From: Edwards, Benjamin () (Benjamin.Edwards at domain DIGIFONE.COM)
Date: Fri 14 May 1999 - 09:42:56 IST
Someone I know supplied some high spec PCs to a company who developed
playstation games. From what I gather the PC had a 'playstation on a card'
in it. This means that Although the gave was developed on the PC it was run
on a plastation without having to port it as such. Surly as you up the
number of polygons power of the console you can modify the toolkits to
utilize this, and as someone previously said codeing for more powerful kit
is easier in so far as you don't have to performance tune so well. Of corse
people in the games industry are going to say it is more difficulty/time
consuming. This increases consumers desire to buy the new, more
sophisticated games and enables the price to remain high.
Consider this. When the home computer market was in it heyday (Amega,
Commodore 64, spectrum and BBC) Games were about a tenner. The industry was
saying that piracy was keeping them at this high price. Then guess what
happened. Consoles, which initially were on par with an Amega came along
and the cartridges were very difficult to pirate. Did the price of games go
down. did it funk, it went up. The games business, like any other
business, is about screwing the maximum amount of dosh out of consumers.
-----Original Message-----
From: Twomey_Mark at domain emc.com [SMTP:Twomey_Mark at domain emc.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 13, 1999 3:13 PM
To: daire at domain wbtsystems.com
Cc: social at domain linux.ie
Subject: RE: [ILUG-Social] free Tux/Playstation 2
That was a direct quote from the head of Iguana Studios *Acclaim' s
Software
house*, a guy who's been developing games for the past decade and a
half...
I think he would have an idea about "who can do what and how fast
can they
do it" in the video games industry.
The reason why the current clutch of Playstation games are getting
better is
because developers have built tools and designed code that finally
makes
the maximum use of the hardware. If it took them 5 years to get the
current
PSX games up to this standard how long will it take for them to get
up to
speed with a platform that is ridiculously more powerful and
therefore more
difficult to develop for. Think about it...most companies use high
end PC's
(or Macs if your Bungie or Cyan) to develop their games and perhaps
some
Highend Graphics workstations for CGI and detailed modeling. When
your
target platform can throw huge amounts of 3D graphics in real time
and
perform huge calculations faster than your development platform It's
going
to be far more difficult and expensive to develop for. To hell with
compression (Compression on a DVD disc...???) or funny algorithms,
it's the
inherent complexity of the platform that makes it exclusionary.
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