Director of ZOE comments on Ps2 difficulty

Taken fron the New IGN interview
"The DC is quite easy to code – it\'s like
                  the machine tells you "If you wanna do this, you can use this feature." It\'s
                  all laid-out and it\'s very simple. But with the PS2, you\'ve got this strong,
                  powerful chip, but there are no instructions like that. You essentially have
                  to do everything by yourself. You can get lost trying to do that. Up until the
                  Dreamcast, programmers were coding in the C language, and that was
                  fine. But now, with the PS2, the coders have to go back to assembler and
                  machine language."
I find this quite interesting.
http://ps2.ign.com/news/28921.html

[Living-In-Clip]

Which is why developing for it can be a bitch, so to speak. College courses on C is easy to find, but ASM is getting harder to find, not to mention alot of people just aren\'t interested in learning it. If you get a team of programmers who can use ASM and C, then development for the PS2 would not be a problem. But smaller developers just don\'t have programmers who know ASM inside and out. So they find themselve stuck trying to do something. And the other machines are going the standard route with C, which is easier then ASM and the programmers know that . ASM is still a great way to do things, allowing more control over everything. But these new programmers, who was raised on C and such just don\'t know it apparently.

Big developers won\'t have a problem. They have ASM programmers and can afford to pay the hefty price that comes along with an ASM programmer. Small developers will be screwed.

Innovation comes with hard work. Innovation+Hardwork=Better games

[Living-In-Clip]

Maybe so, and I don\'t argue that. Your correct. But if it were only that simple. Smaller developers, can\'t afford to invest alot of money in ASM gurus, not to mention the time that it takes to develop a game in ASM with programmers who aren\'t very good at ASM. So, they will move to smaller platforms. But, bigger companies such as EA or Konami can pay the hefty salary of ASM programmers. Not to mention alot more developer kits and time to devote to learning them. I read an interview with the company behind driver in an older issue of GameFan and the director said the PS2 would seperate the smaller / poorer developers from the bigger / great developers. He was totally correct.


In my opinion, the PS2 will have great games. But they won\'t come from small developers. They will come from big developers. And the market won\'t be flooded with PS2 games like it was with the Psone. Great games will be few and far bewteen, but they will be excellent ones.

[Edited by Living-In-Clip on 12-13-2000 at 08:18 PM]

I was going to say the same thing. Assembly programers are way too expensive for the Smaller Development houses that pushed the PSX over the top. The PS2 will indeed have great games but they will be few and far between(i.e. N64). You guys may disagree though.

BTW, I am enrolled in an assembly class next semester so I will find out how difficult it is and if I wish to learn that C++ and Java or just C++. I am taking Java next semester too. This may be kind of difficult (taking two new languages at the same time.) so I might take Java this Summer.

[Living-In-Clip]

ASM is hard, but not impossible. I think the main thing is, there is the whole "why learn it?" when something is easier around like C. So, ASM programmers are few and far bewteen now. And the ones that are good, are very VERY high paid. Small developers can\'t afford them. Its sad really.

I don\'t think it will be as bad or pronounced as the N64\'s problem was.  The PS2 has alot more developers working on it than the N64 did.  It also doesn\'t have the cartridge limitations.  I do agree about small developers though, they will struggle with PS2.  Not only because of the difficulty of development, but also because of the cost.  Alot of them may try to get by with middleware and libraries, but then we\'ll end up with cookie-cutter titles from small software houses.

Make your first console easy to program.  Sony did it with PSX, Microsoft is supposedly doing it with XBox, and Sega did it with the Dreamcast (their "return" machine).  Second year, you can take risks because you have the userbase (hopefully).  Case in point: N64, PS2, Saturn.  No, no, NO the PS2 won\'t go the way of N64 and Saturn.  It\'s risks are nowhere near those levels.  But if you don\'t take those risks, you get the cookie cutter syndrom.  People bash PS2 for jaggies, or for limited VRAM.  But the fact is, they took a chance.  They could\'ve sat back and slapped out a 3Dfx compatible machine.  Instead, they took a risk with streaming data (offering a more robust environment).  Gotta give them their props for that.

I\'ve dabbled in assembler but I don\'t have to take the class yet. I\'ve taken some C and C++ and let me tell you if you want carpel tunnel syndrome take assembler!

My friends and I agree that assembler should br taught at every school and everyone should learn it....it helped me understand the logic part of programming a little better! For every line of C code you can code up to like 10-15 lines of assembler. Could be a little less on average but one thing is for sure....your\'re going to have at least twice as much lines of code for an assembler program vs. a C++ program that does the same job.

When I really think about it I wonder if developers really mean to say it\'s time consuming to develop for the PS2 and not really difficult? At least thats what I get from this interview.

Maybe it\'s not really difficult to develop for the PS2 maybe it\'s just a time consuming. Anyone here have a little more experience in programming than 1 year of it? I would like to hear it since I am always learning.