Valve's Gabe Newell Speaks on Console Development 529
A user writes "Gabe Newell, of Valve fame, criticizes Microsoft and Sony on how difficult it will be for next-gen developers to produce games on their upcoming hardware. He is especially critical of Sony's model, where code written to run on Cell will be very hard to port to other systems, and vice versa. Will this bring upon a new era of PC Game superiority? Only time will tell. In the meantime, Newell says he believes that Steam-like systems will be extremely helpful for developers on the new consoles due to their ability to provide updates and new content."
Fear of the new (Score:1, Insightful)
Steam. (Score:5, Insightful)
Can the PC make a comeback? (Score:5, Insightful)
When the day arrives that I can take a brand-new & high-end PC game out of a box, insert it into the CD-ROM and play it immedietally without installation or having to customize 2 dozen settings: Yes. Till then: No.
Yea okay... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Can the PC make a comeback? (Score:2, Insightful)
On the PC, if I want to play Unreal T2K4 with a couple buddies at my place, I've got to have multiple copies of the game (so a couple hundred bucks per game right there) plus several pretty sweet boxes to play on (as opposed to just one sweet box for myself and crap to run linux on).
Excuse me? (Score:5, Insightful)
The same Gabe Newell who took a relatively portable game framework (Quake) and made it NOT portable (Half-Life)?
The same Gabe Newell who chose to use a non-portable graphics framework (Direct-3D) rather than a portable graphics framework (OpenGL) for Half-Life II?
Well, I guess he is an expert in non-portable - we'll allow his testimony.
PC/Console games (Score:5, Insightful)
God, this is a sad attempt to revive a tired flamefest.
The answer is no, for two reasons.
First, the PC and the console are two different beasts. The different peripherals and capabilities of each system tend to lend them to different types of games. My favorite PC games have not hit the console, and visa versa.
Second, console games sell a lot more copies (partly due to the greater Joe Sixpack appeal from easier setups and partly because it's a pain in the ass to pirate games on modern consoles, so you don't see two-thirds of the games out there being pirated, as you do on the computer). A lack of compatibility would probably not be a really good thing for the PC, given that there are more development dollars in console games (actually, a lack of compatibility almost always screws over the end user and benefits only the system vendors).
In the silver lining department, this is probably a good thing for Linux -- the large and current commercial game library on Windows is one of its greatest strengths in the college crowd, and whatever college students use is what everyone uses in a couple years.
Re:Can the PC make a comeback? (Score:3, Insightful)
modding
the mouse
Care to play a RTS game on a console? I tried to play a lemmings console adaption once, the controls really killed it. Also mods, and their brother patches, make games last longer and more fun.
Re:Pots and Kettles (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I really hate it how it automatically, within notime (on a decent DSL connection) brings me my updates to my game(s) : I much rather go back to the good old days to connecting to a server, only to discover there's a new patch out I which I have to download.
Then I will have to find that patch with a decent download and no ridiculous artificial ques (yes, I am talking about you Fileplanet), and then install it. And all do this within half an hour... max.
Ohwait, I forgot to add the sarcasm tag.
If you're talking about the online activation ; Yes. it sucks : But over here on Slashdot the tendency seems to be to focus on those 'negative' points (and no, I am not losing -any- of my privacy by using Steam), rather than the few great things Steam added (eg. IM-messaging/playing chess ingame, ingame server browsers, automatical updates, a-way-to-say-f*ck-you-to-the-publishers)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Can the PC make a comeback? (Score:3, Insightful)
Seeing that you can't even spell immediately correctly, you may even have a problem doing that.
The installation cuts down on load times since you're loading data from the HD, rather than from the CD-ROM when you're playing a game.
Being able to play around with video and audio settings is a good thing! I hate it how consoles don't give you any relevant options, as I have seen numerous games for the Xbox (including Halo 2) experience frequent polygon drops and slowdowns.
Playing games on a PC is not rocket science, junior. So what if it takes a little more time in the end to set up a PC game? The trade off is an improvement in performance and more options!
Spoiled brats (Score:5, Insightful)
Generation after generation, developers have been given ever more powerful processors with a corresponding extra cost in hardware. Some of this is really needed to overcome architectural limitations (register renaming to make up for the scarcity of registers in x86 comes to mind) -- indeed I think x86 is too crippled to perform well without lots of hardware assistance.
But the fact is that we've hit a wall of performance. Power increases due to ever more complex chips, plus certain effects like leakage currents (that were disregarded in previous manufacturing processes) are becoming ever more problematic. So the free performance lunch is over, and CPU designers are having to trim the fat of their designs. The result is nice power-efficient architectures like the Pentium M, but there's only so much that power-conscious design can do if you still must have the complexity of out-of-order execution and other modern CPU features.
So there's really no way around. If you need a power-efficient processor, you're going to have to resort to completely new architectural ideas, like extensive use of SIMD and multi-core as Cell does. Programmers are going to pay a price in terms of complexity and cost of software development, yes; but there's no other way, the growth of CPUs we're used to is flattening out, unfortunately, and can only grow again through adoption of these alternative programming models.
Which is why I say these people are spoiled brats. If CPU designers are guilty of anything, it's feeding off this illusion that infinite growth without laying any burdens on programmers was possible. But complaining is no good now; either they're going to adapt or die. It's clear that no ordinary out-of-order design, using the same transistor budget, can reach the peak power of Cell if correctly programmed. So if these guys really want the extra power to make better games, they'll have to learn these new programming models and bear the burden of extra complexity.
Re:great (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh btw, do you also whine and scream about DOS games you cannot play anymore? Missing the old 320x240 resolution? Sigh, your hate for steam clearly surpasses any logic, so this is a waste of time..
new age of PC superiority (Score:2, Insightful)
let's just say we should leave the hyperbole to the fanboys...
PS3 cores (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:great (Score:2, Insightful)
Well.. (Score:4, Insightful)
This is to be expected, he has funded the creation of Steam from scratch, of course he is going to sign it's praises and say software like it is the future. The thing that he doesn't have control over is the customers, and they will decide what the future is.
Re:Spoiled brats (Score:3, Insightful)
In particular, I don't think they're going to have that big a problem porting between platforms. Split your game engine into a generic CPU-orientated thread, plus 6 threads designed to work well with the various cores in Cell. Admittadely, this leaves one non-generic core unused, but I don't think that's going to be an issue for games in the short to medium term, at least.
Port to XBox 360 by putting the generic thread on one cores, and 3 of each of the smaller threads on the other two cores. Port to PC by stuffing all 7 threads on one CPU (or let the system auto-balance if you have multiple cores).
It's a bit of a hassle, and there will have to be platform specific tweaks, but I don't think that's what's really getting to developers. I think they're not used to having to deal with the issues related to multi-threading, and that's what scares them.
Blah Blah Blah (Score:5, Insightful)
All I read was:
Blah blah blah, Consoles are hard to develop for, blah blah blah, we can't get our technology to work on them, blah blah blah, buy our product, blah blah blah.
Re:Game Programmers are weird. (Score:5, Insightful)
You've got some sort of evidence to back up this assumed truism, have you?
Before you answer, consider that for example, on a PS2, the sound is handled by a different CPU anyway, so you can't avoid having multi-process code for sound/syncing.
Games do have some difficult problems to solve, to maximise performance, so while you don't mean to belittle the game dev community, you probably are anyway. They usually involve trade-offs - e.g. you want to animate a character's vertices, but due to your parallel architecture, that data is currently being used to render the character. So you have to double buffer the data...but that uses up pretty significant resources...so you might have to come up with some complex interlocking mechanism. Oh, and you're also trying to run the AI at the same time in this parallel world, which probably needs to know the current position/orientation of the character, not what it was for the previous frame, etc. Physics too, maybe. Have fun with that.
That's not to say Gabe's complaints are all that valid though. Technology changes, and you move on, as you say.
It's just a pain when you have a large code base that is hard to port (through no particular fault of your own). Direct3D issues are pretty small compared to re-architecting your system to run on 7 cpus instead of one.
I still remember when a few guys came back from a Sony conference, and said that Sony's advice for performance optimisation was to not use C++, because the EE was piss-poor at running it, due to the tiny I/D caches. Apparently on most PS2 games, the EE was idle/stalling for about 50% of the time due to C++ usage patterns.
Of course, most engineers' reaction to that was, why did they build a console that would run C++ code poorly, when they knew the majority of devs would use C++?
I think Gabe is fearing a similar situation with the PS3. Having experienced Sony's idea of what constituted 'development tools' for the PS2, I'd probably be worried too, if I was in his shoes.
Re:What's so special (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Excuse me? (Score:2, Insightful)
Gabe Newell has done nothing special beyond selling millions of copies of a very mediocre game. Since then Valve has just become another independent game studio that ends up years behind schedule on mediocre sequels. Bravo.
Re:Game Programmers are weird. (Score:3, Insightful)
You and I have been comfortable coding for multithreaded environments for awhile, but the game industry hasn't been forced to feel that pain yet, and Gabe Newell is pissing into the wind about it when he should be spending all his time trying to figure out how to make best use of the hardware we're going to get rather than the hardware we wish we could get.
AMD, Intel and IBM would love to continue providing the exponential improvements in single-threaded, in-order execution we've been enjoying for thirty years, but it doesn't look likely this trend will continue even at geometric rates into the foreseeable future.
Re:Pots and Kettles (Score:4, Insightful)
That's easy for you to say, but some of us don't have DSL. I live in a rural area, so the best connection I can get is 56K. I don't see why I should have to register and update HL2, when all I want is a decent single-player experience. It's gotten to the point where I disconnect from the internet every time I want to start Half-Life2 just to avoid having to download updates.
Re:Pots and Kettles (Score:5, Insightful)
- having to have an internet connection to play the single player game, and spending several hours waiting for it to decrypt when I bought it release day
- how they first required both steam activation AND a dvd check for the store-bought version
- that I can't resell my copy of HL2 when I get bored with it
- that when steam goes belly-up, I can't play (had that problem at a LAN party, massive counter-strike problems for lots of people as the net connection couldn't handle steam logins for 200 ppl)
- if valve goes out of business, I lose the ability to play the game I paid for
- mandatory patches tying up my internet connection unexpectedly, a real problem for dialup users
- piracy protection that does nothing to stop hacked copies showing up on torrent sites, but makes me jump through hoops
-randomly losing my installed game files, forcing me to spend hours downloading and reinstalling the game via steam (happened to me twice now)
I'm sorry, but these far outweigh any good points of steam. I for one won't be purchasing any new games from valve that require it. I'm a customer, not a damn lab rat. Make steam optional so you can use it for the handy features, such as easy patch download, and purchase games through it if you wish. But don't sell something in a box in a retail store, then turn round and treat it like a rental.
Re:great (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Can the PC make a comeback? (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't have to be anal about it. Typos happen.
The installation cuts down on load times since you're loading data from the HD, rather than from the CD-ROM when you're playing a game.
Your assumption that 'HDs make games faster' is a generalization that is false. Games on consoles, often with far inferior hardware when compared to modern PCs, are able to sufficiently cache and stream data such that loading times, though present, are manageable or even transparent. An added HD COULD improve performance, but not always. Usually the performance of a game comes down to a programmer's ability to properly construct the architecture for a it. Case in point: Half-Life 2. Even on a great system w/medium game settings, the loading points between sections of a level are unbearable. Hell of a lot of good that locally stored data did.
Being able to play around with video and audio settings is a good thing! I hate it how consoles don't give you any relevant options, as I have seen numerous games for the Xbox (including Halo 2) experience frequent polygon drops and slowdowns.
And some also enjoy command lines, Vi, and Lynx. While that's fine for them, it's not okay for the vast majority of computer users. They give added power, but complicate things greatly. Same concept applies for games, and it's part of the reason why consoles have a sustained lead in the market. I pop the game in and it works. They're just simpler. They just work. And that's what people like.
Playing games on a PC is not rocket science, junior. So what if it takes a little more time in the end to set up a PC game? The trade off is an improvement in performance and more options!
True it's not rocket science, but it is not what I not would consider trivial either. For an average gamer coming from a console to a PC that 'little bit of time' may be hours of frustration if he can't properly diagnose his performance problems. People aren't as adept as you would like to think. You'd probably consider this as a case of stupidity, but I see it as a usability issue.
Re:Can the PC make a comeback? (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, part of this is the fact that they're just filling more RAM. But I think another part is that PC coders don't feel nearly as much pressure to make loading fast. I know the hoops I jumped through to Load Faster Dammit on the PS2 game I worked on, and just from looking at the file layout of most PC games I can tell you they're not doing the same things.
Of course, they're getting big bonuses on user-modifiability by doing that, so it's not just "pc coders dumb hurrr". But I'd bet cash that you could write a game that loaded from the CD faster than most modern PC games load from the hard drive.
(And then when the first patch comes along, you'd copy the whole shebang to the hard drive anyway - another reason PC games install to HD.
Re:Pots and Kettles (Score:4, Insightful)
I rarely play the game after I beat HL2, but I have had at least two times where it won't play when it verifies my game.
I went to a lan party, this lan party didnt have the internet. When they wanted to play CS Source for some reason the two of us with a legal copy could not play the game, it needed to verify something with a server or something like that. I ended having to get a CRACKED copy off of someone, even though I legally own the game.
Their is also the problem that steam uses 20 megs of ram to run in the background, if you want to "autoupdate". While 20 megs isnt a ton for someone with 1 gig of RAM I dont want to see a day where Epic wants 20 megs, EA wants 20 megs, Blizzard.............. I wont have any memory left to USE my computer by the time all the companies are done.
Their are numerous problems with Steam and Steam like systems, they are a poor idea. When owners of the game are finding it easier to use cracked versions of a game, you know that their are issues with the system that they are using. And it is not just me that has had this problem, I have numerous friends that have had similiar problems.
Finally, you are correct HL2 was amazing, if it wasnt for Steam I would love it a lot more.
Re:Pots and Kettles (Score:3, Insightful)
As for physics, yes, you can find all that in simple programs, but do they do anything else? No. In HL2 physics is just one of its realism features that you can, unlike in older games, use to your advantage.
In summary, you're entitled to your opinion, but when you try to base it on something, base it on something, don't just reiterate the same sort of drivel.
Re:great (Score:3, Insightful)
I didn't think it was a good idea profit wise, but I have no problems with the concept as long as they are not trying to fool people into believing they were like regular DVDs.
"Or you wouldn't mind if your board game spontaneously stopped working?"
If it stopped working a day or two after I bought it, then yes I would mind. However, if it spontaneously stopped working a year after I bought it I would probably just deal with it. I have had board games where pieces broke or got lost which rendered the game unplayable, but I didn't have a tantrum.
"Some of us like knowing our hard-earned money isn't going to be dependent on a company staying in business. Yes, we like to replay games that are 15 years old"
I have no problem with you playing 15 year old games, however I think it is silly to not buy and enjoy a $50 game today because of some "what if" scenario 15 years in the future.
I get this image of you staying up at night worrying that your game library might be obsolete. I imagine that you spend hours of your time making 3 and 4 backups of every game and buying spare hardware just so you can play these games 15 years from now. Life is short, live for the present. If the games don't work 15 years from now, I am sure you will find other cheap ways to entertain yourself.
Why should Sony care if PS3 code is non portable? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sony must make the PS3 as easy to program for as possible, but that does not at all mean that it should keep its architecture even remotely compatible with competing platforms.
Besides, it may just backfire on Sony. Having done well in one hardware generation is no guarantee of success for the next generation. Being able to leverage its previous successes are important, but people eager to play PS2 games are not going to buy a PS3 to play those games if they already have a PS2 and would rather play X-Box 360 or Revolution titles.
END COMMUNICATION
Re:Pots and Kettles (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fan-boys go away... (Score:5, Insightful)
No it's not. It's basically a better-organised and larger version of the PS2's Emotion Engine... Albeit with a different instruction set.
The PS2 developers love it. "256KB of memory per SPE? And we can program it in C? Woot!"
Its a fact that, n parallel processors is less efficient than one n-times-faster processor.
It's a fact that you can't get n-times-faster processors, so tough bickies.
Re:c'mon (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, a 5ghz out-of-order PowerPC 970 (or similar) would draw tons more power than the three simplified in-order PPC cores running at 3.5ghz in the Xbox 360. Performance per watt is becoming increasingly important in both PC's and consoles. Do you really want a console that sounds like a jet engine and heats up your room? How about one that draws so much power, it trips your breaker if it's on the same circuit as your fridge? Didn't think so.
Sony and Microsoft honestly took the more sensible and future-proof route. Sure, the first-gen games for the systems would have been a bit better and loads easier to write if they just put in the fastest PPC970 or Athlon64 available in the damn thing, but these systems have to have a shelf life of around 4-5 years. By then, ALL PC's will be multi-core -- period. Look at Intel, AMD, and IBM's road-map. They can't just turn up the clockspeed forever. Sure, there will be process improvements, and marginal gains, but not like in the past. Intel's "next-gen" architecture is largely based on multi-core Pentium-M's. Why? The growing power requirements of the P4's is ridiculous, and limits the applications of the CPU's. Plus, the P4 can't keep scaling up, despite the Prescott core's absurd 31-stage pipeline!
Re:Pots and Kettles (Score:1, Insightful)
Title: Half-Life 2 with Counter-Strike: Source
Publisher: VIVENDI UNIVERSAL GAMES
Re:great (Score:3, Insightful)
I have books that I'll reread 15 years down the road. I have movies that I'll rewatch 15 years down the road. Why not video games that I'll replay 15 years down the road?
I dunno... (Score:3, Insightful)
Vista (unbelievably) might not be much good. (Shock, horror!)
XBox 360, by not necessarily having a hard drive, makes console development, which traditionally can't depend on having hard drive, harder. That makes sense.
Sony's fundamentally different chip design requires different programming techniques, and might be harder to port. Waaaah!
However, this fundamentally different chip design isn't designed to speed up processing, distribute tasks more effectively or demonstrate an important and new approach to general-purpose computing... no, it's solely to ensure vendor lock-in to Sony. No, really.
Steam solves all these problems (next-gen games being hard to develop, consoles lacking hard drives, different chip designs needing new skills, and Sony evilly locking us in to their own architecture), without in any way having anything to do with any of them. Steam good. Buy Steam. Buy it now.
I'm not saying he doesn't have the odd point, but does anyone else find Gabe Newell's pronouncements more and more whiny? Far from the industry god that brought us HL, now he's verging on sounding pathetic. Oooh, help, help, next-gen development is hard... radically different processor architectures require different programming techniques... oooh... lacking non-standard console peripherals makes console programming hard... oooh.
Gabe? We know. Sit down. It isn't going to change because you're whining about it in every interview you give.
And the last paragraph really was the limit - suggesting Steam (a new distribution system) would really have any fucking efect on the actual problems he'd raised? It's a billing and download service, not a fucking hard-drive, and not a middleware layer for the PS3. What were they smoking in the interview, and WTF does a bloody Steam advert have to do with the actual issues they talked about?
I'd say Gabe should come back to developing PC games, but frankly if a missing-or-not hard drive is twisting his nuts these days, god only knows what he'd think trying to develop for the heterogenous PC platform again...
Re:Pots and Kettles (Score:2, Insightful)
Developer-> Publisher-> MS/Nintendo/Sony Review->
Developer-> Publisher-> MS/Nintendo/Sony Review->
Release -> Consumer
on the PC side it looks like this
Developer -> Publisher -> Release -> Consumer
The publisher generaly wants a release ASAP so they can make a quick buck off of the game they have been sinking money into for the last 18+ months. So games on the PC get released prematurely. Because of lack of platform QC. Somthing that will not happen just because there is a Steam type option for developers to publish through.
The thing Valve is looking to do is to facilitate the ease with which smaller/independant developers can get their games to consumers by making it cheaper to do so. Steam also allows larger, and more established developers to release extra content, and get feedback on content useage. Somthing a "static disk" release doesn't offer.
I understand and agree that Steam has had it's troubles, buy it's a very good idea, and it's coming along quite well. Everyone fears change. And Valve took a huge risk attempting to do what it has done with Steam, but it was an attempt to solve a big problem for developers, publishing software, and software feedback. No one else was adressing these problems and Valve took it uppon itself to tackle them. It isn't an easy ride, but I'm glad they're taking the risk.