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?"
Why would they... (Score:2, Insightful)
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Sony and Nintendo don't seem to care much, you run the servers, you do the matchups (though a PS3/Wii crossplatform game would likely have major version differences that would prevent multiplayer anyway). AFAIK MS is the problem with their paid-for XBox Live service.
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Except they did and they still wouldn't talk (then ps2 vs xbox), I had a copy of the game (star wars battlefront) for each platform and they would not f*!k^%g talk to each other on my local network. v.annoying and v.lame!
I also had the game on a pc and was about to experiment to see if the pc could host the game and the xbox and playstation join in. I even asked at the games store and they said 'they use a different network
Re:Why would they... (Score:4, Informative)
It's short for "verisimilitudinously".
vendor lock in (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:vendor lock in (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think you can blame anybody. It does not make sense for those two networks to allow people to play with each other. If I was making a purchasing decision, and most of my friends were playing some game on XBL, I would be more inclined to purchase the XBOX360 to play with my friends on XBL. Now, if the the PSN and XBL were linked, I could buy the PS3 instead.
Same logic works the other way to Microsoft's advantage.
So why would either of those two companies want to make it easier to buy the competitor's product?
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I don't think you can blame anybody. It does not make sense for those two networks to allow people to play with each other. If I was making a purchasing decision, and most of my friends were playing some game on XBL, I would be more inclined to purchase the XBOX360 to play with my friends on XBL. Now, if the the PSN and XBL were linked, I could buy the PS3 instead.
Same logic works the other way to Microsoft's advantage.
So why would either of those two companies want to make it easier to buy the competitor's product?
I don't know if I agree with your definition of blame.. By the same logic you can't blame the bankers who ruined the world economy because it was in their best interests to make as much money as they could while they could. It's a slippery slope.
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That's a pretty harsh characterization. I don't think that logic applies. There is a difference between greed to the point you don't care who you are hurting and not deliberately creating an equal opportunity environment.
Do you think it is a right for XBL users to interact with PSN users? I don't think you are entitled to it. You bringing up totally unrelated issues and demonizing them for what is really not an issue.
Microsoft and Sony deserve a LOT of criticism, but not for locking in their customers t
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Maybe this is an opport
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Games should retain the ability to play independent of the manufacturer supplied networks...
You know, so people can run their own private servers, join third party servers and engage in lan play. I've noticed a lot of console games don't even allow lan play anymore, we used to get a large group of friends together to play network games years ago, but that's becoming difficult these days.
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I'm not sure that you were trying to sell me on mass promiscuity and totalitarianism, but you've succeeded!
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:4, Insightful)
Seriously? Fucking insightful? I hate seeing this same meme bandied about.
There were multiple actions by the government that worked together with a firm belief that housing prices would continue to rise to cause this situation. Deregulation by one party. Broadening lending standards by another. Bankers who found ways to make money that while not illegal, required a firm willful ignorance of potential future calamity.
No one group is responsible for this, and to try and claim otherwise shows a complete misunderstanding of the situation.
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Seriously? Fucking insightful? I hate seeing this same meme bandied about.
There were multiple actions by the government that worked together with a firm belief that housing prices would continue to rise to cause this situation. Deregulation by one party. Broadening lending standards by another. Bankers who found ways to make money that while not illegal, required a firm willful ignorance of potential future calamity.
No one group is responsible for this, and to try and claim otherwise shows a complete misund
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Just out of interest which government legislation forced banks throughout the world to bundle crappy mortgages up with good ones and sell them on?
As I understand it, US banks & mortgage lenders along with Freddie & Fannie bundled these "toxic" mortgages into debt-instruments that they then sold & traded. Many financial institutions in other countries got caught holding some of that debt, as well as holding other US debt-instruments whose value collapsed when the US banks & mortgage lenders g
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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 foo
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If it works both ways then it seems like the companies are just as likely to be losing customers as they are to be gaining them.
OTOH, if the games were all compatible customer frustration over not being able to play with their friends will go down which could translate into more sales and a win for both customers and vendors alike.
Re:vendor lock in (Score:4, Insightful)
Street Fighter 4 has been released on both xbox 360 and PC. It's the same *exact* game. On PC, online play is enabled through "live - games for windows" (or whatever the hell it is called), bottom line: microsoft provides online gaming for both platforms.
Not only that, but they are explicitly trying to market their pc and xbox online services as a single, unified product... Yet, they still won't allow cross-platform play.
Re:vendor lock in (Score:4, Informative)
Console != PC (Score:2, Insightful)
Why would you want to allow your competitor console to play with yours. If one claims their network is superior to the others, that's a selling point and by allowing the other consoles to connect makes your "superior" network play a moot point.
same as the PC (Score:3, Insightful)
For the same reason console players can't play against PC players.
If they allowed a direct comparison between different platforms, people would realize more rapidly which is better and which is worse.
I'd love to see a match of TF2 between a bunch of console players vs. PC players. It'd be such a joke. :)
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A FPS designed for a console is best played on a console. One designed for a pc is best played on a pc.
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Umm, FPS games are by definition, not typically "Designed" for consoles.
Nobody said mice are better, but they are much better at controlling first person shooters for obvious reasons.
For a racing game when you don't have a joystick/wheel, or a fighter, I'd much rather a controller than a keyboard+mouse. It's very simple, called "use the right tool for the job".
Round hole, round peg. Easy comparison to your own: ever tried playing quake on a g1 or an iphone? It's kind of, you know, pretty hard to do. some in
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Obviously not true. There are FPS games, successful ones, that have never been ported to the pc.
Nobody said mice are better, but they are much better at controlling first person shooters for obvious reasons.
I would dispute this, also. Mice are more accurate at controlling first person shooters. Better is something different, entirely.
For a racing game when you don't have a joystick/wheel, or a fighter, I'd much rather a
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Some interfaces are inherently better for some tasks than others. That's why we use different interface devices, instead of having one "standard" one that has been proven to be the best possible choice. If we're restricted with regards to our input device, as we are with consoles, we work very hard on the game to make the input work with it.
Mice are best for FPS games because they allow for a nearly direct mapping of mouse location to screen location. It's fast, accurate, and refining accuracy from a genera
Re:same as the PC (Score:4, Funny)
I would dispute this, also. Mice are more accurate at controlling first person shooters. Better is something different, entirely.
No in this sense more accurate is better. Why? Because no matter how much ergonomic something is if you spend 99% of your time lying dead on the ground you'll still want to chuck that lovely piece of plastic through the tv.
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Putting the cross hair on someone's head doesn't have to be the point of an FPS. The game can be based on strategy, teamwork and experience indpendent of accuracy.
In fact I would argue that an FPS with no aim what so ever that was purely random would be equally as fun as one which involves twitch aiming.
In a game like TF2, unless you're sniping, most of the game is pretty accuracy independent. That being said.... the 360 version of TF2 is unplayable.
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Exactly, the right tool for the right job.
FPS are better played with the mouse and keyboard. ARMA, Operation Flashpoint and Battlefield are some of my favourite FPS's but to try and fly a plane or helicopter with the mouse and KB is difficult and near impossible to do well. Joysticks are better for flying.
Console controllers are a consoles only choice so they have to be designed to be a jac
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"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 player
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I'd love to see a match of TF2 between a bunch of console players vs. PC players. It'd be such a joke. :)
Just wait until the scripters and hackers get at them. I met a spy that gets ~80% hits with his revolver - most headshots. It was plainly obvious he was a hacker, because round after round, he'd run into crowds of people(Pyros, medics, heavies, etc.), owning them all.
Or he'd just shoot you from across the map.
I've also met genuinely great spies, like Jening. They're fun to play with, if you don't mind getting your ass handed to you over and over. Console players vs Jening... I wonder how many dozens he'd ki
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I've heard that differing CPU architectures is a significant difficulty in cross-platform play and something that hampered Mac-PC online play before Macs switched to Intel. Online multiplayer games rely on players' own machines to perform practically all in-game calculations, and the game assumes that each machine is getting identical results from these calculations and passing those results into the next operation. But due to the nature of floating point arithmetic, the last few digits of a floating point
Obligatory PA reference (Score:2, Offtopic)
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/11/20/ [penny-arcade.com]
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This was done I think. I seem to recall reading a story about a cross platform FPS that ran between maybe the dreamcast and the PC. As expected PC users absolutely dominated the dreamcast users.
of course google fails me and I can't find it now.
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actually, the wii is the only console that allows direct pointing.
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Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
MS and Sony (and Nintendo) want you to use their respective online frameworks. They obviously aren't compatible or interoperable (different name/nick/whatever namespaces, different friends lists, different registration procedure, etc).
You can't have cross-platform online interoperation unless EA uses an entirely custom online framework that is identical among platforms. The console manufacturers wouldn't be too happy about that, and neither would gamers (who want to register once and maintain one friends list for all games, not once for each vendor or game).
The only sane solution would require heavy cooperation between all console vendors and standardizing quite a bit of the online experience, but that's never going to happen (at least not this generation).
Re:Obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
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I'm not sure what this has to do with the Prisoner's Dilemma. If a person buys all three consoles so they can play every game, all console makers benefit more than if everyone bought one console and they shared the profit.
Re:Obvious (Score:5, Informative)
That's pretty much it. My buddy is a test coordinator at EA, and his stories about games failing for the stupidest guideline violations never ends.
And I think that's what it's really about: each company has their own guidelines (from Nintendo's save screen longer than 0.15 seconds has to have a message that you can read, to Sony's all of "PLAYSTATION 3" has to be capitalized). If a version of the game was submitted to one console maker, got passed, but failed at a different one, that means they need to change code for a version and still make sure it's compatible with the older versions that passed under someone else's watch.
And never mind shinanigans related to updating the game (or virtual lack of ability in Nintendo's case).
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.
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They dont care what GPU or CPU it has. How fast the L2 cache is. But I can still get on WOW or battle.net and play the same game title with everyone across the world despite the fact that we all share vastly different hardware.
And this is exactly why a lot of PC game developers have no idea why their games run at 1fps on consoles. This is EXACTLY the type of stuff that a console game developer has to take into account to make sure they get the most out of their hardware. And the trade-off that Blizzard had to make to get WoW running on so many different hardware configurations is a general loss of performance (>50%) compared to optimized console games.
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general loss of performance (>50%)
This number sound ridiculously high to me. Can you cite a reliable source for that?
Surely there will be a performance loss, but I seriously doubt it will be anything close to that magnitude.
Either way it'd be very difficult to compare the performance of a multi-platform MMO to a single-platform MMO considering the "MMO"-aspect probably limits performance far more than the number of platforms it runs on.
Re:Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
To put this into perspective, let's just consider writing a game on the PS3 using console methodology vs. PC methodology. To begin with, you gain >50% performance just switching from PS3's OpenGL implementation to libGCM (15fps to 25fps...sad, I know). Then you consider the fact that you can carefully maintain your buffer states, early Z, double Z, special caches, etc...which is about 5~15% performance PER item (in addition to the fact that you can reinstate the buffer states). Then you consider the fact that you don't need to flush the rendering pipeline (~0.Xms per full flush), custom MSAA resolves (saves passes), hidden functions not exposed on PC hardware, texture bandwidth vs. computing power trade-offs, less worry about batched draw calls, etc.... In the end, it adds up to >50% performance loss going from hardware-specific to hardware-agnostic with an abstraction layer (DirectX or OpenGL). Put it another way: PS3 can push out about a couple million polygons per frame with all sorts of effects and stuff. You'd be hard pressed to find a PC game with a cross-hardware engine pushing out the same render quality at half the framerate.
On the other hand, the Intel CPU is way powerful and there really isn't a way for me to compare that vs. the PPC derivatives on the consoles. But trust me when I say that I've seen 1000X speedup by going from excellent C code to highly optimized ASM, which you can only feasibly get by working on a fixed hardware. However, I'm going to stop giving more details as I don't want to break NDA (everything I've said can be found on the web at very legitimate sites). If you want to know about the inner workings of the GPU (and maybe the CPU), you can always check out blogs such as Wolfgang Engel's (and remember to read comments!) or other GDC/SIGGRAPH presentations.
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But trust me when I say that I've seen 1000X speedup by going from excellent C code to highly optimized ASM, which you can only feasibly get by working on a fixed hardware.
Using the same CPU? I don't trust you: It is plain false. In console CPUs (most of them in-order two-way superscalar PowerPC CPUs), for "excellent C code" I understand that already has: loop unrolling, aligned data access, proper packed data structures. In assembly you can add SIMD (up to 4x speedup), data prefetch (up to 2x speedup), but there is no more. Of course, I do not count as speed-up using the PS3's 6 SPEs available for the game, nor the GPU pixel shaders (however, still counting them, you'll rea
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With this in mind, I'll agree 1000X is optimistic, but 200-300X certainly wouldn't be for SPEs (again, not accounting for the fact that you have six/seven of them at your disposal), and that's just from a relative asm novice (me) using intrinsics in C/C++ -- not even full blown assembly. Although in this case, I'm more likely to blame the compiler not really knowing what to do for optimization -- there seems to be an insane amount of overhead just twiddling tightly packed data on an architecture that's simply not good at it, whether I need to save space or not. And, understandably, the compiler isn't particularly good at creatively utilizing the colorful instructions available. (Go ahead, look up si_avgb.)
I thought you were speaking about the PS3's PPE processor (PowerPC-64, in-order, two way superscalar, dual threaded), anyway, still 200x is exagerated for the SPE case, being 1000x, 200x, and 300x not optimistic, but impossible. Please excuse the rudeness of my reply.
I've programmed SPEs both in assembly and in C, and the main penalties comes from: 1) the fact that data is always fetched in 128-bit units (16 bytes), despite wanting just one byte, and 2) The SPE has no jump prediction (has 'jump hint' op
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.
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general loss of performance (>50%)
This number sound ridiculously high to me. Can you cite a reliable source for that?
Seems rather low to me. It's well known that all the layers of abstraction between your CPU/GPU and the running program really slow things down. PCs have vastly faster hardware, and look at what they pull off!
I once heard from a game developer that the XBox360 has about as much processing power as a 2.0ghz Athlon 64. The XBox360 CPU is pretty weak, but with minimal OS overhead, almost no multitasking, and compilers that optimize perfectly for that particular CPU... it's much easier to milk performance. 50%
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Re:Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it's flatly not possible for EA to do that. The console manufactures have strict guidelines about online play, and without their authorization, a game doesn't get published. It's possible for Sony, MS, and Nintendo to allow it; but it would be an unlikely exception.
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This is truth. I've worked on networking on a 360/PS3 title at EA.
MSFT does NOT allow going outside of their secure gateway based networking system. No exceptions unless you want to pay huge amounts of money to convince them to allow otherwise (I think only Final Fantasy XI has done this). It is possible for games that use Games For Windows Live because it implements the same kind of secure gateway networking environment that Xbox360 uses.
Sony is not as strict, and the PS3 SDK implements traditional sock
Anonymous Coward. (Score:2, Insightful)
I actually read something about this the other day... Sony doesnt care about it. They are actually allowing cross platform with the upcoming FFXIV MMORPG on Windows/PS3. I can't say I agree or disagree with MS's reasoning, but it has to do with Quality Control on XBOX360. Back in the PS2 and XBOX days, all servers were managed by the developer. After a few years, servers shut down, and people still continue to buy the game only to find out that when they try to go online, it doesnt work anymore. Since XBL u
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Re:Anonymous Coward. (Score:4, Informative)
Where did you see that?
I'm pretty sure Microsoft by default handles all of the server for matchmaking and leaderboards. I remember back with the first Xbox that Microsoft had to develop a protocol to allow Live games to communicate with the game company's server. This was done at the insistence of EA, who would not release titles with online play unless they could control the servers. This is why you have to accept a separate EULA and make a separate account to online with some EA games. I remember games like Burnout 3 and Revenge not working right for a few days after launch because of problems connecting to EA's servers. This is also why old EA games like Timesplitters 3 no longer work on the Xbox while you can still play all(?) of the older games that rely on Microsoft's servers.
As shown by what they've already done, EA has enough leverage to force Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo to allow cross-platform play. I doubt you'd find any resistance from Nintendo, as they lack a truly unified online play system like Microsoft and Sony have.
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Now there's an oxymoron; XBox and Quality Control. "Multiplayer worked great until it melted through the floor."
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The existing FFXI MMORPG already works on PS2, PC and 360, so it's definitely possible to do, probably just more effort than it's worth for a non-MMO title.
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Network access on the playstation isn't free. It's just a different model. The person providing the content pays for it essentially. So if you download a 'free' wallpaper from the PSN the guy who put it up there pays. If you buy FFVII from the PSN, Square Enix pays. I haven't looked at the PSN contract lately (not being in the PS3 dev business so much anymore), but I think it was a per gig rate too, so if you had something big, and free you could bankrupt yourself if it was sufficiently popular.
There's
Merge Difficulties (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo were to come to an agreement about common online elements tomorrow, it'd still be nontrivial to merge all the player data, handle duplicate usernames, handle comparisons of records between different platforms and the such. Even if we disregard the political aspects, the technical aspects are daunting, and likely to grow even more so as these services continue to grow independently of one another.
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If you think the technical aspects are trivial, maybe you can describe. What I know is that if the CPUs/architectures are not identical, then things like data exchange become difficult. This is especially so with floating point. A truly trivial way to exchange data between exactly like architectures is to dump bytes of memory exactly as formatted. But if the architectures are different, not only is conversion required, but it is also necessary to decide what format to exchange in that is neutral and fai
well I'm sure it varies from game to game (Score:5, Funny)
but I do know that the keyboard+mouse guys would _destroy_ the gamepad people in any sort of FPS.
also emacs is better than vi.
Pretty sure that is a Live issue (Score:2)
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its a really simple answer (Score:5, Funny)
PS3s are big endian machines.
Xbox 360s are little endian.
Q.E.D They can't talk to each other.
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Uh, no, otherwise PowerPC Macs wouldn't be able to talk TCP/IP with Intel-based PCs. What you do is define the protocol to use one endian and the platforms that use the opposite just convert incoming data. Usually you'd define the on-wire protocol to use big-endian (also called "network endian" - it's also what TCP/IP uses). The same thing works for file formats, though there a third option that seems to be reasonably popular is to allow for both endiannesses in the format, using a magic word to distinguish
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PS3s are big endian machines. Xbox 360s are little endian. Q.E.D They can't talk to each other.
Gee, if only someone would discover the mystical secret of translating between big and little endian [devx.com].
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PS3s are big endian machines.
Xbox 360s are little endian.
Q.E.D They can't talk to each other.
Epic failure to grok network byte order seen on Slashdot. Film at 11.
Re:its a really simple answer (Score:4, Funny)
Is that a big-endian 11 or a little-endian 11?
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I hope you're joking since the TCP/IP and UDP protocols have the concept of "host order" and network order. All packets should be translated to network order before sending them over the network.
Plus both systems run PowerPC based chips which run big endian so even if they didn't bother doing the host to network order translation you that won't be the cause of your networking failure.
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This only applies to the protocol part of the packet. The payload part of the packet may contain anything.
But converting between endian systems is both quick and easy so it is not a real problem. The real reason is that the console vendors put strict rules on how online gaming must be implemented and you do not get your game published without their permission, period.
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woosh went over your heads. A silly question got a glib answer.
Economics, pure and simple (Score:2)
I'll put my 2 cents on the economics of the matter, rather than "vendor lock-in" or whatever. The platform gaming networks provide frameworks for the game developers plus the operational infrastructure (servers, server-side software, bandwidth, ops staff, etc.) and distributes that cost across all of the games on the platform that utilize it. This is likely to be far more economical for the publisher, as compared to coding and testing the client and server side code and paying the capital and upkeep costs
Cross platform console work (Score:2, Informative)
The Xbox and Xbox 360 use encryption implemented in the kernel as part of the Xbox Live matchmaking. There are many reasons for this but the main ones are security to help stop people altering the packets and cheating. This encryption is a requirement mandated by Microsoft before a title can be published. The encryption does mean the other consoles cannot decode those packets, unless a lot of effort is spent to reverse engineer the encryption and Xbox Live protocols. I have a feeling that if a publisher/dev
To the person that tagged "monopolies" ... (Score:2)
A monopoly is one of those things there can really only be one of.
The fact that MS, Sony and Microsoft are viciously competing for video game market share (see, e.g. the recent price drops) is a sign of a fairly healthy and competitive market.
Easy (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot like linux native support is perceived.
Controller Advantage (Score:2, Interesting)
the real reason... platform holders. (Score:2)
The implementation of cross platform wouldn't be out of the realms of possibility.
However, cross platform integration would definitely be a TRC/TCR/lotcheck breaker. Failing them means no platform holder approval, which means your game isn't coming out until you fix the non-compliance, and your development budget is pissed down the drain if you don't fix it.
Rare even managed it with a DS 360 implementation for Viva Pinata - however I think despite their 'late in the day' talk, that the real reason is it wa
Network code (Score:2, Informative)
I used to work at EA and once had a conversation with a guy who wrote network code for an EA sports title. Basically, instead of proper servers controlling game state and updating clients, everyone sent their controller infomation and each client worked out where everything was independently.
I said "but since difference processors calculate floating point values differently, you'll never be able to play against different consoles"
I guess they haven't fixed it yet.... a lot of those titles are rehashed each
Microsoft don't allow it (Score:2)
It's the same reason why Final Fantasy XIV is "exclusive" to PS3 initially, because Sony allow you game alongside players from other platforms, which in this case is the PC version. Microsoft policy is not to allow this, although there have been exceptions like Final Fantasy XI and Shadowrun.
Besides, do you really want 13 year old Xbox and PS3 owners with headsets in the same game together? It would instantly set a world record for the most times the word "gay" was said in a single minute.
"antifeature" (Score:3, Informative)
It is called anti-features. The "Windows 7 Sins" website mentioned it. I love that term. When it costs more for a vendor to remove a feature they sort of got for free - natural effect of smart design - yet they remove it anyway for political, administrative, and marketing reasons - it is an anti-feature. Manually and permanently reducing amount of concurrent TCP/IP connections available in Windows NT Workstation versus Windows NT Server (which does not cap the limit) despite both versions sharing the same code - antifeature. Limiting amount of applications that can be open simultaneously on one Windows version versus not doing so in another, when both share the same code again - antifeature. Filtering game client list based on platform, despite protocol potentially capable of providing inter-platform gameplay - antifeature. Everything that is destined for the consumer goes through marketing before it leaves the vendor. It is the fear of not making enough money.
It can be done (Score:2)
It can be done and has been done. Final Fantasy XI allows cross-platform play between PS2, Xbox 360 and PC. In fact, it breaks pretty much every supposed rule in the book, by not only allowing cross-platform play, but by 100% requiring console peripherals (hard disks for the PS2 and 360, though the 360 one is almost ubiquitous these days), and virtually requiring the use of a keyboard and mouse (which both . Despite all of this, it was the largest non-Korean MMO around prior to the World of Warcraft launch
I'm thinking.,.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'm thinking.,.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm thinking.,.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (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
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Re:My prediction (Score:5, Informative)
One may be more comfortable, decreasing the cognitive dissonance associated with translating mental (re)actions to hand actions.
That's not what cognitive dissonance is. Cognitive dissonance is when you take an action that contradicts or is not explained by your beliefs about how you should have acted, and you change your beliefs after the fact in order to explain the action you took. It is not just when you have some kind of mental uncomfortableness. I'm sure wikipedia has examples.
Re:FLOATING POINT IS NOT CROSS PLATFORM (Score:5, Insightful)
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IEEE rounding is different between x86 and powerpc. x86 CPUs use an 80 bit internal representation. Those bits remain as long as the data resides in a register. Also the powerPC floating point offers a fused multiply accumulate operation (one instruction can do x+y*z) that can produce different rounding results. Knowing x86 they probably have it but its addition varies between architectures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiply-accumulate [wikipedia.org]
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Could PowerPC Macs and windows PCs share the same network with their games?
The only issue I see is that one of the two would need to do some endian swapping, but on modern CPU's that difference would be neglicable.
Re: (Score:2)
Two replies to that post and both are discussing the gaming implications? Honestly I was explaining x86 vs powerpc, nothing more or less.
I'll agree floating point error accumulations should be easy to compensate for. But its not a problem I've ever had to work on.
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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?
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p.s. while both consoles use the powerpc the xbox has a fused dot product operation (a=b*c+d*e). Thats one floating point variance I can think of, I'm sure there are others.
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Floating point should be sent as a string, and, if the game programmers, or their bosses, weren't such idiots, they'd have solved this years ago. Still pisses me off that the Mac and Windows machines could go head-to-head in Star raft because they used native integer representations on both the X86 and PPC. That's trivial, too. Network byte ( hton*()/ntoh*() ) order matches the PPC, but it would not have been hard, just intelligent, to have htoSC*() and SCtoh*() macros to map integers on both to the mor
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Christ, the PS3 is a great machine, but a lot of their owners have very fragile egos. Reminds me of Apple consumers.
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It's how it's implemented. The time it takes one machine to calculate different parts of the game code is different between the two machines.
Yeah, because we all know that PC Processors all run the same speed.