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PlayStation (Games)

Valve's Orange Box For PS3 Delayed, Not Console Related 58

Posted by Zonk from the there-are-elements-here-that-are-confusing dept.
Eurogamer is reporting that the package of Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episodes One and Two, Portal, and Team Fortress 2 known as the Orange Box will have a delayed release on the PlayStation 3. The 360 and PC versions are still slated for retail release on October 9th, with the PS3 version coming two-to-three weeks later. But, Valve was quick to point out, it's not because of the console: "The reason for the PS3 build's late arrival, marketing director Doug Lombardi told Eurogamer, is simply that the EA UK team handling [the PS3 Orange Box's] development are on the other side of the ocean and are necessarily a bit behind the core Valve team's development. 'We weren't going to hold up PC and 360 for PS3,' Lombardi told us."
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Valve's Orange Box For PS3 Delayed, Not Console Related More

Valve's Orange Box For PS3 Delayed, Not Console Related

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  • First Post delayed (Score:5, Funny)

    by LiquidCoooled ( 634315 ) on Saturday September 08, 2007 @05:25AM (#20519165) Homepage Journal
    This post is delayed as well, though its not because of the PS3 console either.
    Its because I outsourced my typing and there is some lag.

  • Gabe Newell is poisoning his own well (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Saturday September 08, 2007 @06:15AM (#20519343)
    His constant bitching about the PS3 must be severely dampening interest in the Orange Box on that platform. I expect most of his complaints stem from the PS3's outright impudence of not being a Microsoft platform and not using Microsoft APIs. Even so, when the head of Valve slags off a platform, what confidence does it instill in games they're making for it? Apparently they're so allergic to this strange and terrifying console that they've shoved the port onto some EA team. Perhaps the game will end up being great on the PS3 but at the moment I have no confidence at all that it will be. Mr Newell needs to shut up or say something positive. Worse is that I just know that if the port does turn out to be poor or sales are a flop that he'll blame the console rather than acknowledge his own hand in the outcome.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Elkboy ( 770849 )
      Maybe you can send Gabe a pamphlet of how to really develop for the PS3 and see how the problems are really features. It worked for Sony and Lair, right?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )
        There are plenty of decent games for the PS3. If the Orange Box sucks, the blame will lie squarely with the developers. And yes the blame lies with the LAIR developers too. The problems of that game had absolutely nothing to do with the PS3 at all (reviewers unanimously said it looked and sounded gorgeous) but the control scheme and targeting sucked.

        • Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)

          by tepples ( 727027 )

          Maybe you can send Gabe a pamphlet of how to really develop for the PS3
          There are plenty of decent games for the PS3. If the Orange Box sucks, the blame will lie squarely with the developers. And yes the blame lies with the LAIR developers too.
          And the Sony developers if the LAIR developers can't figure out how to use the PS3 API right. That's the kind of thing that the pamphlet might cover.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by DrXym ( 126579 )
            LAIR sucked for the controls, not any technical issue with the PS3. Quit trying to insinuate that a bad port mean there are problems with the console.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Grave ( 8234 )
              What port? Lair is a unique and exclusive title for PS3. My understanding of the control problem was that it was primarily an issue of the motion-sensing not working out very well. Whether that is a hardware limitation or bad programming is unknown, but it's always been known that the SIXAXIS doesn't have anything like the motion capability of the Wiimote.

              For a title that was supposed to be a system mover to have such a fundamental problem is a huge disappointment and honestly, not a very good indicator
              • Motion senseing can work just fine in a flight game. Go look at warhawk, for example. Once you got the hang of it, it's pretty easy to whip your warhawk around in a dogfight. Lair doesn't control like that. It's more like trying to stear a 4 ton flying horse, not at all easy or smooth in comparison. Add on the lack of manual targeting, and it was a recipie for disaster. Even on a wii controller, it would have been the same deal.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by KDR_11k ( 778916 )
          I recall reviewers complaining about a shitty framerate, too.
        • Horrible controls is just ONE of the problems in Lair, according to reviews.
          The framerate sucks too. (BTW, IGN just reviewed Skate, and gave the 360 version the nod over the PS3 version due to framerate problems on the PS3, and bad aliasing, and blurry visuals (in attempt to hide the aliasing). We've seen this over and over again, all this after Sony talked of dual-1080p output at 120 frames per second. After all that boasting, PS3 can't even do single 720p output at 60 (and even sometimes 30) fps withou

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by GL250 ( 1153817 )
            "Horrible controls is just ONE of the problems in Lair, according to reviews. The framerate sucks too. (BTW, IGN just reviewed Skate, and gave the 360 version the nod over the PS3 version due to framerate problems on the PS3, and bad aliasing, and blurry visuals (in attempt to hide the aliasing). We've seen this over and over again, all this after Sony talked of dual-1080p output at 120 frames per second. After all that boasting, PS3 can't even do single 720p output at 60 (and even sometimes 30) fps without

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by GL250 ( 1153817 )
            Wow! I'm Don. I don't even know where to start. How is Oblivion, Dirt, and Warhawk possible then? All you are doing is picking out the bad examples and completely forgetting -- intentionally I might add -- the development teams that actually took the time to learn the PS3's hardware. Let me explain "too hard to program for." It means, "Not developed with Microsoft tools, thus devs that are familiar with those DirectX/PC architecture are not able to get the most of our the PS3." Come on now. You can do bette
          • I'd be inclined to believe that was the case, (that the PS3 suffers with difficult APIs, etc) if I didn't play several games that were great. Resistance, Motorstorm, Ninja Gaiden Sigma, VF5... all have 0 issues like some of the "ports" are having. (I can't speak for Lair, because I've not played it... but the consensus from PS3 _owners_ has not been nearly as pitiful sounding as the reviewers... who I take as little stock in their opinions as possible...)

            What I think is going on is lazy-assed developers wh
          • What did they say about the controls? I was looking forward to Skate because Tony Hawk was getting ridiculously unrealistic (and the achievements for things like million point combos are insane), but I played the demo and really disliked the controls for skate.

            I also, for the life of me, couldn't pull off the manuals at all.. and when I did it by accident, I'd get chastised for not flipping into it.
    • Knowing how EA likes to screw up PS3 ports (see the Madden 360/PS3 fiasco), I wouldn't touch an EA PS3 port with a 50 foot pole. I tend to avoid EA at all costs anyway (they really butchered Command & Conquer 3 in my opinion). I'm guessing with 99% certainty that the PS3 version isn't going to be as good as the PC/360 version, since it isn't being done by Valve themselves.

      Besides, I don't see why people would want to play Half-life 2 on anything other than a PC anyway. Of course I'm biased towards PC fi

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )
        Knowing how EA likes to screw up PS3 ports (see the Madden 360/PS3 fiasco), I wouldn't touch an EA PS3 port with a 50 foot pole. I tend to avoid EA at all costs anyway (they really butchered Command & Conquer 3 in my opinion). I'm guessing with 99% certainty that the PS3 version isn't going to be as good as the PC/360 version, since it isn't being done by Valve themselves.

        I think EA are getting their act together. The recent NBA 2008 demo appeared to run at 60fps. I think the issue is that EA (& U

  • Share data across the ocean, what did they think, they wqould get over charged by their ISP for long distance surfing?!

    Seriously, if you are incapable of syncing development between America and the UK you should not have a development team in both countries. I can see how the time difference could be a small problem, but how much does it take to only communicate through e-mail, or I know this is scary, but have one of the offices working different hours in order to keep them in touch.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Aladrin ( 926209 )
      Exactly. How are they "necessarily a bit behind" and how the hell is it necessary? If they were on their game, they could be AHEAD instead of behind for the same reason. Nope, this is just EA spinning another 'the PS3 isn't hard to program for' story.

      Sony's SDK has -always- been harder to use than anyone else's. While they -are- working on a better, easier-to-use one, it's not out yet and companies are having to learn things the hard way and implement them by hand.

      Dynasty Warriors Gundam recently shippe

      • It's sick to have that massive processing power and a tiny little bit of RAM. I can't imagine what they were thinking.
        I can.
        "Look, you can use the SPUs for on-the-fly decompression!"

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )
        I still don't believe this 'they won't hit the limits of the PS3 for years' crap, though. The thing simply doesn't have enough RAM. It's sick to have that massive processing power and a tiny little bit of RAM. I can't imagine what they were thinking.

        The PS3 has exactly the same amount of RAM as the 360. It has been partitioned so that CPU & GPU have optimized access to their own halves. But there is nothing to stop a game from storing data in graphics memory if it wants to. Conversely the 360 has unif

        • I'm not sure, but the poster you were replying to might have been referring to the tiny memory in each SPU which is not main RAM.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by DrXym ( 126579 )
            I'm not sure, but the poster you were replying to might have been referring to the tiny memory in each SPU which is not main RAM.

            Here's a very good overview [ps3forums.com] of the Cell processor including describing the SPUs. The gist of the article is that SPUs have 256k of local cache-like memory but its contents can change on the fly as data is pushed in and out.

            • Anyone who's interested in how the cell is programmed is better off reading Dr Dobb's programming journal and its review of optimizing for the Cell (which they were very impressed with), or IBM's developer guides with code examples on how to use SPUs and their local cache memory. PS, SPUs have local cache and DMA transfer ability -- so you can work on up to 256k of data on your heap at once in the SPU but stream data via DMA to and from main memory constantly if you like. The really interesting bit is spl
              • The problem is that while it may technically be feasible to feed 1 SPU as fast as it can process data. The round robin nature of the bus means that it is completely saturated doing a matrix operation on only 4 spus. In other words, without either more memory or more bandwidth to the SPUs the additional computation is useless (unless you are doing something exponentially more difficult than 4d matrix math. Which neither traditional game physics or graphics programming does.

                Compare this with the 2 additional
                • I can't speak directly from experience optimizing for each, but I'd say you've got your facts a bit screwy on bus bandwidth there from what I've both read and observed. Have a read of the Dr. Dobb's article It may be tricky, but the performance gains are worth the effort [ddj.com].

                  They comment on both the difficulty of fully optimizing for the cell as well as the immense capabilities of it:

                  In this article, we present strategies we've used to make a Breadth-First Search on graphs as fast as possible on the Cell, reac

                  • Even with their impressive optimization they state that in the best case 32% of their total time is still spend waiting on memory. And this is ONLY sending the graph nodes.

                    Now imagine that rather than a simple search the algorithm is required to do something useful, like math transforms at each graph node. Such as for physics inverse kinemetics. Increasing the data size for each node would quickly saturate the bus. (even more than it already is).

                    I am not saying it is slow by any means, just saying that as

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Elkboy ( 770849 )
      The PS3 version is being developed by EA UK, not Valve UK.
    • Share data across the ocean, what did they think, they wqould get over charged by their ISP for long distance surfing?!

      Seriously, if you are incapable of syncing development between America and the UK you should not have a development team in both countries. I can see how the time difference could be a small problem, but how much does it take to only communicate through e-mail, or I know this is scary, but have one of the offices working different hours in order to keep them in touch.

      Have you ever worked at

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