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No problem adapting to PS3 News
PlayStation 3 News by Robert Purchese
Team 17 has had no problems adapting Lemmings for PS3, but has hinted that larger, more ambitious titles may find the transition to Sony's new platform a little more difficult.
"Largely speaking, we've had little problem adopting to the PlayStation3," said Martyn Brown, studio director for Team 17. "But then again it would be foolhardy to assume we are 'bashing the metal' on the hardware with Lemmings as much as something like Heavenly Sword or MotorStorm."
Brown continued with a warning to those with lofty plans for their next-generation games.
"There was a lot of rumour-mongering prior to the PS3 development hardware arriving that it would require huge teams and untold complexities," he said. "There's certain elements of that ring true, but only for titles that are wildly ambitious in terms of range and content detail, but as for day-to-day development, we've more or less taken it in our stride."
Brown's comments came after Sony announced last night that PS3 would launch across Europe on 23rd March for GBP 425, EUR 599.
Other first party developers have remained tight-lipped about PlayStation 3 in general this morning, pointing to NDAs as a reason for staying off the record.
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BadBoyBonner
25/01/07 @ 16:17
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PMSL Team 17???
With all the technically excellent releases from Team17 over the years, and with them able to push technical boundaries with an ease that leaves all others in the development community pondering how they manage such technical wizardry; I do feel if Team17 are of that opinion, that this is in no way an attempt to steal free publicity and will instil confidence the world over of PS3's merits.
Edited 3 times,
most recently on 25/01/07 @ 16:24
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BadBoyBonner
25/01/07 @ 16:23
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I bought full contact from Team17 for the Amiga A500 - the only good bit from it was the rotoscoped silhouetted animation of a martial artist performing fight moves. Which coincidentally took up the entire first disc.
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most recently on 25/01/07 @ 16:23
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JediMasterMalik
25/01/07 @ 16:23
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LMAO Lemmings! Like anyone thought that would be difficult to adapt!
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Hey, I was asked "How do you find PS3 development?" So I answered, as delicately as I could given our own NDA's. The answer is, it's fine.
And before you mocking bastards take a swipe at Lemmings, just have a look at it on PS3, it's bloody lovely - and it's no Java port you cheeky gets :-) No Alien Breed, for the win or otherwise - just yet. |
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BadBoyBonner
25/01/07 @ 16:48
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Hang on is my memory a little hazy or did David Jones of DMA design (and now realtime worlds - ala Crackdown) come up with the Lemmings game that was at the time published by Psygnosis on the Amiga. So how the hell did it become Team17's property?
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/column_... Ha just read that article - had forgotten about Uniracers on the Snes!! |
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Sony own Lemmings, we developed the PSP, PS2 and PS3 versions. We were asked, that's how.
I think there are previews dotted around the web - and excellent reaction from players :-) Since it's SCEE's franchise, it's not for me to discuss it but the title is available in Japan and USA already.
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most recently on 25/01/07 @ 16:51
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BadBoyBonner
25/01/07 @ 16:57
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Spadge you look familiar were you anything to do with the Microbyte stores?
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deepmenace
25/01/07 @ 17:12
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wasnt this the case with both the ps1 and ps2?
sony hardware is harder to get to grips with. but it means the software travels a wonderful curve where-by 1st gen titles literally look like they were coded on a different platform to last gen titles. the lifecycle of the xbox titles followed nothing like that. /is quietly confident that we'll see some *truly amazing* stuff on ps3 a year and a half down the line/ |
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BadBoyBonner
25/01/07 @ 17:15
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Small world, I am great friends with the guy who took over Leeds from the Ilkley store. Microbyte was the best arcade in the world - mind you I did always have to bring over the new Snes games from ICE in Doncaster that I had bought i.e. Jap MarioKart. Glory days.
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The games industry graveyard is littered with studios who produced 'technically excellent' demos and prototypes in recent years.
Developing and risking the livelihoods of 75 staff these days is different to the costs, time and risk involved in taking punts in a very different world (i.e. the Amiga market). As a gameplayer myself, I'm happy with good looking, competent, stimulating and entertaining titles - I've long since stopped considering masturbating over the fact that there are four sprites in the border area.
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most recently on 25/01/07 @ 17:28
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Hey, I'm not knocking you for it - there are many dead companies who also made 'just good' games. To keep your head above water at all is an achievement.
But let's face it - Rockstar aren't going to read that and go "well, they didn't have any trouble making worms, so GTA4 will be a piece of piss!", as BadBoyBonner's comment suggested. You even say so yourself in the article. |
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BadBoyBonner
25/01/07 @ 17:40
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Take TheCodeMonkeys for example - they probably dream about doing a worms Java conversion. Instead of Son of Lion King and Animal Soccer etc lol
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Yeah, I'm bemused it's a news "story" on it's own really, I thought it was me and a bunch of others just commenting that PS3 is fine to develop with. As ever, during a transition, there's a lot of scare-mongering. Like any console, time, experience and quality man-power generally gets the best out of any. Given the memory, computational power and graphics engines, there's a ton of expectation which takes some time to live up to in terms of delivery.
Developing a title like GTA is one hell of a commitment (Even considering Renderware's engine) and I shudder to consider the team-requirements, size of content/assets and time needed to develop, deliver and just get that stuff through QA. It really is enormous. I'm only able to discuss what we did on Lemmings, really, despite something else being in the works. We gave the game a real high-def, rich-visual update without breaking it - and took the opportunity to add a few gameplay elements too. No sprites in the borders though, but bucketloads of beautifully animated lemmings close up... check it next to the mobile phone/HTML version... ;) |
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BadBoyBonner
25/01/07 @ 17:49
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The "I've long since stopped considering masturbating over the fact that there are four sprites in the border area" will have to be plagiarised! Lol
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Love Lemmings, quality game. I bought the PSP version and almost wept when I heard the can-can music once again. Though of course, I am the sad amongst the sad.
Spadge, would you agree that a challenging platform to write for creates a community of the best developers, and thus the most robust games? When people moan that PS3 is more difficult to write for than the 360 I can't help but think of VB vs. C#, bad as the analogy might be. (C# FTW)
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most recently on 25/01/07 @ 18:51
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Xerx3s - Creating a new ip (and then a franchise) is a tremendous challenge in today's marketplace. On the Amiga we could self-publish and it was a level playing field. Today, it's all about the $ and the $$$ marketing to establish it, I'm afraid. Great games on todays platforms generally cost a fortune when embellished with the content and presentation that's anticipated. XBLA, PS3's digital platform and XNA is a step forward in addressing the opportunity for smaller, tighter experiments.
Look at Shadow of the Collossus, Viva Pinata and even LocoRoco - all technically and creatively crafted but to no great commercial success. The great unwashed (the general public, as referred to by someone I forget) appear to have voted with their wallets. It all adds up to the fact that everything spent on something new and original is a great big bloody risk, it's a real vicious circle. Sony are bravely launching new IP on the PS3 with Motorstorm and that has to be commended - it's a huge investment for them and a massive undertaking that Evolution have taken on. Nobuo - I wouldn't say developing for PS3 is more challenging than say cramming something phenomenal into something smaller (R*Leeds did a terrific job squeezing GTA VC/LCS into the PSP as an example) - but there is tremendous weight of pressure and expectation on todays content and visuals, with layers of complexity throughout titles, especially so on PS3 and 360. I don't believe the same expectations are on the Wii and there's an air of open-mindedness there. To make any game entertaining - and consistantly entertaining is a challenge in itself; great art and tech guarantee nothing. The real challenge is to marry all this together and not go bankrupt doing it :-) I'm quite buoyed by the fact that the PS3, like the 360, has the digital platform and that can offer alternatives; alternatives that don't necessarily hark on about how many polys are being used, that the lighting is HDR or there are four sprites in the border. Games that you can just boot up and enjoy, in high-def, widescreen, on the comfort of your shiny new high def telly, against your mates in their houses, on their couches, with a wireless controller. ahh, jumpers for goalposts and all that. |
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Isn't this kind of like saying an Enzo is easy to drive at 25mph?
@spadge I totaly get where you're coming from re: development risks, but surely a company that HAS produced two cult classics can, on Live or PS Store, produce compelling new IP with a significantly reduced risk. I mean, the best stuff you've ever done (by a mile) is 2D. The weakest stuff you've ever done IMO has involved crowbaring your classics into 3D. Play to your strengths! If Bizzare can do it, so can you!
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most recently on 25/01/07 @ 19:34
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Actually, even with both of those platforms, you can't just get up and do what you like - there are platform holder "portfolios" to consider. You can pitch new things and new concepts and this is what we're actively doing :-)
It's a bit trickier for us since most of the time we're working on other people's IP as well as our own and new R&D is both expensive and a luxury, but we are trying to do that - but ultimately not at the risk of the studio.. it's very easy to create black-holes for cash to very quickly drain. As a studio, owning the IP is paramount these days and it's difficult with quickly escalating costs to develop something to a high standard without going out on a limb, in a market that's not generally speaking, hugely receptive to new ideas. I hear what you're saying regarding us taking our own IP into 3d - which was done at a time when there was little to no opportunity to develop 2d games because publishing execs thought that 3d was the only option. I'm so very glad that these days are well behind us now, its great that no-one's getting hung up on 'dimensions' any more and just look at the game, I know as a player, I've never really been that arsed - I just like good games. And believe it or not, we did put heart and soul into Worms in 3d (particularly on the 2nd iteration, Mayhem) and we have to take it on the chin that the great unwashed voted again. Worms for XBLA is 2d, you'll be pleased to hear.
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most recently on 25/01/07 @ 19:45
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Sadly what he has said is something that anyone who knows me on these forums will know I have warned about ever since I began doing work on PS3 (I contract so sony can't really slap me with an NDA as I'm not affiliated with them, only certain projects I can't mention ha!).
The PS3 is great for small projects due to the hard and fast memory split, which doesn't hamper casual games. PS3 needs to stream content for anything larger like resistance or motorstorm and as I've mentioned before, blue-ray is no good at that full stop. As a result we had to compress the sh** out of all graphics and then uncompress on the fly, before moving the uncompressed stuff to graphics memory and...yep we get framerate issues! This will be true of any PS3 project. We are getting better at arranging the data on blue-ray to facilitate efficient streaming but, can do jack about the slow seek speeds of the disk drive itself. No wonder the British devs have been gagged. In the circles I move in we were all more than vocal about the crap sony have handed to developers. It really does feel like they made a blue-ray player and then though oh heck it's supposed to play games too isn't it! The cell can actually play a blue-ray disk without even accessing the gpu so maybe this is why they thought the cell was all powerful. Not realising that de-compressing blue-ray movies and reading a disk serially is not what a games oriented processor needs to do! For games it's all about the texture storage, ai based on branching instructions, good predictive branching in short almost the opposite of what an spu does well. Developers almost without exception (it depends on the game you write) have scaled up their projects from the proof of concepts that you see at shows like E3 (well did see anyway) simply don't fit into PS3 memory and then stall once you try to stream the data from the disk. Haveing done this myself, I bet there are developers at most PS3 software houses who have had to go to their boss and say "Er you know we said march, well er...no way that's happening. We couldn't get the big track to perform above 30fps when we streamed the data for it and did all the compression/decompression etc. etc. for the realtime game and 1080p er unless everything fits into 256mb of graphics memory well forget that too!". For the record the 256mb for data is not a real restriction yet. I've yet to work on anything that was above about 100mb or so for actual game code (usually less than that even) |
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@spadge
Good to hear! Fair point about the '3D vibe' from a few years back - never really given it much thought until now. Although I'm not a big retro gamer, I suppose the 'full circle' we're experienceing thanks to developments with mobiles, internet gaming and live arcade has broken down the barriers. Were a progressive little bunch really ;) @penhalion Whiilst I feel for you guys pulling your hair out I does help me feel more justified about my original comments on the PS3: trojan-horse-force-fed-next-gen-movie-format-war-bollocks attempting to ride on the back of brand loyalty. I'm glad it's backfired, to what degree remains to be seen, but as I said earlier, going from 90% market share to, say, 30-50%, is bad in anyones books (more so when you think they're being sold at a loss!)
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most recently on 25/01/07 @ 20:01
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Oh and I know someone will mention ridge-racer. Go look at the graphics for that (not the nice shiny effects as those are shader based and fit into mere kilobytes. I mean look at the track detail and the textures. See if you can count how many different textures you see when racing a track....Then compare that to any 360 racer and you'll notice something interesting....
Incidentally I seem to have gotten a free PS3 for some reason....I think my current boss is trying to convert me :)
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most recently on 25/01/07 @ 19:58
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Spadge there's something that's been bugging me.
I was checking Worms Open Warefare for the PSP and I was surprised that my favourite worms weapon EVAH the holy grenade wasn't there... why? :'( *sniff* And are you going to do what a few devs have done and port their PSP games to PSN or can't you talk about that. :/ |
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Team 17 were one of the handful of developers who managed to define the Amiga games market. While they didn't often do anything particularly original even back then, they did everything particularly well. So I wouldn't write off PS3 Lemmings just yet, the guys behind Project-X, Body Blows, Alien Breed, Superfrog and the original (and best) version of Worms can't be all bad.
That said, they've been in danger of being just "the Worms people" for a few years now, I'd be interested to know how many peeps from the Amiga heyday are still involved in the company... |
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Quite a few, as it happens. Although we were much, much smaller then.
PS3 Lemmings is lovely, as people will find out - and we are doing other IP too. Franchise success tends to totally overwhem and consume a developer (as is demonstrated elsewhere...) but we're still going very strong and have a varied diet apart from Worms these days :) |
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