Last I looked in to this was probably around the beginning of the year, and there was no real form of non-professional PS3 development available. I just recently picked up a PS3, so I was wondering if there is anything available yet that allows development for the PS3? I know there is probably nothing along the lines of this yet, but something like a XNA for PS3 would be amazing =)

Ah well, my first "yet" was because the last time I looked in to it, the only info I could find said that the only way to do this was thru the PS3 development kits, which were supposed to be harder/expensive to get.

The second "yet" was referring to me not expecting anything like XNA for PS3 at this time =)

Actually I thought I read somewhere that Sony was going to make a SDK like XNA for it, I am sure it will be GLES with Cg.

Quote:Original post by MARS_999
Actually I thought I read somewhere that Sony was going to make a SDK like XNA for it, I am sure it will be GLES with Cg.

I heard GLES on PS3 sucks.

The PS3's implementation of GL is sucky, which is why most developers are using libGCM or using bits of GL in conjunction with prebuilt command buffers. Putting a layer of abstraction, especially something like a fat state machine, between developers and the hardware is generally not a good idea. It was a nice idea to be able to allow developers to hit the ground running, but it's too much of a resource hog to be really useful except for test apps and trying out shader stuff.

There's also the issue that if Sony want to release a generally available implementation of GL/GLES on their system then they could be subject to a whole load more conformance details. Not just from end users (who are surprised when the hardware doesn't work like their mental model of the abstract GL state machine), but also from Khronos - you can't just implement something half-assedly and call it GL, it has to pass the conformance tests and that will require significant implementation and testing effort. Personally I'd rather the Sony guys did more (both in the libraries and tools) for professional developers before they worry about homebrew stuff (but then I'm going to say that, it's guys like me that end up staying till 2 in the morning so we can make our submission slot).

Finally, I see a lot of people complaining that Sony won't open up the RSX to home developers, but it's possibly not Sony's call. Remember that the RSX is licensed from nVidia, so it's entirely possible that nVidia don't want register specs of their hardware (even slightly older hardware) released to the general public. IIRC, the RSX also does other stuff besides graphics (relating to security/copy protection), so there's a chance they can't easily expose just the graphics stuff without leaving themselves wide open to piracy attacks.

cheers,

Quote:Original post by Halifax2Now I don't know if you have actually worked with the PS3 toolchain, but it appears as though you haven't. I would personally like to vouch for the toolchain as it provides some great utilities, that I can't name, but one specifically dealing with occlusion culling.

Yes, I have, and currently do. I'll admit my primary development platform is 360 though, so if I'm being unfair to the PS3 toolchain then you know why.

I'm impressed by GcmHud, that looks to be shaping up to be a *really* useful tool, but a lot of the tools still have issues, and debugging tends to crop up as an issue more often than not. The toolchain is getting better all the time, but it still isn't up to the same standard as the 360 tool chain (IMO) and until it is I'd rather Sony concentrated on improving the tools for professional developers rather than adding a whole ton of extra development, testing and support issues by doing homebrew stuff as well.

Quote:Original post by Halifax2I agree a generic graphics API is not the end-all-be-all tool, but the OGLES implementation does provide some good things. But also remember, is Microsoft not doing the same thing by providing a DX9 layer over their graphics hardware, and DX9 is a 3D API designed to be used with all kinds of graphics hardware.

The difference there is that the 360's Direct3D implementation is a thinner layer, gets rid of a lot of stuff that isn't applicable to the hardware or would require software support and adds new stuff to the API for features that the 360 supports over standard DX9 hardware. The PS3's GLES implementation is quite a high level, abstracted API which adds _significant_ overhead if it's used as is. For both systems the developer is better off dropping to the lower level APIs (yes, 360 has APIs underneath the DX9 abstraction).

Quote:Original post by Halifax2At any rate, the OGLES implementation is used in games such as Resistance 1, and R2, GTA IV, and Metal Gear Solid. I didn't say that they don't also use low-level code, but each of those games use OGLES in one way or another.

As I said, games use bits of the GL implementation, but are more likely building the command buffer directly to get the throughput required. That's not the end all of it, tightly controlling memory layouts and whatnot is the sort of thing that makes (control freak) developers (like me) prefer libGCM ;-).