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

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."

Re:Gabe Newell is poisoning his own well

[Clazzy]

To be honest, the game engine is being updated all the time. We had HDR, better facial animation and now we're getting better physics, optimisations for multiple processors, motion blur and more. I could understand your point if the engine remained static but Valve are putting a lot of effort into the engine so it's not just an addon that's three years late. This is more-or-less the way episodic content will be anyway, this might be the norm if enough people see it as a good way of making money.

Re:On the contrary

[DrXym]

Gabe Newell is a pro-Microsoft business hat. His opinion of the PS3 is non-technical, biased and quite ill informed. And spectacularly bizarre considering (I assume) that he wants the Orange Box to sell well on that console.

Carmack gives a reasoned technical criticism but it wasn't particularly pro or anti the PS3. His opinion was that you had to work harder to get at the power, specifically - "They are both powerful systems that are going to make excellent game platforms, but I have a bit of a preference for the 360's symmetric CPU architecture and excellent development tools," he said. "The PS3 will have a bit more peak power, but it will be easier to exploit the available power on the 360. Our next major title is being focused towards simultaneous release on 360, PS3, and PC."

That doesn't sound like badmouthing to me but an informed observation.

Re:Gabe Newell is poisoning his own well

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's pretty much identical. Yes, the API is different in a few important respects, but OpenGL 2.1 supports every feature that D3D 9 supports except for one (instancing, which is absolutely required in D3D games, but isn't that big of a deal in GL games). One can simply ignore all the legacy baggage in OpenGL, and code for it exactly the same way you would for D3D. The only real difference is GLSL vs HLSL, and frankly that's just a matter of personal preference.

It gets trickier if you count D3D 10. There are cards available that have support for all the D3D features, but hardly anyone has both Vista and a D3D 10 capable card. There are no games that make use of D3D 10 for anything other than simple special effects, and there won't be for several years, simply because it's not worth limiting your audience. Besides, games being released even a year from now would still have been in development long before D3D 10 was announced.

What D3D 10 is useful for right now is prototyping. If you're in the early stages of a game that'll ship in 2 or 3 years, D3D 10 is going to be important. For this kind of prototyping, OpenGL 2.1 with either the vendor-specific (nVidia) or standard (EXT / ARB) extensions are just as usable, and OpenGL 3 will be usable long before the game ships. Chances are the renderer is going to be mostly rewritten several times before the game ships anyway, to keep pace with new hardware that defies the assumptions made about existing hardware, so simply developing on GL 2 now and porting to GL 3 later isn't that big of a deal. Neither is developing on GL 2 and porting to both D3D 10 and GL 3.

Frankly, OpenGL is just as good for writing games with now as D3D is. Always has been, really. It just didn't have Microsoft's marketing department behind it.