The Kind Of Hardware Alan Wake Developers Use

Alan Wake has kept a mysterious outlook ever since it went into production, the developers have kept almost every inch of the game shrouded in secrecy to such an extent that they have not yet allowed Microsoft to splurge their marketing dollars on the game. The discussions however are far from over at the forums which provide tidbits of update of the game. Markus here answers questions regarding the juice they use for Alan Wake.

[swiftshot93]

im just wondering what it is thats taking the game so damn long. Is it programming, is the game going to be that massive....what?

[82211986]

they say this project mirrors the production cycle of the original Max payne which turned out to be an awesome game...

[TOO PAWNED]

I think i can give you answer on that question since my game took 10 years. Look at my game, long development=masterpiece. trust me

[power of Green]

Figures you'd say that... I mean come on you named yourself after a failed game from your competition your opinion doesn't mean much here.

Games taking a long time to make have also been known to sell like sh*T after being hyped as the 2nd coming ;)

[II Necroplasm II]

Well too human was meant to be on the Playstation and we saw how that turned out.

[silverchode]

too human did sell like sh!t

[power of Green]

So does most of the games on your console. lol

[cayal]

"Games taking a long time to make have also been known to sell like sh*T after being hyped as the 2nd coming ;) "

Like how Killzone 2 has already hit one million pre-orders?

[ToastyMcNibbles]

is that comeback supposed to offend a ps3 gamer? im just curious... "so does most of the games on your console"... lmao try harder

[Bathyj]

Whats this "Second Coming" crap all the time.

Just because we're looking forward to a game on PS3 doesn't mean we think Jesus is going to grace us with his presence. Is it only Xbox owners who are allowed to look forward to games, because that doesn't make much sense to me. I'm an Xbox owner and I'm not really looking forward to anything on that console except maybe this and Splinter Cell if they make it good again.

Oh and Green, maybe you should tell Giant Enemy Crab his opinion means nothing here acccording to you, because of his name.

[JasonPC360PS3Wii]

ToastMan018 doesn't make it any less true, you guys don't buy games like 360 and Wii owners, but those Blu-Ray movies roll out fast. Guess Sony hit a home run with those movie buffs, to bad about the games though, well there is always a PS2...:)

Going to see alot of Alan Wake at E3 and thats when EA and MS will announce Mass Effect 2 as a Microsoft exclusive, thats why EA is so hush hush.

[ThanatosDMC]

Hmmm... what if the game sucks?

[sumguy81]

maybe ps3 fanboys should just stay the hell out of xbox only articles. i don't know why you troll in these forums.

also, to the guy that said you look forward to ps3 games and don't think they are the second coming...WRONG. actually, you may be right, i don't think ppl would over hype the second coming nearly as much. i have a ps3 and for months i looked forward to killzone 2. but then day after day i read articles on here about how amazing it is. so amazing, in fact, that once i play it i'll never want to play another game. then i got my hands on the demo and was hugely disappointed. it went from being probably a good game that i wanted to buy, to a pretty good game i don't want anything to do with. you absolutely do over hype your titles. and how much hype has surrounded this game? damn near none. and i like it that way. and i think the majority of the 360 owners like it that way too. it's nice knowing we're consistently getting good titles on 360 without having to build them up to something they can't live up to.

but just to help get ppl a little excited. this is a demonstration of alan wake 2.5 years ago. http://www.youtube.com/watc... imagine where it is now.

[Traveler]

BTW, Alan Wake is one of the games I am most looking forward to on the 360. The PS3 just happens to have more games that I am looking forward to this year.

[jessupj]

Maybe because ms has hardly lost any exlusives and maybe because there are some media outlets that obviously have a lot of hate for the ps3 and any thing related to it. And don't try to play it off as if it isn't happening. Only blind fanboys believe it's just a conspiracy.

Ps3 owners get the rore end of the end of the deal for a lot of things 360 owners don't have to put up with, that's why we complain.

I think you'd find a lot of uproar if gears went multiplatform and edge gave it a 6 or 7.

[Nice]

A-Wake when this game comes out...

[10000]

come on remedy off with the secrecy..give us a glimpse into bright falls...

[28121986]

I was pretty excited about the game, but am sort of losing interest now with no updates...

[Zeus Lee]

Hopefully the game is shown at GDC.

[dachiefsman]

gameplay...no more trailers. I want to see a guy/gal with a controller actually playing the game.

[10000]

hopefully they also tag a release date to the game...

[Shaka2K6]

LMAO dont bank too much on Alan Wait also Xbugs.

1st game is best on PC.
2nd. game is being made by remedy which their last game
Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne Flopped and failed to score AAA.

7.3

http://www.metacritic.com/g...

[DavidMacDougall]

You make people like me look worse and i don't have that to spare so STFU

[JasonPC360PS3Wii]

DavidMacDougall... Nasim is just pissed because the PS3 is in last place this gen.

[Aquanox]

This isn't the worst lineup Microsoft has ever had. They had worse, back in 2007 and 2008, remember it was all cloudy with barely any exclusive games confirmed. The Xbox 360 was condemned to doom.

That was what people thought by the first quarter though. As the months advanced, the release dates were announced and the console had two of the strongest lineups ever in a console. So yes, if you didn't learn from the past you can keep saying that. It's dangerous though... nobody wants their mouth being shout year after year.

[2FootYard]

Alan where are you?

[2FootYard]

Shaka you are a god! Ignored by 130 users I am astounded.

[TheMART]

I think you missed my stats ;-)

[Jerk120]

It's called ''Better than Killzone 2'' hardware.

[lokiroo420]

So your not talking any where close to 360 hardware.

@below
way to throw it in reverse, I think, I dont understand box boy I guess.

[Jerk120]

Xbox360 excels the Ps3 in everything except hardware.

[Cutnell]

what just happened here?

[Kushan]

Interesting thing you should take away from this:

"Q.Will Alan Wake use all 3 cores in the 360 CPU?

Any developer obviously tries to use all of the available hardware resources. But it’s unrealistic to assume having all cores at 100% at all times.

Just as an example, sometimes you need to stream new data in and decompress that on the fly, and thus need to leave headroom on the CPU to do that. When not streaming, that reserved time would be idle. If you don’t leave free CPU time for that the frame rate will suffer momentarily."

This guy knows what he's talking about. Now, he's being completely reasonable when he says it's unrealistic to have "all 3 cores at 100% all the time" and that's not just because it's a 360, it's the same on any machine, be it 360, PC or, you guessed it, PS3. And the more cores you have, the harder it is to keep them fed with stuff to process when you're making a game. That's why although the PS3 has a huge amount of power on paper, it's much harder to get that power out of the system, due to the way you have to juggle threads and stuff in a game.
Note that I am NOT bashing the PS3 here, I'm simply stating this is WHY developers claim it's "harder to program for".

[II Necroplasm II]

you are right... Very well said.

[Bathyj]

"And the more cores you have, the harder it is to keep them fed with stuff to process when you're making a game. That's why although the PS3 has a huge amount of power on paper, it's much harder to get that power out of the system, due to the way you have to juggle threads and stuff in a game."

I know you're not bashing, just making a point, and I'm not attacking you, just countering your point.

I dont think thats neccessarily true. All hes saying is you cant have a processer running 100% all the time, like you cant drive a car top speed all the time, you need to slow for corners. They need to leave space for something else coming up.

Saying that what PS3 power is hard to tap doesn't ring true to me. There would always be plenty of things to do for the SPU's, you can dedicate whole cores just for the physics, or for the particle effects, whatever, but they still need to leave headroom too for things about to happen. Thats not different for any proccesser.

You're right but things need to carefully allocated on PS3. With XB you can chuck all they work in a blender and let the CPU go for it but PS3 needs specific instructions on which core does what, thats why its more complicated, but its also why its move powerful, things are alot neater when stored in their own place and each SPU does its own job.

Obviously I dont have the technical jargon to explain all of this properly and I may be off abit, but from what I've read on Cell I have the jist of it pretty well.

[Kushan]

Bathyj, even though you disagree with me, I want you to know that I appreciate your constructive tone. I wish more people on this site were as diplomatic as you.

But, back to the points at hand. What you say about the Xbox isn't quite true, the processor isn't like on a PC where you can have as many threads as you like and just let the OS sort out which goes where, each core is "in order", which to my understanding basically means you can't just have threads willy-nilly jumping around the place like you can on a desktop processor ("out-of-order", but the flip side is that in-order is cheaper). I believe that each core on the 360 can handle 2 separate threads (In a system similar to Intel's Hyperthreading), giving you a total of 6 threads to work with. This means you have to carefully decide what those threads are doing at any one time. There's no need to dedicate an entire thread to just one operation, you can leave your threads in a "Pool" and grab them as you need them (So for example, the thread that does physics might do some scene culling later on).
I believe the PS3's SPUs are similar in that regard, but don't quote me on that as I haven't looked into it.

Still, think of it this way, whenever a processor isn't running at 100%, you're sort of "wasting" processing time. It's very unlikely that all cores will be running at 100% at any given time, simply due to how it all works, so the more cores you have, the harder it is to keep multiple cores running at 100% - eventually, one core is going to be finished before another and there's always going to be a "bottleneck" somewhere where the rest have done their job for that frame and you're waiting for the final thread to finish, so the amount of computing time you "waste" goes up with the number of cores.

I hope that makes sense lol.

[MicroSony4Life]

sounds like your talking about makeing a dress while driving at very fast speed. LOL...Just kidding

Good read, bubbles to you Kushan and BATHYJ

[Bathyj]

Hey no one said disagreeing means you have to be enemies. Offerring different opinions is how you have a good debate. And I'm the Master of Debating. ;) (Little Lethal Weapon joke thrown in for free.)

Everything you're saying makes sense to me and you're probably right but I still think any dev who knows how to use the SPU's properly will have ample power available to him and this "wastage" shouldn't be to much of an issue.

Lets be clear but, I agree totally that nothing can run 100% all of the time.

@MicroSony4Life
Fun-ee !

[Kyur4ThePain]

What the fck is this? Are you a p*ssy? Of course disamagreeing mean you have to be emeny! You can't have disamagreemant and still be like lovey dovey. BS. You must be hatin'. HATIN' I say!

/sarc

[Kushan]

Oh yeah, there's definitely plenty of power to go around. Nobody ever said "hard" was impossible.

I think what slowed the PS3 down at first was the games that were based on existing engines. I can imagine it being very difficult to shoehorn in more multithreading options into an existing engine (and some companies have been using the same engines for YEARS, albeit heavily modified over time), but when you're building from the ground up, it's significantly easier to implement such things.

Either way, I think we both more or less agree here. Bubbles for one of the few interesting debates I have had on this site!

[Bathyj]

Thanks. Bubbles back at you, and for Kyur and Micro too you funny b**tards.

Keep in mind too that many early games on PS3, didn't even use the SPU's, they were using the PPU only which is the easy way but you'll never achieve the full potential like that, talk about gimping the performance, just like Gravox makes a substandard meat sauce. You want real gravy you gotta use the drippin's.

[Consoldtobots]

nice try but once again you are WRONG kuushan

These processing bottlenecks are exactly what the PS3 was designed to overcome. THAT is why you have a PPU supported by SPU's, so CPU cycles never take a hit due being able to spread out tasks among several cores.
IT IS VERY POSSIBLE to use %100 of a processor %100 of the time. How and why is something I get paid for.

[xlx-russ_92]

Heavy Rain will kick this game's ass.
LOL Alan Wait.

[azmanmanz]

slap_neir.. u r dreaming

[MicroSony4Life]

Remedy must have a very trust worthy staff or there office is like the mission impossible movie where you need eye and voice id to get into the development room.

I think I would enjoy a game more if I played it and Knew completely nothing about it. Uncharted is a perfect example, when i picked up my PS3 I never knew there was a game called uncharted and when i played it every thing was new, the character,the plot,the location. Another example is Assassin creed, I followed that since it was put on paper, I saw screen shots, how the game was made,the maps,the story, and when i actually played the game it felt old and lost interest very quick.

[IaMs12]

Whoa someone out there that feels the same as me. I agree, because when you play it yourself you make your own review so if you go online and see not many people liked it you may not like it either, being afraid to pick it up. Ah its hard to type what im trying to explain but i guess thats the best i can..

[Bathyj]

Opps replied in the wrong spot.

[Jaces]

I'm curious as to how the story is in this one.

Is it more of a Silent Hill type game with an Indigo Prophecy/Heavy Rain feel to it or something off the map?

Kind of reminds me of that movie Amnesia.

[JasonPC360PS3Wii]

A screen, just one screen damn it.

[Gantrfaxx]

They're having trouble with the X360's hardware. They made a game for a high end Pc and now they're porting it to X360.

;D

[JasonPC360PS3Wii]

You mean like having trouble getting those high end 360 multiplatform games to work right on a PS3?

[LeonSKennedy4Life]

You don't understand how that works, do you Jason?

[Diugu]

I think he understands it... he just acts stupid to piss off some people.

Well... I HOPE he understands it... I mean noone can be that stupid.

[jessupj]

Serious question. I wonder what kz2 would have to look like if they programed it for the 360.

Maybe jason is just getting more and more insanely mad and sticking his head further into the sand as we more closer to 27th Feb. To be honest, I would be to if I was an xbox only owner, I'd be p*ssed off as all hell and wanna kill someone. Can you blame jason?

[LeonSKennedy4Life]

Everybody HOLD IT!

Power of Green's avatar is now Hancock? That movie sucked!

[GarandShooter]

He's trying to show some love for Sony.

[Rockstar]

I liked Hancock.

[Figboy]

when it was a hilarious comedy. the second half was weak sauce.

my theory about what happened with Hancock was this:

Studio A wanted to produce an all around super hero comedy sendup.

Studio B wanted to make a serious, angsty super hero movie, in line with all the others out there.

in the end, they made a compromise, and took the first half of the comedy super hero movie, and the last half of the serious super hero movie, and meshed them together.

somewhere, in my heart, i know there is the hilarious last half of the super hero comedy, and the serious first half of the serious super hero comedy.

i'm joking of course, but that's what the movie feels like: to totally different super hero movies slapped together because the studios that threw down money to make it couldn't decide if they wanted to do a comedy, or a dark super hero movie.

ON TOPIC: i wish Alan Wake would just come out already. if Heavy Rain hits before Alan Wake does, i'm going to laugh. both are right up my alley (i miss adventure games), and i'd love to have both this year, honestly.

[Droid Control]

won't max out the 360's 3 cores...

[Gue1]

Is not like they can't max it out, it is more like they need to leave some resource for some other post-processing processes...

Quote:

"Any developer obviously tries to use all of the available hardware resources. {{{{But it’s unrealistic to assume having all cores at 100% at all times.}}}

Just as an example, {{{sometimes you need to stream new data in and decompress that on the fly}}}", and for that you need additional resource.

Have you seen what happens when a PC processor goes all the way to 100%? Your PC crashes. From this I could say that the X360 have been maxed out a long time ago. If the PS3 is in its 2 year and the X360 on its third, the answer it's pretty obvious... A full year ahead with easier development... mmmmmmm... What would be you answer?

[Trebius]

I hope this game is as great as Max Payne. I'll most definitely play this game if it's that good, very hard shoes to fill though.

Something that kind of bothers me is the lack of any information on it after so long...one would almost think maybe there's some sort of struggle? Maybe i'm just being paranoid, but I hope they release this sooner than later.

[MrJack]

I mean its been in development longer than KZ2 I think, if his turns out bad it will really be bad for MS, but why no screenshots or anything?

[123360]

no one has seen the game yet, the last video claiming to be alan wake was a ps3 trailer wasn,t it.last thing to do is hype somethink no one,s seen.too human,haze both big time flops

[SonyRulz]

English is the native language of this site; I suggest you learn it, before attempting to post again.

[maverick1191]

bringing it to the xbox i think will completely downgrade the graphics and maybe the gameplay it should stay on the PC but yea heavy rain looks better you've only got to look at the character models on heavy rain and then your sold

http://uk.ps3.ign.com/dor/o...
dont get me wrong alan wake does look good but i think they will find it hard to pull off what they have done on the PC to the xbox

[L-a-i-n]

It does not take a supercomputer to make a game. You can do it out of your home with a cheap dell. The only thing you have to worry about processor speed, graphics chip, and memory. Most new PC's come with all you need. You don't want to over tax your processors on the PS3 or 360 at all times. If you don't leave room you most likely end up with a problem (seen on most online modes)

Two things come from hype or lack of hype. You have to put just enough out there so that fans can see what you are doing. If you put to much the player might feel that they have "been there, done that" type of response to the game. You can also put to little information out and that is what I think they are doing here. That can cause people not to get the game until after more is known. You have to get a good balance in there so you don't have to much and not have to little information.

[Droid Control]

Alan Wake WON'T max out the 360... so how can it downgrade the PC version thick Sh!t?

[Thoreau]

you will want this game, i admit i like the ps3 better, but this is one of the reasons i bought a 360 also.

[Diugu]

But I just cant believe you bought a 360 for this game. Nobody knows anything about this... why would you buy a gaming console for a game noone (including you) knows anything about?

You're crazy.

I hope Alan Wake is good. I wish I had a 360 also... not for Alan Wake though (for other games) at least not yet since I know nothing about it.

[Trebius]

I hope you're not disappointed...
Thats a lot of money to waste on a gaming system for a game that you dont even have the slightest inklink will be good or not.

For all you know it's an RTS game! :)

[AnttiApina]

I also bought it because of Wake. Why? Because it's made by Remedy...And Remedy never disappoints me with their games.

It's like Valve

[Gun_Senshi]

I'm sorry if you're a real gamer you would by a gaming PC for this game. You are now going to play an inferior port.

[Arnon]

I wish you guys who proclaim that people should buy a $800-$1200 PC over a $300 360 would leave this site.. you are obviously just full of freaking hatred to the console itself. Even though most of you who say such a thing are PS3 loyalists out the bung hole.

1. It's cheaper

2. It makes the PC seem almost inferior due to the lack of a uniformed online community, the cost, upgrading, and the fact that a lot of PC games are on the 360 as well.

PC gaming is cool, but DAMN. You are SO far off if you think people should choose that over a 360 for gaming. PCs are just money holes. Especially in the recession.

[Diugu]

I think they should start showing some more of this game. The guys at Remedy are good, so I expect this to be a good game.

[Joey Greco RULES]

clown.

[TheOutsider]

The Picture says it all!! THIS GAME IS GAY!!!

[Thoreau]

why? the 360 is cheap, and i actually bought my 360 at launch. i bought the ps3 at launch too. i enjoy all games, and by the way....streetfighter 3rd strike is better than part 4. don't believe the streetfighter hype. 4 is slow, and only ok, i am playing it as i type.

[Diugu]

I agree that the 360 is cheap and I also think the games in there are great.

I just dont understand why would you buy it for Alan Wake since noone knows anything about it... for other games (Gears, Mass Effect...) I get it, they are hella fun.

[silverchode]

ALAN WAKE IS A MYTH.

[Droid Control]

lol

[Obama]

well in a sense he is right since we haven't really seen a gameplay trailer of Alan Wake. XD

[II Necroplasm II]

There is however a tech demo. That's the closes to gameplay they have shown

[aggh im on fire]

Reason its taking so long is because its avery small team working on it. Around 28 people.

[WaitStation 3]

"the developers have kept almost every inch of the game shrouded in secrecy to such an extent that they have not yet allowed Microsoft to splurge their marketing dollars on the game"

Sounds like a sleeper hit to me.

[AnttiApina]

Wait a second...Wasn't this sent on the forums like two months ago?!

[Droid Control]

quietly confident of their own success. They don't need spin or endless magazine articles showing every tiny feature of the game leading up to lauch a year or two ahead of schedule (halo/killzone)

[Jaces]

Actually I'm not sure if it's true but from what I've heard is that the trailer that was put up then taken down a while ago was not based off of M$ 360 but Sony's PS3.

Doesn't make sense but that's what I've heard.

Comments?

[Trebius]

Doesnt make much sense...but it does make you think.

I doubt it's true, but you also cant rule out the fact that MS has a lot of money.

a lot.

And they'll USE it.

[green]

Sorry but that is not true.Alan Wake is published and funded by Microsoft games Studios.Also remedy is just a small team of 28 and stated in a previous article that they don't know how to code games for the PS3.The trailer you saw was running on a PC.

[Jaces]

ahh so it was PC footage, hmm why show that then instead of what they have on the 360?

[grantps3]

this game reminds me of wardevil on ps3.

we know nothing about it, except for some trailers that came out about 3 years ago. They are both rumored to have the best graphics available. im excited for wardevil.

we need info before we can brag on a game.

for some reason i dont see a lot of casuals getting this game

[Ldubbz]

Interesting read. Cant wait, this game looks really good. Graphically yes, but the story and type of game that it is. It really looks to be a 'mature' title.

I think this is one they are tweaking to get just right.

[y0haN]

Not bad machines, kind of worrying that they said they were going to phase out the E6600 machines, that processor's still really good.