Ex-SCEE Employee Reckons The PSP SDK Is A Bit Rubbish, iPhone SDK Is Better

[wraggster]

rubens' New Employers Made This Game With The PSP's "Rubbish" SDK.
Just to clarify before you read the rest of this article: SDK means Software Development Kit. It’s ok if you didn’t know, we Googled it too!
Moving on, Sebastien Rubens, a former SCEE employee, has spoken out about the PSP’s SDK. Speaking with Edge-Online, he asked Sony to give more support to developers. He claimed that Apple’s own iPhone SDK is flat-out “better” and that SCEE is “slow to move” during the submission process.
Rubens currently works for Anozor, who made the marginally ok No Gravity: Plague Of The Mind.

http://www.pushsquare.com/1568/scee-employee-reckons-the-psp-sdk-is-a-bit-rubbish-iphone-sdk-is-better/

[ziegrim]

Of course developing a console quality game on a handheld is going to be harder than making a damn tetris clone. Who the hell do these people think they are.

[apex05]

It's got nothing to do with the size or complexity of the game compared to the iphone, it's just the fact that Sony's dev kits are badly designed and a pig to get the best from, They should take some lessons from Microsoft because their SDK's are massively better.

[b8a]

This is a bit of a "duh" statement. Sony has never been a software company so it's pretty rediculous to compare their SDK to a company's that's been creating excellent software for over twenty years. The iPhone runs OS X, the PSP has no real OS. The iPhone automatically inherrits much of the great work that Apple's put into the OS over the past ten+ years, while the PSP software has no real legacy. It's a total apples-to-oranges comparison.

The real story here is that the iPhone effectively out-specs the PSP by several magnitudes (twice the raw processing power, 2-4 times the RAM). The PSP is INCAPABLE of running an OS of the complexity and maturity of the iPhone's. The PSP is harder to code for mostly because you have to be smarter about how you use the more limited resources.

The one insightful point in this article is the quote about Sony being "slow to move" during the submission process. The real reason that the iPhone is taking off is the all-around sheer simplicity of the App Store. As long as Sony and Nintendo contninue to insist on draconian restrictions on the creative process for creating titles that are compatible with their portables, they're going to continue to lose potential audience to the iTouch platform.

[staticshade]

what a tool!! didn't he work there ? why didn't he take it up with the company, sometimes i wonder if the people who work at these companies talk to each other. as it seems more and more people who work at sony/nintendo/apple don't know anything about gaming/programming and are all pencil pushing weirdos

p.s i wish him good luck in the shovelware market that is the app store

[ojdon]

even if the SDK is better, the handheld itself isn't. ;)

Being an owner of both. I'd use the PSP for gaming any day.

[jeegee]

even if the SDK is better, the handheld itself isn't. ;)

Being an owner of both. I'd use the PSP for gaming any day.


Agreed, dont think anyone can deny that Psp is best handheld gaming platform by far. If only for the IPs it carries. Sony DO need to give more support to 3rd parties though. Sony ARE a software company really (some of the most seminal titles ever have come from sony devs) so they need to offer the kind of support they gave to Media Molecule to others.

[Isopropyl]

The PSP is INCAPABLE of running an OS of the complexity and maturity of the iPhone's. The PSP is harder to code for mostly because you have to be smarter about how you use the more limited resources.


Huh? What, in your opinion, makes the iPhone's OS so complex that the PSP's hardware is incapable of running a similar OS?

[b8a]

Huh? What, in your opinion, makes the iPhone's OS so complex that the PSP's hardware is incapable of running a similar OS?

Wow, I love the ignorant people on here who think that everyone else is just spouting unfounded opinions. This is not my opinion, it's cold hard fact:

The (iPhone's) operating system takes up less than half a GB
Once again, the iPhone runs a full blown, mature OS, the PSP does not. Partly because Sony doesn't have an OS to put on it, but mostly because the PSP is INCAPABLE of running one. Or, is there some magic I'm unaware of that can compress half a gig into 32MB?

This isn't a slam against the PSP, I love the machine, but the iPhone is technologically superior. You really can't successfully argue that it isn't. Besides, I bought a PSP to play games, as far as I'm concerned the PSP doesn't need a full OS. I'm not surprised by some of the other responses to the original article, but I would've thought that the original developer who they were quoting would've been clued in enough to not try to directly compare the development experience for each machine.

[GamingHorror]

Normally i don't register in any random forum but i've read some statements here that i wanted to correct.

First of all, Sony is by tradition not a software company, that is correct. But if you put out a console and with it the SDK you become a software company, too. And it is absolutely fair and square to compare a company's product that is competing with other company's similar product on the same basis, no matter what your background is. So Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony all have SDKs for their consoles, and it is not a big secret that the Sony SDKs have been a PITA to program with. This isn't something exclusive to the PSP, it's been this way since the Playstation 1 and it continues on with the Playstation 3.

I've had the pleasure to see colleagues of mine working with both Microsoft and Sony SDKs, and guess whose devkit needed days before it was even properly setup, configured and the software installed? Right, Sony's PS3 SDK. And which needed the most time to port our code foundation so that it even compiled? Correct, Sony's SDK. And that was less than a year ago.

About the thing that people in large companies don't talk to each other. It couldn't be more true, as sad as it is. :(

And concluding that the PSP doesn't have an OS while the iPhone does is just ... comparing apples with oranges for real this time.

It depends a little on how you define OS but typically an OS is not even a shiny brilliant iconic User Interface. An OS contains the fundamentals to program and use a device. If it has a UI slapped on top of it the better. iPhone has it's icons and the PSP has it's XMB interface. Both have an OS. The best proof of that being that the PSP reserves 8 MB for it's "kernel". The kernel is nothing more than an OS that consists mostly of programming interface and less user interface.

The iPhone OS takes up half a gig because it includes all the Applications it ships with. This is just like Windows - the actual Windows kernel is only a few megabytes, the rest of the space is taken by applications and other software components and quickly amounts to several gigabytes. As DOS and Linux show it is of course possible to put an OS even onto a 1.4 MB floppy disk. With the obvious constraints on the user experience.

[JLF65]

Once again, the iPhone runs a full blown, mature OS, the PSP does not. Partly because Sony doesn't have an OS to put on it, but mostly because the PSP is INCAPABLE of running one. Or, is there some magic I'm unaware of that can compress half a gig into 32MB?

Yeah, because we never ran "full blown, mature OS" on our PCs when they only had 4MB of RAM and 20 MHz CPUs. :rolleyes:

The PSP is more than capable of running a full blown, mature OS - there's just no reason for it. The PSP is meant to play games, and play multimedia. You don't need a full blown, mature OS to do that.

As an example, I run MacOS 8.1 on my PSP via Basilisk II. That is a full blown, mature OS. Maybe not modern, but you didn't specify modern, did you? ;) So if we can run a full blown, mature OS in an EMULATION on the PSP, you can certainly have a full blown, mature OS natively on the PSP.

Even if you specify modern OS, the PSP is more than capable of an OS the same level as Windows XP, just with a couple features missing - like memory protection. Such a thing really isn't needed on the PSP anyway.

[Zack]

I have to say b8a's point on the app store is a good one.

If sony and nintendo (let focus on sony here though) opened up PSN to allow user submitted content and took a slice of the selling fee, they would gain substantially from it.

For one, it would take out a lot of the need for "hacking" the console, and it would also allow free titles to be released into PSN if the developer didn't want to charge for their software.

Will this ever happen though? Probably not.

[GamingHorror]

Well, the App Store didn't stop users from hacking the iPhone. So that's not a silver bullet. Plus the reason why people hack a device is not to get to more or free software, but to prove they can do it and to get access to features they otherwise couldn't and to modify the device. Piracy just follows suit whenever the dam breaks.

[Zack]

Well, the App Store didn't stop users from hacking the iPhone. So that's not a silver bullet. Plus the reason why people hack a device is not to get to more or free software, but to prove they can do it and to get access to features they otherwise couldn't and to modify the device. Piracy just follows suit whenever the dam breaks.

Well I am aware of that. Either way, whether it prevents piracy or doesn't, it would still be a move in the right direction for Sony.