Gran Turismo 5

I finally got over being angry at Sony and played a bit of Gran Turismo 5 on the weekend (it had nothing to do with the discovery of the broken PS3 security over the same weekend - but yay for that).

In a word: unfinished.

Compared to GT3 - which I consider the pinnacle of the series - there are so many graphical issues, slow loading times, poor models and frustrating game-play mechanics.

Models

Some of the models are really bad - almost certainly direct PSP imports. If as reported they spent 6 months on modelling each of the 200 'premium' cars then it was mostly a waste of time - you can barely see much of the interior if you do drive from inside, and there's little reason to anyway. The sounds are pretty weak too.

1080p@ under 50 fps

The sharpness and crispness only shows up how plain some of the models and race-tracks are. I'd rather 2x AA on 720p, so at least the frame-rate could keep up and you could improve the textures (also allow simpler models). It makes the screenshots look bare, and the moving game less than impressive.

Screen tearing

Tearing tearing everywhere. Trying to do too much AA or too high a resolution is all lost as soon as tearing rips the screen in two. I've definitely seen worse tearing ... but that was in games that weren't gran turismo.

Pop in

There's just too much pop in. Occasionally a whole road's worth of shadows pops in while you're driving on it too.

Shadows

Shadow mask is way too low a resolution, as are the environmental maps used for reflections (additionally they have low temporal resolution). Again this looks particularly bad at 1080p.

Volumetric mist/dust

I think the dust and mist actually looks quite nice - at least you can't see it as a bunch of layered animated sprites. Except at the edges that is - where it looks like total shit. Nice algorithm, simply unfinished or simply unsuitable for such a high screen resolution.

Slow/inconsistent menus

Obviously different teams/individuals work on every separate menu system in isolation as they still have the problem where they all look and work differently.

OK pox

Way too many 'are you sure' 'ok?' boxes and so on. Win some money - click ok. Win a car - click ok. Then go to the ticket, click on it, click ok to get it added to your garage. Click ok after it shows it driving up in the dark. Click ok/cancel to 'use it now'. I mean ... really? Its even worse when one considers this is the only game these guys have been working on for well over a decade, and yet the basic navigation mechanics haven't progressed at all - or gotten worse!

Loading slog

This is supposed to be a `next gen' console, why does it still have so much loading delay? Loading a track is one thing but almost every action from going to the car settings to the options to changing menu's triggers another load. I don't consider a 10G `install' a viable option to mitigate this poor design and reportedly it's hardly greased lightning with it anyway. These sort of delays had a reason on the PS2 with it's tiny RAM but there's no such reason on the PS3 - only excuses.

I really can't see where all the time went to come up with this result. Although the modelling and engine coding no doubt took a long time, all of these things can be done in parallel and they would have been playing with the PS3 as early as Evolution Studios anyway (Motorstorm devs who are now polishing their 3rd game), so it can't be the coding. There doesn't seem to be any obvious delay on the 'critical path' that could have caused such a long release cycle for such an unfinished game. Apart that is from poor management. Sony for letting them get away with it and Polyphony for fucking around too much. I'm not counting the over-detailed modelling here either, i'm talking about the engine and menu systems.

It just looks like Sony demanded that they stop fucking around and release it by xmas 2010, perhaps because the PS4 is coming up, or simply to ensure the PS3 hadn't hit it's inevitable decline.

It's only beta quality - a decent beta, but still lacking all the polish we should all expect from such a triple-a game. If I were to review it I wouldn't give it more than 60% given all of the above (a low 'C'/'Pass' grade), and the fact the game itself isn't much other than `GT4-HD'.

If it was a launch title then there would be good excuses for all of these problems, but it isn't.

Bye bye CELL

Well, I guess that's really the last nail in the coffin for CELL.

Sony's just announced that the next firmware `upgrade' for the PS3 will drop Linux support (and it's so important, that's all it will do). This is very, very disappointing. They blame it on crackers or 'security', but it's obvious it is just a cost cutting exercise. Sony have been hurting financially for a while now, and the razor gang is out with their daggers looking for savings.

After the `ps3 slim' dropping support (due supposedly to lack of resources to write the hypervisor drivers), and then IBM dropping CELL for HPC ... I guess the writing was on the wall. I'm glad I gave up development on CELL BE some time ago and got hold of a beagleboard instead - overall it's been a more satisfying experience if only because things are simpler. The whole CELL thing was just a costly mistake for all by the looks of it - being a bit ahead of it's time lead to a few limitations that people couldn't cope with.

Even though I rarely use it anymore, the whole thing plainly stinks - this is not a device I rent, I bought it. And for them to come into my home and remove functionality (advertised on the box no less) from a device that I paid for in full (well over-paid) should simply be illegal, if it isn't already.

I can't even log onto the Sony blog to fruitlessly whine about it because they've changed the login system to some horrid mess that takes ages to load and only shows blank pages (I bet it works on ie6 though, if the comments in the page are anything to go by). Well if they don't want me as a customer it isn't really my loss is it?

Time to remove CELL BE from the subtitle of this page at least; not that it has had much point in being there for quite some time.

It beat me, another year on, and what happens next?

I gave dragon age one more go. Started from scratch and spent my upgrade points wisely rather than wasting them on turning a rogue into a fighter (it's been a while since I played a WRPG). Things were going swimmingly for the first 5 hours or so, even managed to do things I couldn't before like get the two horny elves together, but then I hit a too hard part again and I got sick of retrying or wandering back and forth looking for something I could manage. I switched to easy mode.

Well, it's a little too easy but it's ok, at least I can see the story out now (which is playing out differently - this time i'm a human rather than a whiny sickly looking elf) and make some progress.

Ahh yes, another year on. It's not ending very well, I'm barely sleeping and feeling generally pretty miserable. Blah. Reading too much stuff on the intarwebs doesn't seem very healthy, it's all just so depressing. The world is going to shit really and observing that isn't as fun and interesting as I thought it would be, at least for me. Hmm.

I still have work to do in the yard, which I haven't touched for two weeks, but at least I now have a wheelbarrow, so it should go a bit faster once I get back into it. It's been a bit too hot the last couple of days to even consider it - if I had the energy to go that far anyway.

I'm still thinking about projects to work on. It's a tricky prospect however, as all of the interesting stuff is just too complicated to get involved in anymore. Or it's already done. Or it seems like a dead-end waste of time - although perhaps that is what I need, just a hobby again. I'm thinking of just doing some isolated hacking on the beagleboard - at least I have almost complete documentation for it - all 3 516 pages of it, not including the CPU. First I think I'll try and get u-boot booting something which can display to a frame-buffer. That should be doable at least. Still, not holding my breath on that one.

Too many late nights, Dragon Age

Well i've been losing the plot a bit lately - staying up till 5:30 playing games, watching tv, commenting on blogs I should probably not be commenting on. Had a strange episode last night too - possums were running across my roof about 3am making a terrible racket - well that happens almost every night. I went to go outside to shoo them away but caught sight of some guy on the road with what looked like a golf club. I snuck back inside and went back to what I was doing. There was quite a bit of screeching going on before everything went quiet. Must say i've thought of doing the same myself (or what I imagine he did, I didn't look), but they are a protected species. Yard has gone no-where all week, although i've been keeping the plants alive and eating lots of button squash. I did a couple of hours of work this `morning' but tired out pretty fast (should've had breakfast first). I was contemplating doing a bit more this afternoon but after I had some lunch and sat back down on the computer I might just give it a rest for another day.

The 5:30 sessions have been for Dragon Age. It's a strange game, i'm still not sure if I really enjoy it yet, or if it's more like work and I think i've spent more time talking than fighting so far. I guess that's ok in and of itself, and it is mostly done pretty well (it's ALL spoken - most of the voice acting is good too), but it's a bit of a change from other RPG's i've played where the dialogue is just a plot device and not a past-time in itself. Although there's been a couple of times - like when the busty wild mage starts going off about turning into a spider - that were quite confusing, since there didn't seem to be any reason they were talking about it at the time. Also feels a bit funny when, after chatting with some NPC cordially for 5 minutes, you accidentally do one wrong thing and they wont talk to you ever again.

It's big and open and non-linear, although that usually means you don't know where you're going at some points. There also seems to be long-term consequences to how you treat allies and alternative ways to solving things - which is a nice change from 'it doesn't matter what you do/the order you do it in, it always goes through the same steps' (well it seems that way, who knows in the end). Which party members you have active at a given time seems to affect conversations too - but that might've been a coincidence. One problem is that you're often not in the possession of enough information to know if you're doing 'the right thing', and sometimes the decisions are made unknowingly - like turning the wrong corner and getting stuck in a fight you didn't intend. I need to save more often - but why does it take so long to save! It takes about 30 seconds, 10 of which you're paralysed cold and the rest runs mostly in the background. And there's a lot of reading - all the writing (and there's a LOT of it to read if you want to) is too small too for a TV game, and light-on-black which is difficult to read.

The combat system isn't too bad, although a bit clumsy at times - being real-time makes it hard to keep track of all 4 characters and I keep losing them since they don't drug themselves up with health `potions' automatically - I guess I have to investigate the `gambit' system further. Final Fantasy 12 did a nicer job of introduction this programming system I think, made it more accessible, even if it took a lot longer to become useful. For potions, you have to change your current character to the one you want to take the drugs - which is clumsy in the heat of battle. Often when you do, the guy you were playing decides to rush in with his sword when he was quite safely firing arrows - or he just wanders off and forgets to fight! Also I don't know why (nor do I like it) how the current character keeps saying 'yes i will do it', 'as you wish' and crap like that every time you hit X to swing their axe or pick a lock! It completely removes the third-wall for no apparent reason. Isn't this meant to be 'role playing', not 'god playing'?

Early on I didn't get a back-pack at one of the shops (and they're very rare) and now i'm permanently down 10 'weight points' of carrying capacity since that shop has vanished (unless I go back 10 hours of playing) - and it's a constant pain. Mechanics like that are just frustrating and pointless. It adds an unnecessary level of micro-management whereas this is the sort of knowledge you'd expect the players to just know and take care of themselves. Be better if it was just experience and/or strength based. The inventory/status screen seems to overlay on the the live image (whilst pausing it). This seems like a really odd decision, and all it means is sometimes the menu system runs somewhat slower than it should, and uncomfortably so. It is mapped to the controller quite well though, making good use of all of the buttons and sticks - not just a PC port where they map a pointer to one of the sticks, and X to the left mouse button.

Technically it is no Uncharted 2 by any stretch. The stills may look ok (and some look fantastic) but there's a fair amount of popin and the framerate is very unsteady which detracts significantly from how it feels when wandering around. Add some very lo-res textures for things like the ground or tables which are part of canned cut-scenes and conversations which you are guaranteed to look at closely, and it looks more dated than it should. There are very long (10-20s) loading pauses between areas or if you die, even with a big (and painfully slow) copy-to-hdd bit when you first run it. Naughty Dog shows it can be done without the pauses, so it's a pity most developers are too lazy to do it and stick to the crappy 'pc way' of stop, load everything (again), continue, which doesn't translate well to optical storage. Traditionally I put this down to two things - 1, it's easier, a lot easier - and it's not just code, it involves art assets too, and 2, PC hardware can't do two things at once, like loading off a slow disk and keeping number crunching going, but there's no excuse in this day and age and hardware and gigantic budgets for such a naive implementation.

Well over-all it's a pretty decent and involving game so far, even with those criticisms. And it's nice to have a half-decent RPG on my PS3.

Another cell tutorial

Just uploaded another Cell tutorial ... they've just about come to an end, and although there's probably things I could write about, the urge to do it only comes in spurts. I just introduce an absolutely bare minimum library for accessing the ps3 frame-buffer.

And otherwise ... I had some strange thought at the pub one night that I should 'write a game', and unfortunately sobering up didn't dispel such a silly idea (it's not like I don't already have plenty of other ideas floating around to keep me busy). A mate of mine has wanted to write one from before I met him (damn, was it already 15 years ago), so I asked him to join me, and maybe we'll get somewhere this time. Perhaps - he's a bit of a rabid Ninty fan (which I am not) so it may not end up something I'd play; but i'm not particularly worried about what comes out. I've never written one either, so it's the journey and not the outcome that counts. It's a whole new set of basically unfamiliar problems so it's pretty much starting from scratch.

On stuff, and other stuff.

Well I've updated the cell tutorial with another entry. This rounds out the optimisations for the Mandelbrot Set generator, with I think some impressive results.

I spent most of the weekend (another nasty cold and wet one) plugging away at my renderer and reading up on bits and pieces. As I suspected `it was harder than that'. Oh well. Losing interest on that track, so I think I will play with some Cell code for a while - I started work on completing the IPC chapter again which I'd abandoned a couple of months ago. Then I might go back to the freetype renderer or maybe agg (the freetype renderer I was looking at turned out to be based on that).

It's amazing how much ones productivity changes from day to day. When things are kicking along you can write several thousands of lines of code in a week, and a lot of it can be good code. When you hit a wall everything seems to grind to a halt. I spent all weekend writing 50 lines of ... total worthless crap.

Oh well, another week gets under-way.

Cells and ratty rodents

Got off me arse and posted a new intro to Cell tutorial. It gets into SIMD coding so it's one of the more interesting ones.

And I managed to get a ps2 mouse driver working, of sorts (well, i'm getting the bytes from the port). And what a pile of shit the PS2 AUX port is. There doesn't seem to be any official documentation, just a few old text files from the days before the internets. Anyway, after a lot of mucking about I got it to work on bochs, qemu and and old PC I have - so that's good enough for me and it didn't take too much code. I'm still not sure if I should combine the keyboard and mouse 'devices' since they share the same io port.

Of course, in the process of testing on real hardware I found everything was broken. Everything. Ho hum. After much frobnication I found the APIC maybe wasn't as easy to use as I thought - or it's just buggy. And my old laptop doesn't even have one (early celeron). So I had to remove all the APIC code so it booted (i'm not doing any run-time stuff yet). And then I moved to using the RTC for timing instead. But that didn't work on real hardware either. Arg. In the end I got it to work but i'm not sure if it was just setting values directly (rather than read-twiddle-write) or clearing the interrupts first.

The apic thing is a bit of a bummer, I guess I'll need to use the pic instead for timing. Which sucks because it can only measure very short periods of time. I suppose if I use the RTC for longer periods - either by just using the 64Hz signal to count down, or the alarm function, and just resort to the pic for the last bit if more accuracy is required, it should be an ok balance between accuracy, overhead, and simplicity.

Hmm, wonder what to do next. A framebuffer would be nice - i'd really rather piss off the text mode entirely. And a disk driver - although then i'd need a filesystem too. Maybe it'd be less effort working out the hypervisor on the ps3 ... Hmm, perhaps a forth based monitor? Something to think about ...

More Cell Tutorial

Part 3 of my Cell tutorial is up. Not much in this round, but more to come of course.

I've been doing pretty much SFA on hacking for the last week or so; the weather's turning to winter here and that always seems to such some enthusiasm out of you; at least for a bit. As did a few hang-overs and so has being stuck with writing documentation for so long.

Introduction to CBE, Part 2 (chapter 3)

I've uploaded the second part of my Cell BE intro up to
Everything Cell. Things are a bit more interesting this time and it gets straight into talking about double-buffered DMA and SPUs and registers and other fun stuff. Should be enough to digest until the next chapter which gets into multi-processing.

Whilst checking that it uploaded ok I did some proof-reading and realised the writing style isn't terribly good. If wordpress didn't force html line breaks all over the place it would look a bit better too. My excuse is that it's only a draft and i'll keep working on it as I have time.

Although now i've got this out of the way i've gone back to playing with some of my Java projects for a while. Oddly enough, using wordpress has given me inspiration to work on my own internet publishing tool again; although it also shows just how far off my ideas are of being realised too.

Introduction to CBE

Aren't we spoilt today, two posts in a few hours.

Just a quick mention that I've started publishing my introduction to Cell programming - based on the Mandelbrot generator I wrote last year and a few other bits and pieces.

It's on a new site Everything Cell which is a tad bare at the moment, but will hopefully tie together some cell programming resources for free software developers and hackers interested in programming on the PS3 and the CBE CPU.

The first chapter is a bit unexciting but sets up some framework before I can get into the nitty gritty. It's surprising just how much work it is getting this stuff together.

PS I cleaned up the theme here too.

Sore throat, sore fingers, sore head, sore heart.

I had a party for a friend visiting from Chicago last week. Drank way too much of course. Not bad for a school night, although I planned ahead and took the day off. Then I caught a bad cold or a mild flu off a house-mate, and got stuck with that over the whole bloody weekend.

Over that same weekend I worked on an introduction to Cell B.E. programming. Quite a lot. A series of worked examples starting from a plain C Mandelbrot generator, through various phases of SPUification and SIMDisation up to a final high performance(?) implementation. And all the trials and tribulations, discoveries and tricks along the way. I'm looking to publish a chapter a week or so to a new free software Cell hacking site that will hopefully come together soon. I wrote it using texiweb, using literate programming. Eight postable chapters plus introduction and appendices so far, and there are still plenty of ideas to explore.

And to top it off, yesterday I was cooking some meat on the BBQ, and I wanted to check the flame setting -- which tends to involve looking under the front. I didn't notice the folding chair right where my head was heading to, so I got a rather heavy bump on my forehead that seems to hurt more now than it did at the time.

After the party and flu I finally went to work today but I think I could've done with another day off. Apart from not being fully past the virus, it feels as though I'm suffering withdrawal from all the hyper-active hacking I've been doing on the couch over the last few days. Empty heart, irritable disposition, and feelings of exhaustion and despair.

PS3 Linux

I bought a new HDD for my PS3 yesterday, backed it up and installed it. Very easy process, although the screws holding the drive in its caddy were a bit tight for the jewellers screwdriver I was using, and it took a couple of hours to back it up and restore it (nearly 50GB used). Although disturbingly, it sometimes seems to start up a bit too slowly, and then goes 'missing' at power-up until a restart. No big deal I suppose - if that's all it does. It's a western digital 320GB drive (WD3200BEVT), fwiw. Ahh, i did a search, and it seems to be some sort of interface issue - I tried jumpering the 'RPS' mode on, and so far it looks to have done the job.

I didn't bother backing up the Ubuntu partition, beyond my source tree. I haven't been particularly happy with Ubuntu, and that was even before upgrading to 8.x broke everything. Even after I fixed the boot issue, all it did was leave me with an unusable amount of RAM detected. I had long since got rid of any Ubuntu on my laptops, so I didn't need much of an excuse to jump ship. As i've said elsewhere - i'm sure Ubuntu is just fine for plenty of people, but it certainly isn't for me.

So I spent a bit of time trying to work out what system to install. It was pretty depressing really, it was quite difficult to find ANY quality or useful information at all (or maybe it was this incredibly disturbing video and comments I'd seen earlier in the day?). There are a few blogs and news sites around for PS3 development, but many (most?) of them are quite stale. Often started in a flourish and soon forgotten.

Of those still active, the developerworks forum for Cell development is full of newbies with very basic GNU or C/parellel programming questions for the most part, or weird arguments about performance (e.g. 'why is the ppe so slow?', 'how come i can't get the peak theoretical bandwidth in a memcpy?', sigh.). The beyond3d and ps2dev forums seem to be stuck on the fact that the GPU is inaccessible, or relying and waiting on a couple of guys working on ps3-medialib to deliver some magic, and generally just don't seem to be all that helpful. There are a couple of queries about useful linux distributions, but they are either unanswered or not helpful to me (e.g. they recommended ubuntu). I was starting to think that the whole situation was a lost cause, and certainly nobody seems to be working together toward any common goal. I finally stumbled upon PS3 forums - which seems to be a bit more active, and a few of the sort of questions I was interested in at least had some sort of answer.

Anyway, since there was a decent article on DeveloperWorks about installing FC7, and the IBM SDK 'support', I thought i'd give that a go. Burnt a DVD and away I went - I even checked the media. But unfortunately, it couldn't find the DVD it booted off when it came to looking for packages for some reason - so I couldn't get any further. Bit of a waste of time. I couldn't find any mention of this show-stopper on the 'net, so I gave up. I have FC9 on my laptop and although i'm happy enough that it works, the default setup is far too fat for a PS3, and it took forever to install, so I thought i'd give it a miss.

Someone on ps3forums.com had suggested Ubuntu to a query of what distro to use, but then changed his mind and complained about how much of a timewaster it was, and suggested YellowDog. I hadn't really considered YellowDog - it seemed a bit out of date, and well, just different, but after my experience upgrading Ubuntu - to get features I didn't really need - I thought stability and ease of setup will do over bleeding edge. So, YD downloaded (fortunately my ISP mirrors all these DVD's, so the download is as fast as the phone line can muster). Hmm, Fedora 6 based. Ok, so it's a bit old. Still - the install worked just fine first time. It was also pretty fast, and it boots up pretty fast too. Both much faster than Ubuntu ever did. For some reason the default 'development' install doesn't include ppu-gcc and particularly ppu-binutils, but I found out what I needed, and it seems some of my test code can build and run. I can always compile a newer gcc if I need it.

Ahh well that's done, and i've updated it too, now I can reboot back to the GameOS and forget about it for another few months!