pouët.net

Hell yeah - in a few days a GPLed PS3 devkit library called "ps3mlib" will be released.

Not much to see here - but it's a first preview
http://psx-scene.com/forums/f6/tkc-demo-01-waninkoko-72353/

I'm pretty curious what the community will do with it ... :)

i'll tell you what the community will do with it:

1- spam a gazillion places on the internet with all kinds of baseless claims about the capabilities of this lib
2- goto 1

Since developing an OFFICIAL demo for the PS3 with tons and tons of OFFICIAL support and help wasn't exactly a picnic, I'm going to say: Havoc wins.

Gloom speaks the truth.

I am curious how it looks compared to the official sdk though. The unofficial PSP SDK for instance was actually less of a pain to use than the official one. However, I highly doubt that to be true for the PS3.

Whenever I read an article and PS3 is mentioned it seems the writer lost it's soul in the process.

i agree with Xernobyl.

Its not just that the development tools suck. Its the whole ideology of Sony that does a great part.
Combine a platform that is hideous to code on and a devkit that rather limits the platforms cpabilities and you get no coder to work on for free.

There is a reason why there are no demos like ahem, Sega Mega CD, Sega Saturn, 3DO, Atari 7800 etc.... Despite their technical good sounding aspects on paper.

And before everyone moans, no, software rendering supported by SPU's doesnt count as hardware accellerated 3D.

ps3 dev isn't horrible. but for the most part it's just not fun, either (parts of it are a lot of fun, but to get there you have to wade through a swamp of suck).

it confuses me how some ps3 devs speak so glowingly of "their" platform. i've done a lot of cross-platform and console dev in the past 2 years (and a lot of ps3 work in the last few months), and my experience is that ps3 work takes maybe 20-30% more time than the other platforms. some of that time is spent thinking about optimized, spu-friendly dataflows, and i don't mind that part. a lot more time is spent fighting the tool chain and the libs and most annoyingly waiting for the goddamn devkit to reboot after a crash. that i could most certainly do without.

Does it come with a console? If not, there isn't much use for it :(

i wouldnt be so pessimistic ... the ps3 is kinda similar to the psp when it comes to how libs are organised (a lot of things in the library are just wrappers to OS calls), and a "free" sdk can be created much the same way, ie duplicate most of whats in the official one, plus exposing those functions which are not exposed in the official sdk. this will probably take a while though until its half useable, i dont have high hopes for these early libs either (which probably is just a bunch of half assed convinience functions using the framebuffer, etc pp)

Masochists! why would anyone spend all this time fighting with all this when PC development is so much easier, has a broader audience and means of delivery...

Navis: Because if you do it on ps3 you can get away with doing copperbars and shadebobs yet again.

[quote]i wouldnt be so pessimistic ... the ps3 is kinda similar to the psp when it comes to how libs are organised (a lot of things in the library are just wrappers to OS calls), and a "free" sdk can be created much the same way, ie duplicate most of whats in the official one, plus exposing those functions which are not exposed in the official sdk. this will probably take a while though until its half useable, i dont have high hopes for these early libs either (which probably is just a bunch of half assed convinience functions using the framebuffer, etc pp) [/qoute]

Well, the PS3 SDK is significantly larger and contains much much better tools and libraries than the PSP SDK, which I doubt the unofficial one will even come remotely close to. I agree that there are some similarities between the structure and the libs involved, but they are two completely different beasts anyway IMO. My point with the PSP thing was that the unofficial toolchains and tools (like remote debugging, remote screen etc) are actually pretty good. Granted, I have limited experience with the official PSP kit, but enough to have an opinion nonetheless.

I actually didn't think developing for the PS3 was *that* much of a pain in the ass btw, it was a steep learning curve, and getting things working "correctly" took longer, but that was with official support, docs, tools, devkits etc. etc. Doing it on a retail console without all the official stuff is surely torture, and I wouldn't even consider it. While I respect coders who use their spare time doing stuff for these types of platforms, I still question their sanity. :P

Maybe the unofficial SDK will mature enough over time to be usable for the average hobby coders out there, but I think it's gonna take a lot of time, and that for now it's reserved for those with special interests.

Yes, if you never intend to ship an actual product or, *gasp*, support it, that's certainly true :D

Yeah, these 'static, locked down' platforms (platform eccentricities aside) are generally easier to make and support software for, and easier for the consumers to use and get software for. I'm thinking things like iOS here too (which I'm writing a lot for lately). They're easier for IT departments to support too.

That's kind of making me wonder if we'll end up with mostly dumbed down platforms in a few years, plus traditional "open" computers for dev + hobbyist use?

we are still talking about demos right? which, like a formula 1 car, is most successful if, when passing the finishing line, breaks down into a million pieces.

Now who tells the scene that the compo pc is not behind said finish line? :)

I have no delusions that it will happen, but it would be cool if there were more scene activity on fixed highend platforms like the PS3.
It would be cool to have a platform where you can actually compare technical achievements much easier and see who has the fastest engine, pushes the most polys etc.
And perhaps then we could get back to more smooth-one-frame running effects. I mean, pick 1920x1080 or 1280x720 and get your demo running at 60 fps. If it drops a single fucking frame, optimize more or remove some content. This way it will be a smoooooth experience for everyone, since it will run just as good on every computer.
PC demos nowadays I'm wondering if it runs oneframe on even the coders computer. It seems mroe like "render 3d stuff that I had thought of, if it runs 5 fucking FPS, meh - who cares, people will just watch my kkapture version instead."

/Grumpy oldtimer

I've no idea how good or bad the official PS3 SDK is, I only used the PS1, PS2 and PSP ones.

The PS1 SDK was actually quite good, the PS2 was a monstrosity with half baked samples with kanji/sjis comments converted to DOS format, with a compiler which sometimes managed to generate invalid code (ie: loops of less than 6 instructions breaking on the custom mips processor), with a processor with a not 100% compatible single precision floating point and lack of double precision format as well, multiple revisions of devices/memory card libraries - each of these having some well defined bugs making it hard to not fail the TRC on the first attempt - the devkit itself had hardware issues (I killed 4 devkits DVD drives while working on our streaming library), etc... The PSP SDK in comparison was refreshingly nice and simple.

There's nothing technical good sounding about the A7800. Actually, when you try coding something for it you realize the thing is actually as braindead as it seemed when you tried to make sense of the programmer's manual.

Don't know about the other consoles, though.

i did NOT read this thread, just one Q:

is it capable of handling all of em cores ? stable ?

if yes, plz send preInstalled_gifts to hardcore@RottenDamn.nl ;)
ktnxbye.

Like Ryg nicely pointed out; besides the obvious niche-factor that it shares with many other console platforms in the past, there is no good reason to get all worked up over PS3 development. Most will end up spending "wasted" time on trivial bullshit like debug cycle overhead (and less wasted time on learning to streamline your dataprocessing along a somewhat complex piece of hardware): and then end up with a demo that would've looked better if that time was spent on the actual multimedia experience and the whole thing was just made on a PC :)

Then again, I did/do have an old modded XDK standing around, for much the same reason: niche. But that's a much friendlier and simpler platform, even if you stretch it.

XDK stuff is somewhat different, though. Since it is quite similar to PC that often got used as "let's see if I can compile my PC content on XBOX" and not much extra thought given to that.

But the main problem there is with these platforms is that it's all so unsupported. If Sony would just go ahead and say 'here are the SDKs, please do some cool stuff' and provide a platform for people to distribute their stuff, I guess some very interesting things could happen.

Like piracy. :)

Well now that piracy already "happened" they could damn well release it and reap the benefits instead.

In my humble opinion ;)

cg, i doubt that's the general policy of nintendo/sony/microsoft