Thurak1 wrote:Kristoff Atruin wrote:"Saying its a platform issue is a poor excuse. The real problem is the programmers dont know how to program for the platform."
That's what we in the software industry refer to as a platform problem. It might be possible to write a good app using Silverlight, but if the developers who are experienced with it are rare then it's a bad choice of platform because you're gonna have a hard time building and maintaining a very effective team. Same thing here, companies who have lots of experience with the PS3 may be able to build some very impressive games, but the people working for those companies aren't working for CCP. You're completely discounting the value of a developer's experience. Programming isn't magic you know.
I use the Silverlight example because one of my recent clients was using an app from a vendor that was getting very out of date, and the new version used Silverlight. The customer was looking very hard for alternatives from other vendors because they worried that the choice of platform was going to make the already bad support even worse, due to the low supply of experienced Silverlight developers.
If the PS3 was rare you might have a valid point.
However the PS3 is not rare and neither is the talent to program for the PS3. Just so happens that CCP doesnt really have any of it which makes it a CCP issue still.
I guess I'm going to have to use small words. It doesn't matter how common the equipment is. PCs are *everywhere*. That doesn't mean a developer who writes in Java for a living is going to be any good with Silverlight. Different app platform. The PS3 is a similar situation because it has an extremely strange architecture, which changes how you write code for it even if the language is the same. You have different limitations to work with than on a PC. The PS3 is well known to be challenging to work with.
Thus, if your developers haven't written PS3 games before they won't be terribly great or efficient at it. CCP has not written PS3 games before. The developers working at CCP have not, as far as we've seen, worked at companies that have made PS3 games. This means they went into developing on the PS3 without any experience. You can often wing it and get away with it, but this *is* a big risk factor for a project.