When talking with a game developer, aren't 'assets' graphics and audio
content of a game? If so, how is current hardware holding them back?
Well, different generations of HW tend to have different capabilities
for what they can display. For instance, IIRC the PS2 has held back
texture mapping for a loooong time because it only did 16-bit texture
mapping. Also things like how much texture cache exists on the card,
how much RAM for the game itself, etc. affect what art gets done.
These are usually "least common denominator" issues; it's often a PITA
to provide graceful fallback paths for older HW.
Now with the new console chips there's a problem that the very model of
game programming is going to change. IIRC the Cell is oriented around
lotsa fine threading because it has more processors that do less. The
360 is oriented around coarse threading because it only has 3
processors that do a lot more. It is possible that these game logic
changes will affect art asset development as well - if you compute
physics differently under each model, then you may also have to render
it differently. Which means you may store it differently, and you may
produce it with an art team differently.
Differences differences differences! It remains to be seen if this is
progress or just churn. I must admit I've been deliberately asleep
about pixel shaders for years now, waiting for them to stabilize.
Maybe they have now... but maybe it's not worth getting excited about
low level details like pixel shaders, which very much have a "here
today, gone tomorrow" quality about them. Maybe the fundamental
structure of the programs is more important. At any rate, for now I'm
worried about doing very basic things in Scheme, rather than trying to
chase bleeding edge HW specs.
Cheers,
Brandon Van Every
