My fear of Mantle, and this has been mentioned a little here and there, is it will steal resources away from the DX code and result in buggier games. Probably buggier on both code paths, rather than a single more stable code path.
When games used to support both OpenGL and DX, those games used to be really buggy messes. I'd rather not go back to those days.
You will not go back to those days because the consoles hardware and mantle hardware is more or less the same. The games is made for the consoles. Its easy and cheap to make quality port to pc with mantle. You will get better quality ports.
You have to remember there is pieces of dx in mantle because of primarily the xbox.
You have to remember there is pieces of dx in mantle because of primarily the xbox.
You will not go back to those days because the consoles hardware and mantle hardware is more or less the same. The games is made for the consoles. Its easy and cheap to make quality port to pc with mantle. You will get better quality ports.
You have to remember there is pieces of dx in mantle because of primarily the xbox.
This is what AMD are saying, but unless there's a huge piece of the puzzle missing, how could it possibly be true? Even if Mantle was absolutely identical to the low level APIs on both the Xbone and PS4 how does it reduce the amount of work you need to do to port to PC when you need the DX renderpath for Nvidia, Intel and pre (and maybe post?) GCN AMD cards anyway?
Consoles are huge relative to PC yes, but as has been explained by MS and AMD at this point, Mantle is not a console API. It might be very similar - that remains to be seen, but as far as anyone who actually knows has said , you can't write a Mantle render path that works on a console and the PC.
I'm not sure I'm interpreting this correctly, but are you suggesting that companies are likely to port to PC using only Mantle and not have a DX/OGL render path at all? Unless something really drastic happens with market share, that seems unlikely doesn't it? There's a lot more work involved in porting a game than rendering.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. Mantle being a new API is going to have growing pains, or at least I expect there will be. A new console platform is going to have growing pains. New stuff, especially low level code, often results in buggier code at first. In time things may change.
And just because they are very similar to the new consoles, does not mean they will be exactly the same. A lot of times those small differences result in unexpected behaviors.
In the days of $100M game budgets and 150 person dev teams why do you care? Cost of adding this will be insignificant.
There will absolutely be a learning curve here. And take all the ps3 developers going to a new platform.
But look how long time it took to get the best of ps3. I imagine this will take a quarter of the time for this learning process. Also because the hardware have been available for some time now.
The situation with the first ps3 games was typically more or less ps2 standard. I think we jump one year forward with this gen from day one.
And yes the devil is in the details but now all consoles is the same/similar. And very similar to mantle pc. There is lots of cost to be cut here compared to earlier generations to be used for content creation instead.
And you know this how? I would argue that with the huge cost of games, it would make it even more expensive to include another rendering path. The more complex and expensive the game, the more complex and expensive it will be to add another rendering path.
You're basing this assumption that the APIs are at all similar in how you code for them and that the code will 'port' over instantly. Like there is some option like [compile for Xbox] and [compile for PC] that just does it.
Also, unless you have actually used Mantle and the Xbox One API, I don't think you're in position to comment on how easy it is.
Even if it only takes an extra 2 or 3 developers, that is still TWO builds that must pass QA testing. That extends the development cycle and costs more money. Either costs are going to balloon with Mantle (unlikely) or publishers are going to tell the development studios to just figure it out themselves. Chances are pretty good that takes away resources that would be otherwise spent on just a DX version of the game. Now, how much resources is a question we will learn more about once the Mantle SDK is actually finished.
But you are not "cutting costs" by adding mantle, unless you omit DX or decrease the amount of resources devoted to it. Mantle alone might only cost 20% of a DX port (just a guess and giving a generous number), but if you still port to both mantle and DX the total cost will be 120%.
Sorry but this doesn't mean anything. If you have your engine set to update on texture and meshes changes (which are usually packed in container files among other stuff) all you just need is to update those to make changes in all platforms.
I'm used to UE3 file schemes and you can mod any game in any platform with the very same file. The only effective problem is the protection which obviously isn't there for a developer.
Again, model stuff is easy to port between engines, there are a ton of scripts out there to translate geometry and anything you need. You can even sniff models from a DX tool or mod them in real time without touching any game file.
http://mycryengine.com/?conid=53Sandbox
CryENGINE®3 Sandbox™ gives developers full control over their multi-platform creations in real-time. It features many improved efficiency tools to enable the fastest development of game environments and game-play on PC, PlayStation®3 and Xbox 360™.
All features of CryENGINE®3 games can be produced and played immediately with Crytek's "What You See Is What You Play" (WYSIWYP) system. CryENGINE®3 also introduces CryENGINE®3 Live Create™. This allows developers to work with a single editor, but see and play the results in real-time on PC, PlayStation®3 and Xbox 360™, hooked up to a single dev PC. The engine takes care of the conversion
and optimization of assets in real-time, enabling instant, cross-platform changes to any part of game creation and, as a result, materially increasing the speed and quality while significantly reducing the risk of multi-platform development. Developers can see the effect of lighting, material and modeling changes within moments on any supported platform. Cross-platform development has never been so easy!
http://mycryengine.com/?conid=53
Sure sounds to me like you're playing the actual port in real time with Live Create. The PS3 and Xbox are hooked to the PC and the port runs in real time showing exactly what you are going to get on each platform.
This isn't going to show you the quality of the engines, only that they can easily port over a lot of the models easily. The writing of the engine and the software to do the port is what takes the extra time.
http://mycryengine.com/?conid=53
Sure sounds to me like you're playing the actual port in real time with Live Create. The PS3 and Xbox are hooked to the PC and the port runs in real time showing exactly what you are going to get on each platform.
You basically just illustrated why it's an extremely smart investment to put your $8 million dollar's and your engineers at Epic, Crytek, and DICE. $24 million dollars (just guessing based off the DICE/frostbite number) to get Mantle working automatically in the big 3 engines of the upcoming generation is chump change in the grand scheme of things.
You assume that these engines will be equal in all code paths, and bug free. You assume that equal time will be spent on all the code paths when bugs are fixed. You assume the similar hardware on the consoles will remove the bugs as a result of small differences on the PC GCN cards.
We will have to wait and see how it all pans out, but don't be surprised if things don't work out the way you envision things.
You assume that these engines will be equal in all code paths, and bug free. You assume that equal time will be spent on all the code paths when bugs are fixed. You assume the similar hardware on the consoles will remove the bugs as a result of small differences on the PC GCN cards.
We will have to wait and see how it all pans out, but don't be surprised if things don't work out the way you envision things.
No, every engine port is different but containers and files are the same. It's just PR.
All engines work with a set of custom containers and files which are used in all platforms. If you read carefully it says all devices connected to a developer PC which is just feeding those containers.
It's cool to see in real time if you're running into performance or feature issues and adapt to each platform but this is not related to Mantle at all.