"Sony's Michael Denny has explained the reason why the company did not go with custom chips like the Cell processor. It's a known fact that the processor was difficult for a lot of developers to get the hang of and plenty of them complained that it was a lot of work for them to offload GPU tasks on the SPUs."
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The other day a friend of mine was telling me about one of his co-workers that lost his job because the project had to be coded on ColdFusion(CFML) but he wanted to make it on C#....
"The other day a friend of mine was telling me about one of his co-workers that lost his job because the project had to be coded on ColdFusion (CFML) but he wanted to make it on C#...."
Wha? I would fight ColdFusion too. What kind of bonehead decision is to create a project on ColdFusion? It's practically no longer used and C# is a much better choice.
The only reason I see sticking with ColdFusion is because this is an upgrade/add-on to an existing ColdFusion project.
I wouldn't want to be there if management made decisions like that myself.
That said, yes developers like *people in general* are reluctant to learn new things. Once they are set in their ways it is very hard to change that, and that goes for all industries, not just programmers. The young and motivated ones are much more interrested in learning new and fresh stuff.
It's just people, not programmers.
Games take a long time to make as it is. They cost millions to develop which is an investment with zero payoff til the game launches and hopefully sells successfully.
High risk.
Why force devs to risk even more by having to invest in specialised technologies not relevant elsewhere.
Costs have to be controlled better or the industry will go into meltdown.
Because once you get pass basic command lines and scripts, it's mother F'in hard! So of course they aren't going to throw away everything they learned in 4-6 years of College and 5-10 years of coding experience.
People don't realize that. Guys like black1911 has no clue about what development really is. These are engineers with Master's and Ph D.s that are working on these engines. Pure geniuses in comparison to 99% of the clowns here on N4G.
With all the "smart spending" crap going around companies, devs are ususally cutting corners to get things as acceptable as possible.
and devs were notoriously lazy about learning how to optimize their code for the PS3 architecture, not because it was hard, but because they couldn't be bothered to learn (i.e. laziness).
@ mushroomwig: they have the time, that's a tired excuse they often give when they're too lazy to fix something.
@ mustang300c2012: i worked in QA for several years - they really are lazy.
"the different architecture didn't mean it was more difficult, just different."
In some cases yes, but inthe PS3 case it was not.
"and devs were notoriously lazy about learning how to optimize their code for the PS3 architecture, not because it was hard, but because they couldn't be bothered to learn (i.e. laziness)."
The PS3 architecture wasn't properly designed for the type of loads video games need so you end up doing a lot of workarounds to optimize your code. However, the PS3 can do super fast computations on small data sets!
The additional benefit is minimally better, yet the drawback was huge.
"i worked in QA for several years - they really are lazy."
QA and is often times where you stuff people with the lowest set of skills and the laziest of the bunch, so yes. That said, good companies will place some of the best, because bugs will kill a product.
The problem is some games are expected every year and if developers have to meet these annual deadlines whilst trying to code for a processor that is generally harder to code for, the games quality could take a hit.
CPU's are powerful enough to easily handle games for a very long time, consoles are only as strong as their weakest component which is usually RAM or GPU.
The PS3 processor will be fine in the next gen but lack of RAM and GPU would hold it back more.
So rather than wasting a year figuring out to use the damn thing this time they'll spend more time on actually making games!
Sony's first party devs are far from lazy and they before any other devs asked for this change.
An I bet if Sony keep using the Cell, they would understand it more better and it be more easy to use.
Something Sony felt the hard part of last generation, yet eventhough releasing exclusives that broke the visual barier over and over.
Can't see what happens next.
In comparison, both the Durango and Wii U seem to be more modified. The Wii U for a fact has a heavily modified GPU and the Durango is swarming with rumors, most likely true about Move Engines and Mutiple Planes and even dual/tri-soc architecture.
Being an early adopter of the PS3, I was all over how technologically customized the console was. That stuff interests me, but the PS4 doesn't garner much hype from me when they essentially came out and said we will be using generic architecture. And in no way is this architecture going to suck, but at the same time... what am I paying these guys for if they aren't doing something technically mind blowing?
I and everyone else knows that Sony has some of the best minds and resources in the world... but the PS4 just seems lazy and uninspired to me.
Going default hardware based and dev friendly was a mistake that SONY recognize and I am proud of them for not trying to be cocky about thier hardware.
They now are back in position of the PS1 days when they were cool, devs loved their machines in comparison to Saturn
Welcome HOME Sony
PS3 however went beyond custom. It went to alien.
The truth is that Sony is broke, and it's way cheaper to go with of the shelf parts.
But AMD is broke to, so they probably made a offer that either Sony or Ms couldn't resist.
@iconic56
Totally agree with you.
A gaming console need to be custom, or else it is just boring.
Even SNES was custom designed and culd do things that pc couldn't in that time.
Ps4 is so simple that the second generation of games on it will max out the hardware.
So we will not see any major improvement on games over time like it used to be with custom made console architecture.
The move to more mainstream processors is because it is what developers wanted. The chips themselves are still modified, and there is no way you would see the same chip available at retail, so the cost is still there for Sony.
Sony isn't broke. Learn how finances work when it comes to multi-billion dollar corporations before saying such a thing. If they were broke we wouldn't be seeing a PS4. We'd see Sony move to a software only maker(or drop out completely).