I'd be prepared to bet that much of the delay we are seeing is related to shoehorning into an absurdly small amount of RAM.
Persuading a lot of function to fit into insufficient memory just slows development and testing to a crawl. 512MBs of RAM was a piddling amount back in '06, and is laughable today.
Maybe so, but Polyphony knew that was what they and everyone else who made a game for PS3 had to work with. It's a poor worksman who blames his tools.
Developers making games for phones and such work within the confines of the hardware that the games are expected to play on. Why doesn't Polyphony?
Here is an example. There are two versions of the Replay code in GT6. There's the full version, and the cut down version which is available at race completion time. The one that goes off automatically. That version doesn't allow a whole bunch of things, like switching cars, choosing interior views, pausing, skip forwards or backwards, rewind, camera mode etc.
I'd say the full Replay just would not fit in RAM and leave enough space for end-of-race functions. So they had to write two versions of Replay. The full one would squeeze in as much as they could, and that's hard to estimate. The stripped down one has to be small enough to be loaded at race end.
And it's not entirely clear why that post-race replay exists anyway. It's mostly just another button press for people to finish the race, and if anyone wants to actually watch the replay then it's fairly useless and they have to go get the proper replay mode anyway.
It may be an example of them being cramped for space, but it's also an example of where they shouldn't have been had they thought about it from a design perspective for a second. That post-race replay doesn't need to be there. They'd be better served with a quick loading and light menu that would give the player the option to rapidly select what they want to do after the race.
Absolutely the worst mistake that a system designer can make is to skimp on what is arguably the cheapest resource, which is RAM. Both Sony and Microsoft are repeating the errors of the past with their new consoles. 8GB is crazy. Better to eat some early margin and catch it up as RAM costs drop and encourage faster, more ambitious game design, development and testing.
Maybe so, but that's what they and everyone else has to work with. It's not an unknown quantity.
Good developers get on with the job and do the best they can with what they've got. Bad developers complain that all the problems with their game are the fault of the hardware.
Kaz repeatedly makes reference to the frustrations of shoehorning. I feel for him. It's no fun and it's unproductive. And it makes estimation and design hugely more complex and risky. Another byproduct of RAM shortage is that it causes a higher incidence of software failures. I'm not trying to make excuses, just trying to shed some light.
I'm sure it's very sad. He's got a tough job.
Perhaps he should have lowered his aspirations.
You're passing on excuses that Kaz has been trying to foist off on the public for some time. To some extent he's correct, but it ignores the fact that being in a situation where you're fighting against what the hardware can actually accomplish is a failure of planning and design. No system is able to just do whatever you want, there's always going to be tradeoffs that need to be made to fit within what the hardware is capable of.
Look at what they did with the graphics in GT6. There were known issues in GT5 with dropping frames and tearing. They obviously made some improvements during GT6 development, and then wasted them on boosting the resolution, so that we still have the same problems. That's not an issue with the hardware, that's an issue with the developer not knowing when to say enough.
I'm very wary of blaming the hardware when there's decent examples of Polyphony simply pushing the hardware beyond what it was capable of. You don't blame an NES for not being able to run Far Cry. They're at the end of a generation with a machine they've been working with for 8+ years. If they're still getting caught out by the hardware then they're seriously doing it wrong.
