Certain vocal memebers of the EVE Forum Community which makes up a TINY fraction of the actual player community went on tirades because "MUH EVE DOLLARS" were being spent on something other than EVE, which is a stupid and childish issue to raise and just shows how much of no-life wastes of organs they are.

/end rage

I hardly ever ran into an actual player in the game in all my time of playing Dust and EVE at the same time, doing OBs for FW and PC, and just chatting in Local that actually didn't like the idea of Dust 514. Most of them just didn't like playing FPS or didn't own a console. It was more that they were apathetic than anything else.

I actually talked to many people that didn't know the influence Dust 514 had on EVE, and found the idea exciting after I explained it to them. On many occasions people in the Gallente Militia channel would get psyched and go fit up a Catalyst to try out an OB for themselves.

Don't believe the EVE Forums. ESPECIALLY not anything you read on General Discussion.

Don't believe the EVE Forums. ESPECIALLY not anything you read on General Discussion.

I like the unintended implication that our GD section is somehow trustworthy.

not sure that was unintended ;) most days, I cannot tolerate the replies over at the EvE-Online general forums. OMG those people are d!cks. Some kat asks a question or offers criticism of some aspect of EvE, then it becomes 10 pages of who can find the most minute comment (and sometimes just a word) to tear apart out of context with the intent of just mocking the OP before they really bother to read it. All while trying so very desperately to be cool and condescending.

EvE GD posters are something special.

I disagree, and I only play on PS consoles.

First, PC is CCP's forte.

Second, developing the game on PC gives them more freedom than developing for the PS4. CCP doesn't need to go through Sony for anything. They could not have pulled off the demo they did as quickly and easily had it been developed on the PS4. They also couldn't use test servers for Dust when coming up with changes, and look how that turned out. Development on the PC allows for test servers to try out changes beforehand, and working out kinks before releases and patches hit the player base.

I do hope that Nova eventually releases for a console, but I think that the best way for that to happen and give the best chances for long term success is to first develop on the PC.

There are + and - to be honest. I'm sure if current gen consoles were a little bit more powerful we wouln't even be talking about PC games for some simple reasons.

PC, we all know by now, are not equal in performance. None of them. Every PC has its own CPU, its own GPU its own RAM, Motherboard etc,and can throw out very different performances running the very same game. Now, imagine, you have to produce a videogame and you cover every possible position in a team: would you rather know exactly what's the max polycount target, what's the exact texel density, how many draw calls in order to sqeeze the hardware you have? I'd say of course I'd prefer to know beforehand what's possible and what's not, and that's exactly the main point in developing for consoles: you have your hardware and you push it to its best. On PCs, instead, you usually don't do it: you usually try to guess what will be the "average" PC build, scale it down a bit in its core "heavy" features, and then pump it up with visual fx for people who have better builds.

So, no. It's not easier. The fact that (and it was true) it was easier to develop for PC rather that consoles was only valid for PS3 (not even xbox 360) due to its "very strange" architecture (based on what developers said).

I might repeat myself but I really want to stress that seriously, if Ps4 was some kind of GTX 970 build, we wouldn't be here arguing on what's better between PC and Consoles. Having to deal with SONY and Microsoft instead of being free to publish your game whenever, wherever you want would have just been a lesser inconvenience, but nothing more.

There are + and - to be honest. I'm sure if current gen consoles were a little bit more powerful we wouln't even be talking about PC games for some simple reasons.

PC, we all know by now, are not equal in performance. None of them. Every PC has its own CPU, its own GPU its own RAM, Motherboard etc,and can throw out very different performances running the very same game. Now, imagine, you have to produce a videogame and you cover every possible position in a team: would you rather know exactly what's the max polycount target, what's the exact texel density, how many draw calls in order to sqeeze the hardware you have? I'd say of course I'd prefer to know beforehand what's possible and what's not, and that's exactly the main point in developing for consoles: you have your hardware and you push it to its best. On PCs, instead, you usually don't do it: you usually try to guess what will be the "average" PC build, scale it down a bit in its core "heavy" features, and then pump it up with visual fx for people who have better builds.

So, no. It's not easier. The fact that (and it was true) it was easier to develop for PC rather that consoles was only valid for PS3 (not even xbox 360) due to its "very strange" architecture (based on what developers said).

I might repeat myself but I really want to stress that seriously, if Ps4 was some kind of GTX 970 build, we wouldn't be here arguing on what's better between PC and Consoles. Having to deal with SONY and Microsoft instead of being free to publish your game whenever, wherever you want would have just been a lesser inconvenience, but nothing more.

First off, there's way more to dealing with Microsoft or Sony than a "simple inconvenience". Keep in mind that both of those companies require that any hosted game run on their servers, in their ecosystem according to their rules, not CCP's. This is massive issue and reason enough to avoid it even if consoles were somehow on the same performance level that PCs are. Obviously consoles aren't at the same performance levels of PCs either, so that's a second issue.

The biggest reason to avoid consoles in the future, for CCP, is to avoid being held hostage by the walled gardens of providers like Sony and Microsoft.

There are also more subtle issues when dealing with consoles that somewhat defeats the idea that it may be easier to develop for consoles. It's true that when developing for PC, you have to consider a wide variety of hardware performance levels, but all of these differences are handled by standard APIs and libraries. Therefore, a developer doesn't have to account for different target architectures, for the most part, aside from providing a lot of options to the end users to tune graphics levels and other settings.

On the other hand, when dealing with the console world, any updates to a game in the walled garden of Microsoft or Sony has to go through those company's Q&A as well as CCP's own Q&A. Microsoft, at least, also dictates how many updates can be delivered in a given time period and how much data can be delivered.

Once again, it's no mere "minor inconvenience" it's a different environment completely. CCP will do well to simply avoid consoles completely in the future. If they want to try to capture new market revenue, mobile it the way they will probably go since VR isn't really taking off at the moment.

On the first point, well, just no. PSN/Xbox Live don't "force" you to use their servers. Their servers are only required for autentication purposes, and with obvious reasons. So, yeah, no need to say "damn PSN" when Tranquillity was down . The only real point I see here is that if PSN/Live are down you cannot play.

API and libraries:

it's not that PS4/Xbox doesn't have any! Actually, they both have custom/semi-custom API and libraries and Sony's closely resemble Vulkan (in-depth from slide 32 on http://develop.scee.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/ParisGC2013Final.pdf). And by the way, APIs won't help you if your shaders are too complex (just think like Parallax Occlusion Mapping on a terrain shader/material with no optimization) for a specific machine or if your drawcalls are too high.
In case you want hundreds and even thousands of the more or less same object on screen, lets say, pebbles or small rocks, you will probably want to instance those objects and HLOD the hell out of it. It has nothing to do with machine specifics, but more with design/optimization choices. The whole point here is that if your boundaries are uncertain, you won't risk breaking the game on half the PC builds simply because you went too far with a shader (and yes, I'm exaggerating, but you got the point). APIs won't help you if you want your game assets to be both med poly and on Xbox360. I mean, you could, but then you would expect incredibly "empty" rooms.

QA:

Well, yes. But as we console paesants have seen here, Sony QA usually just makes sure that your PS4 doesn't blow up while playing your game. It's not the kind of QA you would expect, for example, at CCP. And they reduced the time the whole process takes to a week or so, so it's not even the epic amount of time the community usually think of. But if a week is too much, then you're completely right.

The point I didn't see in your post, anyway,might be the main reason why (often minor) developers avoid consoles imo: costs. It is a pretty big and potentially risky investment, and you'd have to pay everytime you want to push out a patch. That's why I started my post saying that console development is both a plus and a minus. You must carefully plan your marketing and players expectations in order to not lose money from your game.

The "very strange" architecture was hardly ever really used properly. Most usually just developed on some other platform then used emulation to cram it into the PS3. The architecture we're talking about, by the way, was the "Cell Broadband Engine" which was actually more of a small neural net than a multiprocessor. Of course, that functionality was far too obscure for most, so they just treated it as an 8-core processor. Very sad, because that same chip was apparently being used in supercomputers where the neural net capability allowed it to vastly improve on a simple multiprocessor.

I liked the fact that every core on the chip knew what every other core on the chip was doing. So each core didn't just do its own job, it could be programmed to be "aware" of the other cores and react. I believe there were very few games that ever used this, and all of them were developed specificly for the PS3 - the ultimate exclusive as those games could never then be ported to a "normal" platform. The PS3 was its own worst enemy - the very architecture which made its processor generations ahead of everything else made it so hard to program for that virtually noone did it. I would have loved to see games that were developed exclusively for PS3 using this functionality. I don't believe Dust ever used it, as it's obvious that the performance was clunky, where it should have been lightning fast. Now we'll never know, of course. The PS3 and what it could have done will be lost to antiquity.

Oh yes, I've read a lot on the Cell Processor and I've always read very discordant opinions on the matter (at the time it was blazing fast with single precision and "meh" with double precision) and don't have an opinion on that really since I don't now enough on the matter. Even tho, I don't see many ways to use it in the game industry specifically (perhaps in AI?).

I honestly think the issue is now moot. They'll never again (not anytime soon!) revisit this kind of architecture in a games console, nor for that matter in a PC. It was just too complex for an industry that only wanted multiprocessing. As for the things it was NOT good for, that was probably developers trying to use it for processing that it wasn't designed for. Again, valid, but not necessarily relevant. The fact is, whatever it could have done, the Cell Broadband Processor was largely ignored for its unique capabilities, which by the way were simply activated with appropriate firmware, but you had to program to those functions in order to use them, otherwise it was just going to be emulating some other platform in the same way as the early PS3s could emulate a PS2. Emulation will always result in a slower product, even if the architecture itself is capable of much more.

Anyway, we won't see anything like it again until the whole industry moves towards similar neural net architecture. The problem for the PS3 was it was just too advanced for most to use natively, and too different to support porting from other platforms well enough. When everyone is doing the same thing, that might change.

Coincidences: I was reading this right before reading your post

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10907/amd-gives-more-zen-details-ryzen-34-ghz-nvme-neural-net-prediction-25-mhz-boost-steps

But I believe it's used in a substancially different way-

IMO, they take themselves far too serious for their own good. I've only read a small percent of posters over the years that are legitimately being smart asses for fun. Most of what I see are overconfident little shats that only want to argue for the sake of assuming they already know everything.

You read my like a book, but tell me, did you enjoy flipping my pages as much as I enjoyed getting them flipped?

until they actually produce something, ANYTHING, it's all just vapourwear to me.

*transfers all likes to Alena*

Though to be fair, taken at face value, they have technically produced the demo. That mostly just induced rage in me, but I'm a pessimist extraordinaire so it's just kind of my thing.