CES 2007: Words from id Software

Game Informer interviewed id Software‘s John Carmack and Todd Hollenshead about the QuakeCon, the state of PC Gaming, and the pros and cons of developing for the PS3 and the Xbox 360. The interview gets a bit lengthy so we’ll just relay to you folks the juicy bits, and if you’re interested about further details, you can make use of our source-link below.

Here’s John Carmack on developing for the Xbox 360:

Microsoft has made some pretty nice tools that show you what you can make on the Xbox 360. I get a nice multi-frame graph, and I can label everything across six threads and three cores. They are nice tools for doing all of that, but the fundamental problem is that itÂ’s still hard to do. If you want to utilize all of that unused performance, itÂ’s going to become more of a risk to you and bring pain and suffering to the programming side. It already tends to be a long pole in the tent for getting a game out of the door. ItÂ’s no help to developers to be adding all of this extra stuff where we can spend more effort on this.

His thoughts on developing for the PS3 await after the jump!

Game Informer interviewed id Software‘s John Carmack and Todd Hollenshead about the QuakeCon, the state of PC Gaming, and the pros and cons of developing for the PS3 and the Xbox 360. The interview gets a bit lengthy so we’ll just relay to you folks the juicy bits, and if you’re interested about further details, you can make use of our source-link below.

Here’s John Carmack on developing for the Xbox 360:

Microsoft has made some pretty nice tools that show you what you can make on the Xbox 360. I get a nice multi-frame graph, and I can label everything across six threads and three cores. They are nice tools for doing all of that, but the fundamental problem is that itÂ’s still hard to do. If you want to utilize all of that unused performance, itÂ’s going to become more of a risk to you and bring pain and suffering to the programming side. It already tends to be a long pole in the tent for getting a game out of the door. ItÂ’s no help to developers to be adding all of this extra stuff where we can spend more effort on this.

And here’s his take on developing for the PS3:

WeÂ’ve got our PlayStation 3 dev kits, and weÂ’ve got our code compiling on it. I do intend to do a simultaneous release on it. But the honest truth is that Microsoft dev tools are so much better than SonyÂ’s. We expect to keep in mind the issues of bringing this up on the PlayStation 3. But weÂ’re not going to do much until weÂ’re at the point where we need to bring it up to spec on the PlayStation 3.

WeÂ’ll probably do that two or three times during the major development schedule. ItÂ’s not something weÂ’re going to try and keep in-step with us. None of my opinions have really changed on that. I think the decision to use an asymmetric CPU by Sony was a wrong one. There are aspects that could make it a winning decision, but theyÂ’re not helpful to the developers. If they make the developers say that Sony is going to own the main marketplace, letÂ’s make them develop toward this and build it this way, it would somewhat downplay the benefits of the Xbox 360 and play to the PlayStation 3Â’s strengths.

I suspect theyÂ’re not going to overwhelmingly crush the marketplace this time, which wasnÂ’t clear a year ago. A lot of people were thinking itÂ’s going to be a rerun of the last generation, and itÂ’s now looking like it might not be. IÂ’ve been pulling for Microsoft, because I think theyÂ’ve done a better job for development support, and I think they have made somewhat smarter decisions on the platform. ItÂ’s not like the PlayStation 3 is a piece of junk or anything. I was not a fan of the PlayStation 2 and the way its architecture was set up. With the PlayStation 3, itÂ’s not even that itÂ’s ugly–they just took a design decision that wasnÂ’t the best from a development standpoint.

The short of the long of it? Carmack thinks that both consoles are hard to develop for. He’s not saying that both consoles are trash, he’s just saying that they’re not developer friendly. He notes that at the least, Microsoft has tools that make it all look easier, and that with the PS3, the architecture isn’t even ugly, it’s just that the design decision that Sony made wasn’t the best from a development standpoint.

Via Game Informer