John Carmack: The SPOnG interview

The problem with Carmack talking about console development is that he's not a console developer.

He's giving this impression that the tools matter more than the raw power. On a PC environment this is true. New hardware is constantly being added and it takes every last bit of DirectX and OpenGL for devs to keep on top of things. Those who use the latest tools on the latest hardware end up with the most technobabbly FPS which sells games (and graphics cards and memory and operating systems). Making the whole thing run efficiently needs to be automated becase there's no time to do it by hand before the new hardware's out.

On consoles the situation is virtually the reverse. Look at the PS2. It's situation was such that no developer could be crazy enough to ignore it despite horrible development tools. But Sony knew this. In fact Nintendo knew it before them.

The trick with console hardware is to remember it has a life cycle. Time can be spent to perfect squeezing out every last kernel of power from the silicon. Having a dynamic of development is important even on fixed hardware: games better look better at the end of the generation than at the beginning. This is achieved through archaic arcitecture and development tools. The genius is Sony spent every last transistor on raw power instead of efficient loading (etc.). Tapping it will be difficult, but by the end of the generation it will be done, and we'll constantly have a compelling (graphical) reason to buy new games. 360 hardware on the other hand has great tools for maximising efficiency from the get go. I.E. games won't ever look a whole lot better than they do now. Why'd they do it?

2 reasons:

1. Developers will only spend the time squeezing the power out if your system is dominating, which MS couldn't garantee (and Sony sorta could).
2. MS wanted to attract developers (particularly those neive PC veterans) away from Sony. Developers would like to go where the tools are. This plan may have failed - they attracted them, but did not really put them off the competition. The fact of the matter is, even though devs love nice tools, the ones that feed them know where the sales are.

As for his preference of symetric chips, of course he likes it, it's more like a PC. Cell requires a new programming mindset. Different is troublesome, but it's also better for certain things. The certain things Sony is leveraging it for.

As for buying a comercial PC to match these consoles?

Have you ever seen a comercial tri-core chip? Heck, have you ever seen a 3.2 GHz commercial powerPC chip. Or a 3.2 GHz multicore anything for that matter? unless it's called 360, I didn't think so. Further, it would take a ridiculaously wild departure for Intel and AMD to make PC chips that can do what Cell can do. GPUs and Ram may be one thing (or rather two), but nothing on the market can touch the 360 CPU for the moment, and nothing will touch Cell for a longer while.

I believe Carmack is completly right here, tools are very important part of devlopment and when it comes to Microsoft no one does a better job, why do you think we have so much devlopement on Windows than any other operating system.

Having said that its developers who can can squeeze everything out of a harware, just look at the games on PS2 6 - 7 years ago, there is a hell of difference. I think Carmack is talking about the first impressions here, when I started developing on PS2 it was a pain in the ass, however for X-Box, there was not much change from PC (though Xbox is just PC).

So in my opinion its the tools, tools and tools which can decrease the devlopment time, and it always the delopment time /cost that matters for any project.

For exactly the same reason there are so many games on the PS2? The market is huge!

Great tools on a marginal platform will not cause huge numbers of developers to write huge numbers of software packages.

Developers will still write large amounts of software for a dominant platform even if it has s**te tools. See the PS2, which, as you point out, had awful tools to start with, but large numbers of games none the less.

In the end, you have to weigh up the development costs against the potential sales. If it takes 20% longer to develop for PS2 over XBox, but the market is four times the size then it's not an issue.

Please note that I'm not a console developer and that 20% figure was pulled out of the air as an example. However, I do write software for a living and can understand the basic parameters of console development.