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Playstation 3 Uncovered!

PSM's information came from developers. Some on the record, some off.

....particularly when it comes to ease of development for the system: how it cmpares to PS2, and more importantly, Xbox 360. "The *****ing this round sounds opposite of the last. Both are friendly, but the PS3 may actually be friendlier," reports one of out PS2 and Xbox 360 development sources, who wished to remain anonymous. "People are finding that the [xbox] 360 has some stupid bottlenecks."

Developers will soon learn more about the ins-and-outs of creating PS3 games, as Sony has started taking orders for final development hardware to be delivered by December. At that time, game creators will be able to tell just how much mroe extra polish they can put on their titles without worrying about them crapping out on a retail PS3.

The latest on PS3's power
"Once we have final hardware for both next-gen systems, we'll have a much better idea of how they caompare, but teh general consensus right now is that the PS3 is considerably more powerful than the X360 across the board," said another source. "It's important to get a good idea of which is the most powerful soon, since multi-platform games will need to be either ported down from PS3 to 360 or vice-versa."

Speaking of multi-platforming games, another of our next-gen contatcts chimed in with the following when we asked them, flat out, which system will ultimatelyl have the best looking games. "Only the games that are exclusive to tiether system will be real technical showcases,"adding "There will be strong points for each, but the cross platform games will most likely look and perform almost identically."

PS3's Promising Online Support

In addition to all of the cool Wi-Fi-based PSP to PS3 functionality we've previously reported Sony is working on (transferring media and save data between the two anywhere in the world at a hotspot), there's some actual news to report on the online gameplay front. not only that, it's pretty good. (Although the gradual diminishing of Sony's PS2 online plans over that console's life will always have us taking their goals in this department with a grain of salt.)

PS3 is slated to have an actual online community ready to back it up on day one, complete with friend tracking, message services, and a central hub for everything. If it sounds like xbox Live, it should. Sony has been folloowing M$'s moves, and, well, plans to copy most of them, according to our sources. "They [Sony CEA] have a whole division that was put in place after the Network Adaptor was released for PS2 that bascially dropped focus on PS2 and moved to planning the PS3," says one designer working on an online PS3 title. "They knew that early that they were not going to compete during the current gen."

Ramping up for an early release?
There's been a lot of talk about Sony's E3 2005 proclamation that PS3 would ship in the spring of 2006. A lot. Would it be in Japan only, or were they talking about the U.S. too? Questioned further on teh topic, Sony execs have since stuck to their guns, saying that the system would be available worldwide before next summer. Is that even posssible?

Yes. However, there's the question of launch games and system price. (Ok, here it goes into some things about what Ken Kutaragi said (and a few other things) about the pricing, but we all already know about that so I wont' post it)


PS3 will have a limited playable presence at TGS 2005. Sony has told PSm to expect a significant presence for the system at January's CES in Las Vegas. If a March launch does occur, it owuld be accompanied by only a couple of first-party titles, another two to three from EA, and one title at most from their other thrid parties. Madden NFL football developer Tiburon has had PS3 dev hardware longer than almost any other U.S. developer. Rockstar North has had stable kits since at least August 2005.

There's a lot of talk among the PS3 developer community about the importance of being firt-to-market, or at least not letting M$ get too much of an installed base before PS3 ships. The general feeling is that Sony considers xbox 360 to be a possible contender in this generation, so they're not going to just rest on their laurels. In fact, developers report that Sony Japan is taking a much more hands-on role in the U.S. luanch of PS3 than it did with PS2 or PSP. Shades of the PS2 luanch, there.


GTA 4: Rebuilt from the Ground Up

The next GTA game is going to look really good. Actually, maybe that should be feel really good. It's a no-brainer that on the most powerful games console yet, one of our favorite series will have better graphics. But, base on developer Rockstar North's technical research, GTA4 will be more about immersion than just mere eye candy.

Rockstar North is creating a specialized game engine for PS3 that will rbing GTA 4 to life to a degree that the PS2 games could only hint at. Speciafially, they're going to be using the high data transfer bandwidth of the Cell CPU, RSX GPU, and Blu-ray Disc to use several streams of game info simultaneously. The game's city- unfortunately yet to be even hinted at- will still be free roaming and seamless, but broken down into smaller, more deatailed areas at the engine level, into which the game designers are going to eb able to pour more textures, more oject variety, and tons of details (such as discareded soda cans with their own physics), just for starters. The goal is a city that's less repetitive and where everything - and everyone- looks and acts mroe like they would in the real world on every level.


MGS 4 Becomes a War Zone

Pointless to post intro info...so onto the second paragraph...

One source has described the game to PSM as "a cross between Rambo and Black Hawk Down," with Solid Snake plunged into the middle of a high-intesntiy urban war zone where artillery is taking out cover all aroudn him and AI controlled "sidekicks" fight alongside him as if they were actual human-controlled characters. The new 3D camera will paly a big role in surviving the fight quarters and constantly changing cover.

Kojima has an update on teh game planned for TGS.



The PS3 Game Lineup So Far

Activision
Spider-Man 3

Bandai
Mobile Suit Gundam

EA
NFSU 3
Madden NFL 2007
NBA Live 2007
Fight Night Round 3
Def Jam 3
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2007
New SSX
New Burnout

Majesco
The Darkness

buena Vista Interactive
Pirates of the caribbean: dead man's chest

Capcom:
Return of a "beloved fighting franchise"
New Ghouls N' Ghosts
DMC 4
RE 5

Rockstar
GTA 4
Western-themed action game (likely Red Dead Revolver 2)

Sony
New Team ICO project
Genji 2
Warhawk
I-8
The Getaway 3
Killzone 3
GT 5
New Hot Shots Golf
MotorStorm
Eyedentify
Heavenly Sword
Formula One 2007
New Wipeout

Sony Online Entertainment
Marvel comics MMORPG
Untitled Fantasy MMORPG

Namco
Tekken 6
Ridge Racer 6

Eidos
Tomb raider Next-gen

Lucas Arts
Star Wars: Clone Wars
indiana Jones (launch with new movie)

Konami
MGS4
Suikoden V
Castlevania

Midway
UT 2007
Mortal Kombat
Stranglehold

Atair
Test Drive Unlimited

THQ
New WWE Project

Sega
Fifth Phantom Saga
Sonic The Hedgehog
Condemned: Criminal Origans

Tecmo
Fatal Frame 4

Ubisoft
Prince of Persia 4
Killing Day

Koei
Ni-oh

Also in developemnt...
Dark Secotr, Dirty Harry, Battle Angel, Alita, Project Avalon, Endless Saga, Lair, Possession, Death Jr., Metronome, Psychopath, FF XIII, Alan Wake

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Q. You must have a good reason to add 2 HDMI transmitters, what usage do you expect for dual HDMI?

A. It’s purely because we wanted to add them. Since multi display expands gaming like a horizontally wide dual display or an extended game screen, we’ve wanted to add it at any cost. You don’t have to connect 2 HDTVs, a small sub-display is enough.

Q. Does HDMI contain S/PDIFx6?

A. Yes it’s totally compliant to the HDMI spec and audio output is assigned to it.

Q. This is related to the OS too, when you have a communication tool (such as IM) in the firmware and play games talking with your buddies by the same tool, can you use a sub-display even in games that don’t support dual display?

A. Yes. A communication tool is embedded in the firmware of course. You want to communicate while gaming, don’t you? You can popup a chat window in the main screen or in the sub screen.

You know PSP has much more functions in the OS than PS2 does. Likewise, the PS3 system will be extended and evolved one, in which a communication tool via internet is included.

Q. Judging from the message that you recommend PS3 as a digital media center, it’s very natural, in a sense, that it has an SD card slot. But as a default feature, in a Sony-branded product? It’s unprecedent, isn’t it?

A. To begin with we expect use with a digital camera as you can see from the fact that it has a CF slot too. Also, SD card is in many devices including mobile phones. Users will be annoyed if media have to be converted except for memsticks. Of course you want to put save data in all media types, don’t you?

Q. I can see you need those 3 slots to support digital cameras, but is it possible to put music purchased via EMD onto an SD card by this SD slot?

A. It’s dependent on DRM rather than on the slot types. If you need Magic Gate, you have to use a memstick. All media types including memstick are equivalent except for such aspects.

Q. In the spec sheet it has remote-control via IP network, what kind of usage is expected?

A. Controlling a game via IP, or controlling PS3 via an IP-based remote controller.

Q. It’s supposed to play BD-ROM video format, is it implemented on sale?

A. Yes of course. The video application format is not finalized but almost done and HD video decoding is very easy for us. Interactive functions will also be implemented in software, just after it’s finalized.

Q. The published PS3 diagram doesn’t contain a sound chip.

A. This time it has no sound chip because Cell can generate all sounds. In the leaf demo in the event we create sound data by running a code to simulate sound of a leaf in a wind then assign it to 5.1 channels to synthesize surround sound. CELL has abundant processing power and can do sound processing with ease so it doesn’t need a dedicated chip to create a sound wave in the DSP style.

Q. Gigabit Ethernet connectors are listed as In x 1 + Out x 2, what does it mean? Does it have router function and are they for WAN/LAN? Or do you use a special connection to connect multiple PS3s together?

A. It has no router function. It’s supposed to be a switching hub internally, but I don’t know about the meaning of In/Out frankly so will answer about it at the next opportunity. Of course you can connect PS3s together. After it’s on sale, some will make a supercomputer by connecting many PS3s. Apparently Sony Picture Entertainment is considering to use PS3 in a rendering farm for movies.

Q. For the connectors or the design, it looks very AV-oriented. It’s based on the PS2 design and just rounded, but when put horizontally it has the atmosphere of B&O (Bang & Olufsen) in the top-loading era. Is it strongly meant as one of AV products?

A. When TVs in home get HD, we recognize PS3 as the standard in the HD era. Thus we made it to be able to play all 12cm-disc formats.

Q. Considering power of CELL and GPU, the case size, and the internal power unit, it seems tough to manage heat. How is the noise?

A. Since quietness is very important, our hardware team is trying to make it as quiet as possible. Of course it has all power-saving efforts in the chip-level. Though it’s not compared with PS2 yet, I’d like to make it more quiet in the final product.

Q. The demo in the press conference suggested the possibility that physics simulation can change games. Though it has the aspect that it’s done to utilize the idiosyncrasy of CELL, I think whether PS3 can be an attractive game console or not is dependent on how it can achieve in this area.

A. In PS3, in addition to the full HD output, the rendering quality per se is very high. But the more high-def and the more real it gets, the more wierd it’s felt when it animates with a strange manner that’s not experienced in a real life. For example it’s very uncomfortable if skin contours don’t change naturally when facial expression is changed in rendering a face through which even cutaneous sensasion is conveyed.

It’s only an example, but on all occasions we have to actualize natural animation proportionally to improvement in graphics. In games it backfires if graphics improves while AI/simulation stays the same.

Q. To which part of physics simulation does parallel processing by 7 SPEs contribute?

A. So far, a simulation code in games had handled an in-game character as one rigid body. From now on more soft things such as human, plants and fluid can be represented more naturally. When you represent one character, you can generate natural animation and natural facial expression by spliting it into multiple parts and calculating them separately.

Likewise in a car-race game each part can have a different behavior calculation. For example, how a car moves when left and right wheels are on different kinds of surface can be solved by calculating behavior of each part.

Q. Physics simulation includes games such as Gran Turismo in which simulation precision per se is connected to the value of the game and games in which it’s just an assistant. How easy will it be for developers to use physics simulation as a tool?

A. Of course there’ll be a vendor that can implement and tune simulation code. It always surprises us, entertainment software developers have very high skill. No matter how difficult some processing seems, they come up with a very fast code. One point is to supply a tuning tool to make use of their skill.

The other point is, since there are middlewares for physics simulation, it can be easily implemented with them. In the case of PS2 it had taken some time until they got usable, but this time Havok and others are already in. For example, automatic generation of natural terrain or cloth simulation code are supplied.

Q. Is the PS3 development environment different from that of PS2?

A. Basically it doesn’t change very much. The target hardware, the regular development environment, and tools. The difference is Cg compiler and tools, OpenGL/ES support by the change to nVIDIA.

Q. Is it the same kind of approach in performance tuning?

A. Since we have performance analyzer tools for cache usage and bus usage that game developers have evaluated so far, we extend them further. We concentrate on tools to extract programmers power. Also, CELL has the function to emit processor usage statistics as a log. By using this, you can know detailed usage statistics of each core in CELL.

Q. In regard to PS3, because few devkits are supplied, I hear 2 kinds of opinions. Some expect it’d be hard to extract performance and others are surprised as they can extract performance very easily in an actual development. How is it in the real development scene?

A. To be honest, since it has so much margin in performance, we’ve heard no such feedback that it’s difficult to develop on it. Naturally it’s different from single-core programming, but it doesn’t add to man hours required for game development that much. I repeat it but entertainment programmers have tremendous ability.

For example we showed the demo that renders London City, it’s not rendered in the GPU but the CELL does lighting and texture processing then outputs it to the frame buffer. Even without GPU, only CELL can create good enough 3D graphics.

Q. A few years ago it seemed you were lost for how you use CELL in augmenting entertainment factors. Have you found the answer?

A. As I told you here, physics calculation, simulation, and AI. The better graphics gets, the more often you see unnaturalness. To extract reality that matches graphics quality, programming abstract animation is not enough already. CELL exists to represent the worldview closer to nature. In future, expression in games will evolve into the different level from until now.

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