mean you go and build an 8 core processor that is reliant on parallel instructions to keep up.

Did you know the 360 is a triple core processor? Nobody complains about development on the 360. 360 and PS3 games are about the same on graphics.

This is Sony's hen coming home to roost. They bet that devs would figure it, and it's looking more and more like that isn't happening. If Sony's first parties have figured it out, why don't they share?

Before you complain about the devs being "lazy" (you don't work for long in the games industry if your lazy or unqualified), think about this, why don't people complain about the multi-cored 360? Why does the cell have to have 8 processors?

Now imagine if your a dev, why would you "figure it out" when you can get the exact same results without figuring out?

aaronf: I don't understand how directX plays part in this versus figuring things out?

I think them scrapping it was probably a good thing if the game was taking too long to port what is the point. It wasn't able to beat GTA4 out so what it missed its oppertunity they would be dumping a lot of cash for little return. And I think this is a better decision than putting out a half baked port.

The PS3 is a beast to code for and some of the early ports and even 1st party games have suffered a little for it. It doesn't mean the games cannot be good or that the technology can't push things. But I do slightly frown on Sony approch as with the PS2 and the PS3 they did make things more complicated in their architecture decisions and good things have came from some of those decisions. But it has also lead to Devs having to spend more time making it work good as well as some compromises (such as 4 meg texture memory on the PS2 when even the Dreamcast had 16).

But I think in general the 1st parties have got past the biggest obstacles and even 3rd parties are starting to get a handle on it. And I'm sure we will see great things to come that we never thought they would be able to pull off.

Miike:

I'm aware that the 360 has 3 cores. What's your point? The point I'm making is that from some studios, all you hear is a bunch of whining and complaining about the PS3 architecture, when at the same exact time you have plenty of other studios pumping out great games and have no complaints whatsoever. So given these two factors you have two possible reasons for the whining:

The first possible explanation is that the PS3 architecture is so hard to learn, that only the best and brightest programmers in the world are capable of understanding it. If that is true, Insomniac and Naughty Dog must have hired all the best programmers, leaving none for anyone else to snap up. No offense at all towards the talented people at Insomniac or Naughty Dog, but I don't believe this to be the case.

The second option is that the programmers are incapable or unwilling to figure out the architecture. They are either not smart enough or they don't want to for whatever reason. Now, as others have said, Insomniac and Sony's first party developers aren't keeping their successes a secret. They release tons of information and toolkits that everyone else can use to make great games on the PS3 platform. In fact, I just Googled "playstation 3 programming". In the first 4 hits there are detailed articles from both IBM and MIT that explain how to program for the Cell architecture. If I can find the information, surely the game programmers can find it.

As far as DirectX is concerned, the point about that is primarily a failure of the education system. Computer Science in many schools basically means "Microsoft Programming Science". When these people get out in the real world and encounter anything other than Windows APIs and DirectX, they are way behind the curve.

Well, as far as I can tell, it is more an issue of lack of support than anything else. You bring up the point of Insomniac and Naughty Dog. But my problem with using those two is that they made exclusive games for the PS3, vs THQ who does multi platform. Plus that increases the likely hood that both Naughty Dog and Insomniac had contract deals guaranteeing help from Sony HQ.

With Saints Row, the game was originally going to be an exclusive for the 360. It was completely done for the 360 when they declared that they would also publish for the PS3. Now if I had to take a guess, I would say that they just attempted something along the lines of a simple code change?(not really sure where I'm going with this). But instead of just doing a rebuild, they wanted to just do a quick transfer of the game using the knowledge that they had for the PS2.

Yes all of this is inference, but as far as I can tell, Volition's game before the 360 was the Punisher for last years consoles.

@rabidkeebler & Quiotu:

I understand your point that Insomniac and Naughty Dog might be getting "extra help" from Sony. But it doesn't make much sense considering Criterion has no special Sony allegiance, and Burnout Paradise turned out to be fantastic on the PS3, no whining at all.

Lots of people seem to be able to grasp the PS3 architecture without having to ask Sony to come over and write their code for them.

On top of that is examining the time line. Saints Row came out in Sept of 06, Jan 07 they announced it for the PS3, and in May of 07 the canceled it. Burnout took 2 years with separate teams working on the 360 and PS3 versions. Volition now has exclusive PS3 designers, this is different from Jan 07 when they announced.