Why Is It So Difficult To Allow Cross-Platform Play? 389
cookiej writes "I just got the most recent version of the Madden franchise ('10) for the PS3. Can somebody explain to me why EA has separate networks for the different platforms, only allowing players to compete with people using the same console? Back in the day, there were large discrepancies between the consoles, but these days it seems like the Xbox and the PS3 are at least near the same level. After so many releases for this franchise, they've got to have a fairly standardized protocol for networking; it seems arbitrary not to let them compete. Or am I just missing something obvious? Is it just a matter of Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network not working together?"
Re:Why would they... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:its a really simple answer (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
Posting Anonymously for this. There is no software reason why the two consoles don't share games. In development as an online engineer for another title (I don't work on Madden so I can't say for sure for them) I've actually done some game play tests between development consoles, it helps work out some uninitialized values and corner cases that cause online crashes when dealing with sloppy programming. But development consoles can work in non-secure mode, retail consoles can't. As developers we have to send everything out as secure. That means that a PS3 can't talk directly to a XBox360. The consoles can't even talk directly to the servers, instead they have to go through gateways that decrypts the data. The gateways are located centrally, and you can bet that Sony's gateway isn't going to talk to Microsoft's gateway (And I'm leaving a hell of a lot out here), so that means for one console to talk to another console it has to hit a central server, adding three machines, and a lot of hops/latency to the mix.
The gimped up networking layer is one of the reasons I'm glad I got out of online development, and into a much less stressful area. Everything, and I mean everything, can @#$@ up online, and its up to the online engineers to fix it. Someone forgets to initialize a variable in the game play engine, a bug only appears online, its up to online to find it, going though code that they haven't designed, written or looked at before. I've even had a mistimed animation cause a disconnect on me. That makes online very conservative, and you could say very religious as in 'please god don't let it @#&$ up on my watch'. The typical Online engineer is only about 5 hours from burn out, they aren't going to suggest xbox 360 - PS3 gaming. Besides I'm pretty sure that both MS and Sony have their lawyers on the case that you can't interpenetrate between the two. But also Online Engineers want to help make a great game. And they would love to add in cross platform play if they could, and if they had the men to do it, don't get me wrong about it, but online has never been a focus in most sports games, and are constantly over capacity.
Re:FLOATING POINT IS NOT CROSS PLATFORM (Score:2, Interesting)
You do know that an entire genre of games relies on a networking method that you're calling "wrong"?
How many thousand+ unit RTS games have you written?
Re:same as the PC (Score:2, Interesting)
"One designed for BOTH is probably equally bad on either."
There was Shadowrun, which was designed for both PC and 360, and for cross-platform competitive play. As far as multiplayer shooters go, it was a good pickup if you got it for $20. No single-player mode.
But what's interesting is the balancing that went into Shadowrun. In playtesting, 360 players were getting massacred by PC players because their control over their aiming was so vastly superior.
So on top of handicapping PC players by giving 360 players some auto-aim and smaller hit boxes, the designers went back and tried to make terrain more valuable than aim.
If you really got into the game, you were able to either close up quickly or ambush people at short range pretty well. In close combat, the advantages narrow off quite a bit.
you have it all wrong (Score:1, Interesting)
You do realize that controllers (mouse+keyboard), more customizable settings, and more processing power all would still slant it towards the people playing on the pc, right?
You completely forget about the cheating.
It is incredibly easy to cheat on a PC. I have written my own cheats, and find it very easy to do so for each new game that comes out. I started to do it because I was curious about how programs used memory. I don't go exploit it that much, in fact, I rarely play. But I do like beating the system. And from what I have observed while watching other people play, there are definitely a ton of cheaters out there. Some cover their gameplay to make it harder to see, but most do not. As long as you don't make your hack public, you can probably go undetected for years... as I have done with every PC game I have been interested in.
Re:I'm thinking.,.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, both manufacturers want to ensure simplicity in their interfaces. The last thing Microsoft wants to have people to deal with is that when you select one player you get the usual XBox live guide options come up and when you select another it simply has to say sorry, this person is using a different console.
One of the whole points of Live, and one of the things Microsoft did well with the XBox was the consistency of it, it offers you a consistent experience throughout, if you start branching out to other consoles you lose that. Sony no doubt feel the same, although their interface wasn't consistent throughout startup to gaming, they've made massive strides in that direction such that it is much more so nowadays so also clearly see the benefits of maintaining that.
It's probably worth pointing out that there are games where XBox players can indeed play with PC players, simply because of Live for Windows which does allow Microsoft to maintain that consistent interface across platforms.
There are also outright differences on a code level, the PS3 can't hook into XBox's lives voice setup for example and vice versa so there'd be no communication between players of different platforms. Similarly, for games that use Microsoft's matchmaking and so forth again, the PS3 wouldn't be able to make use of it because I doubt Microsoft are about to publish or even license their proprietary protocol specs to a competitor. Again, the same goes for Sony to Microsoft.
Of course, there's the business side of things too, if your console has 20,000 people playing online at any one time and the other guys only has a 100 making it a pain to find a game then you don't want to give them the advantage of having access to your playerbase in the hope those will switch to your platform if it has more players.
Re:Obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
That being said, all my statistics are based on actual profiles -- you really can't beat seeing a 5% performance drop by deliberately adding one single line to invalidate a GPU cache state in the middle of rendering your scene.
In addition, I would argue that the CPU (on the PS3) coupled with the architecture is actually more flexible than that of a PC. Have you heard of a PC game developer explicitly writing the framebuffer back to main memory in the middle of a rendering just so they can do post processing on the CPU? And that's the type of post processing that you can't get until DX11 hits (scatter, arbitrary ordered writes, etc...). Furthermore, I'm not sure what why you look down on tricks. Isn't any modern day real-time rendering just based on "tricks?" Isn't rasterization itself a trick? Unless you think all the games out there are solving full global illumination in real time, otherwise I think you can classify every one of them as a collection of tricks for all sorts of specific situations. And to answer your last point, post-processing isn't exactly free.
Re:vendor lock in (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe this is an opportunity for open source to jump into the console market that is fully integrated with PC platforming and as an added bonus will even let XBOX and PS3 connect up (I'm dreaming here). Just my ignorant opinion, but if Linux systems had a little more entertainment they might become more main stream. Maybe a console fork would help get high end card drivers faster for Linux as a whole.
Controller Advantage (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:vendor lock in (Score:1, Interesting)
"Slippery Slope" is a logical fallacy:
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/slippery-slope.html [nizkor.org]
http://www.fallacyfiles.org/slipslop.html [fallacyfiles.org]
Re:Why would they... (Score:1, Interesting)
Ignore the fact that you'd have to get Sony, Nintendo and MS to cooperate with their matchmaking systems and such first.
Hi! Welcome to 2009! You may notice a new technology named ARPANET, colloquially known as "the Internet." The Internet allows you to communicate across vast distances at high speeds, and was designed with a set of protocols to facilitate these communications. These protocols are platform and computer architecture independent, and as such, said protocols may facilitate communication between two very different systems. /sarcasm
Seriously though, the only reason is to sell PS3 hardware, since their standard means have not led to great success on this generation of the Playstation. I point you to the case of Quake3 on the Dreamcast being fully compatible with all other ports of Quake3 as proof that Sony is just trying to sap your wallet of $300+ to play the same fucking game and alienate all of your Xbox owning friends.
Re:OT: who to blame for economic woes (vendor lock (Score:4, Interesting)
"By the same logic you can't blame the bankers who ruined the world economy"
You can't blame them, but for a different reason. The seeds of the devastation were planted in 1999 [nytimes.com], when the congressional Democrats forced Fannie Mae and Freddi Mac to lower their lending standards -- suddenly, millions of people, who hitherto would not qualify for mortgage, were able to obtain one. The same supply of the real estate now faced a spiked demand, which in our highly efficient capitalist economy resulted in spike of both prices and building activity to meet the demand.
Unfortunately, helping the poor qualify for mortgage does not help them pay it off. That the Democrats were able to blame Republicans [ldsmag.com] (whose only fault was in not fighting against it hard enough) for this is a spectacular feat of mind-manipulation...
What about the much-maligned easing of banking regulations? Nope, that's not, what caused the problem -- even if it exacerbated it. Would you blame a powerful engine for an accident, when the car slams into a log lying across the highway? Sure, if it weren't running at high speed, the driver could've stopped safely without hitting the obstruction. But the blame is solidly on those, who placed the log across the road, not on the car-maker, that gave you the speedy vehicle...
I just wanted to say, excellent summary & analogy...and spot-on, even if it's off-topic for the discussion. I remember screaming at the TV back in 1999 when this was put in place; "Why are you putting poor people who can't freaking afford a house onto a near-certain path to default & bankruptcy!?!?".
This was so easy to see coming that it makes you start to take Glenn Beck & his theories on a planned collapse and reformation of the US as a socialist/fascist regime seriously, and I don't *want* to.
Strat
Re:OT: who to blame for economic woes (vendor lock (Score:3, Interesting)
I understand that part. I'm just not sure how the sub-prime lending law was the cause of it. After all, damaging though it must have been to the US economy, it wouldn't have had such a dramatic global effect without those toxic financial instruments, and, as far as I understand it, those were a completely private sector invention that decent oversight would have prevented.
I doubt though the global financial crisis is as simple as either of us think though and keeping a very close eye on all the greedy fools would be in everyone's interests.
Just as a point as well: the UK doesn't have any such law and yet our financial institutions were doing very stupid things like sub-prime mortgages, easy to obtain debt consolidation loans, 125% mortgages etc etc. What we did have though was a similar relaxing of bank governance allowing them to do stupid risky things.