Oh, I hadn't heard about Visual Studio Express 2008. The new user page for XNA still says to use 2005:

http://creators.xna.com/Education/newtoxna.aspx

http://www.bandega.com - Never miss a show again

Most stores that I know of wouldn't even put DIRT on the shelves because the system requirements were so high that even brand new systems couldn't run it at all. The list of supported ATI graphics cards alone disqualified half of the new cards on the shelves at the time.

Brilliant.

Lots of burned customers there with new systems who didn't bother to check the system reqs.

However, Sony is giving something away for free which is nice.

This comment was edited on Feb 21, 19:17.

This is long overdue.
About time Sony did something to this effect.
And yes, I remember DiRT on the PC being absolutely fucking horrible.
Framerates were atrocious.

It's "XNA Game Studio 2.0" now - http://creators.xna.com/Education/GettingStarted.aspx
and Visual Studio Express 2008 - http://www.microsoft.com/express/product/default.aspx
Still all free though!

It's all in the tools. XNA is free and can be used with Developer Studio 2005 Express which is also free. Sure this engine is free, but what tools is your average joe going to be able to use to work with it?


http://www.bandega.com - Never miss a show again

They developed it and now Sony is purporting it's theirs because they helped fund it for them to develop on the PS3.

If Sony bought the rights to it, then it IS theirs.

Looks like an interesting response to XNA, though, and one that's been used in the real-world on some rather high-profile titles.

This isn't Sony's engine, it's Codemasters, who developed Colin McRae's DIRT. They developed it and now Sony is purporting it's theirs because they helped fund it for them to develop on the PS3.

I don't understand why we can't just accept that a decent graphics engine can scale up when the support is there. The only reason you don't see it on a console is because it's basically hard wired to specific settings. I'd rather people just accept their video card's capabilities and select 'medium' seeings and stop getting angry because they can't select 'high' or 'very high'.

I would hypothesize that graphics are one of the leading causes for poor PC gaming diversity and why we are seeing a decline of seemingly every type of game except the MMO.

Sure the best PC can blow the best console out of the water visually right now. One could argue that the reason for this is that so much time and money is dedicated to just appearance and that gameplay has suffered because of it.

As for Sony's governing or dumbing down that is pure speculation. An engine can be created with more features then is needed or used. I think that for you to state this is pure speculation especially considering that the cell architecture utilizes more then one core.

It may be true that this new engine can't push the beefiest computers to the limit but I am sure that it would be dumbed down.

They point out an obvious motive for Sony to support cross-platform development, in that using PhyreEngine will guarantee PS3 versions of games that are least the equal of their counterparts on other platforms.

Or in other words, the games developed in this engine will hold back the abilities of the PC. Because if it has to maintain the ability to run on a PS3, then it's going to "govern" your PC's processor and graphic capabilities.