John Carmack, infamous creator of the Quake engine and the maker of the Doom PC game series, spoke glowingly of the XBox development platform, in particular, XNA at the recent QuakeCon 2005. It is, like my coworker Shane Creamer said, a true affirmation of the work that Microsoft is doing in the console space. Carmack says repeatedly that Sony (makers of Playstation) needs to come up to the same quality level as the Microsoft Development Platform for console games.
It only proves our point that the most important people in the industry, to quote our CEO Steve Ballmer, are the Developers, Developers, Developers.
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A couple of snips from John Carmack’s keynote (in context)
"The development tools again aren’t up to Microsoft standards on there, so it’s probably more painful from that side of things, but it looks like an elegant platform, that would be fun to develop something on."
"A lot of people assume for various reasons that I’m anti-Microsoft because of the OpenGL versus D3D stance. I’d actually like to speak quite a bit in praise of Microsoft in what they’ve done on the console platform, where the xbox previously and now the 360 have the best development environment that I’ve ever seen on a console. I’ve gone a long ways back through a number of different consoles and the different things that we’ve worked with, and Microsoft does a really, really good job because they are a software company and they understand that software development is the critically important aspect of this, and that is somewhat of a contrast to Nintendo and Sony, and previously Sega, who are predominantly hardware companies, and decisions will get made based on what sounds like a good idea in hardware rather than what is necessarily the best thing for the developers that are actually going to be making the titles."
"Microsoft is focusing on that for Longhorn to try and make that a little bit better, but it’s a combination hardware software thing where ideally you want your API to be a direct exposure of what the hardware does, where you just call something which sets a parameter, and it becomes "store these four bytes to the hardware command buffer", and right now there’s far too much stuff that goes on which winds up causing all of the hardware vendors to basically say "use large batches", you know, use more instancing stuff, or go ahead and put in more polygons on your given characters."
"I’m not completely sure yet which direction we’re going to go, but the plan of record is that it’s going to be more the Microsoft model right now where we’ve got the game and the renderer running as two primary threads and then we’ve got targets of opportunity for render surface optimization and physics work going on the spare processor… You’re closer to the metal on the Microsoft platform and we do expect to have a little bit lower driver overhead."
Download the keynote here if the UseNet post format below drives you crazy.
http://www.filerush.com/download.php?target=QuakeConCarmackKeynote.zip
kurtsh
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