Valve Software Interview

Interesting interviews. I especially like his insight into Longhorn, 360 and PS3. From his point of view Longhorn does nothing to help game developers or consumers playing their video games. This is disapointing. Obviously though WGF 2.0 will be nice for future graphic tech but that's similiar to the same experience end users have now with DX9.

I agree with him how nVidia/ATI/MS need some sort of auto update display driver for avg joe bob consumer who never checks nvidia.com and ati.com. I'm sure support gets flooded by this issue and it's sad this issue hasn't been addressed yet.

His views on 360 & PS3 are interesting also. I think it's obvious multicore CPU approach isn't ideal for programmers either especially the PS3. He mentions how one line of code on just one of the 7 SPE's and your whole code slows to a crawl by a factor of 80. He also speculates Sony went this route so game devs code is so specialized for the PS3 that it would be a waste of time & money to port games to other platforms. I'm not sure I believe that's that the reason. I tend to think Sony/KK are just really obsessed with theoritical floating point in hardware and not necessarily realistic hardware & software combination. PS2 is similiar to the PS3.

This isn't a problem for just the 360 & PS3 either though. PC cpu's are all going dual core right now and in 2006 virtually all cpu's will be dual core, even on laptops.

From all the info i've read from Carmack, Gabe and then the anonymous source article on Anand awhile back it really does sound like most software won't be using more then 1 CPU or SPE for quite awhile. Obviously games will still look awesome in the next generation but it sounds like the future of hardware really isn't ideal for game developers at all, no matter what platform you code for which hurts both the developers and the consumers.

Wow, it's amazing what developers actually say when they don't have to worry about biting the hand that feeds them. So much of what he says about the next-gen platforms is so on the money, though I couldn't figure out why he was so harsh about Microsoft, since Xbox Live seems to cover a large quantity of what he says at the end that he's after - billing, closer connections with customers, etc - and MS, once upon a time at least, said that XBL was coming to Longhorn too (even if it is made redundant for them by Steam). One can only hope that we don't get stuck in the same situation again where the inferior-for-developers platform gets dominance through sheer brute force marketing and size of customer base.