GDC Notes
A couple of interesting transcripts and impressions from this year’s Game Developer Conference, before I lose track of them.
First, some notes from a panel by Katamari Damacy’s creator, Keita Takashi. More an examination of the creative philosopy and mindset of the game than anything more detailed, but interesting none the less. It’s also a prime example of the “Damn the torpedos!” approach required to get any non-proven concept out into the marketplace these days.
(On a related note, create your own Katamari guy from this print template. Send evidence!)
There’s also a transcript of a hugely entertaining bile-venting panel on the state of the games industry from various industry luminaries. Would probably be even more amusing if I wasn’t, you know, part of the industry.
Funniest quote comes from Greg Costikyan:
Then there was the Nintendo keynote. This was the company who established the business model that has crucified the industry today.. [Nintendo president] Iwata-san has the heart of a gamer, and my question is what poor bastard’s chest did he carve it from? How often DO they perform human sacrifices at Nintendo?? My friends, we are FUCKED!
Most contentious quote comes from Chris Hecker:
Gameplay code will get slower and harder to write on the next generation of consoles. Modern CPUs use out-of-order execution, which is there to make crappy code run fast. This was really good for the industry when it happened, although it annoyed many assembly language wizards in Sweden. Xenon and Cell are both in-order chips. What does this mean? It’s cheaper for them to do this. They can drop a lot of cores. One out-of-order core is about four times the size of an in-order core. What does this do to our code? It’s great for grinding on floating point, but for anything else it totally sucks. Rumours from people actually working on these chips – straight-line runs 1/3 to 1/10th the performance at the same clock speed. This sucks.
Which I don’t think is neccessarily true. His 1/3rd to 1/10th example is presumably based on AI/game simulation code running on a similar clock speed Intel/AMD chip, which I’m not really sure is a comparable measure. Most CPUs struggle with branch intensive code like this. It’s true that out-of-order capable chips can normally do a better job with it, but it is possible to narrow the gap.
The Emotion Engine (Main CPU in the PS2) uses in-order execution and it can mostly hold its own with the XBox/GameCube. The main performance hit with the PS2 tends to come down to the fact that the available compilers don’t really take full advantage of the machine, and frequently produce assembly which could be improved by hand if you had infinite time/patience. The PS3 will basically have to improve on this, and there’s evidence that Sony is trying, especially if they want mere mortals to be able to program the Cell without having to worry about the scary scheduling going on under the hood.
There’s also no particular reason why game code, and in particular AI code, should have to be written in a traditionally PC manner. Hecker is working with Will Wright these days, on Spore (story, pics,) which looks potentially stunning; kind of like an interactive version of Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten. A lot of the type of AI and evolution/simulation requirements that you’d imagine for this type of game sound ripe for implementing with multi-core, parallel processing in mind. I can’t really imagine the PS3 being left in the dust in the next generation.