PS3 Developement and UAE

[AJCopland]

PS3 linux only gives you a framebuffer without 3D hardware acceleration but you'll still have access to the PowerPC and most of the SPEs. You can forget attempting to get the full devkit. For one thing they're very expensive, and for another you only hire them and pay for access to the SDK you'll also need to get approved as a Sony developer. Do not try.

Linux should be fine though, there's plenty of grunt in the Cell CPU.

Andy

[AJCopland]

Krusher wrote:
It's stupid though to sell your development platform for too much money.

Give it for free and people will write code and make it populair = more sales.

That's not how console manufacturers see it though and indeed they have a good reason too from past experience.

See it's not that they couldn't give everyone access their kits, in fact Sony do let you use Linux and give you largely unfettered access to Cell. However giving anyone access to console development isn't their goal, they gate access so that you can ONLY release software for their platform if you've gone through them and they allow you too.

Opening their platforms as MS have done to some degree with XNA and Arcade _potentially_ risks their primary revenue stream being subverted.

It's not so much that it'd even be a real problem should open development be allow but as this gating of software release is what makes them the big bucks it's merely the potential disruption that causes them to come down so hard on preventing it from happening.

Hmm posting from work so that may not be totally coherent... what does that say about my job!?! :-D

Andy

[AJCopland]

trekiej wrote:
@ AJCopland : what job do you have, may I ask?

I'm a Software Engineer doing games coding -> PC, Linux, xbox, xbox360, Wii, PS2, PSP and long ago when I started in testing (before it became QA) MegaDrive and SNES :-D

Had a tinker with PS3 but they were early devkits and I've left that place now. Currently just PC (windows) and Linux server for an MMO.

Andy

[AJCopland]

haha yeah right, you should see how games companies are run :-o it's a nightmare, besides I'm embarrassed (I don't think "highly" of it atm) to even talk about the game I'm currently stuck working on :-(

Andy

[AJCopland]

I don't know of any way that you'll get rich writing software for the Amiga (Or I'd be doing it! MWAH HA HA HA! etc) but theres probably a call for various utilities and programs still.

This is why I work for other people, if I was having all of the bright ideas people would be working for me :lol:

If you're learning C# then give XNA a whirl. You can run the code on Windows PCs and if you're willing to pay for the extra developer thingey via MSs Live service then you can run the same code on the Xbox360. It's pretty cool and there's quite a few tutorials out there.

It's not the same as the developer version but don't assume that coding for XNA on the 360 is all that different from using the final devkit. It's good experience.

Andy

[AJCopland]

It is more limited but it's mostly artificial as they reserve one of the threads/cores for security purposes. So you lose 1/6th of the possible performance straight off. Theres a few others like the networking, you don't just have total access to the Live! service etc. You're pretty free to do what you like with the GPU though :-D

One other thing is that when you're doing XNA dev for the 360 you're not going to be able to share it very easily. The only way to do it is to give someone else the built program BUT they will need to have the same developer thing setup over Live that costs about $90 :-(

Most of console development is about working with an unfamiliar system within the strictly defined constraints of the platform. The Xbox360 has pretty high limits for a console, or maybe that's just my perspective :-D

Andy