Ubisoft Having Problems With Assassin's Creed On 360 & PS3 >

	2007/10/12 9:02:41: Posted by DM
	In an interview with ProG, Assassin's Creed creative director Patrice Desilets, has revealed that both the Xbox360 and PS3 versions of the game are suffering from their own separate technical issues. For the MS console, Ubisoft is having problems fitting all the game data onto the DVD9 format that the XBox360 uses. On the other hand, the team is worried that the PS3 version will not be as good as the XBox360 version because the team is "really struggling right now on PS3" because of memory problems specific to Sony's console. Looks like the final version may not be what we all expect. >Link
	Labeled With  assassins creed ubisoft xbox360 playstation 3 Comments [16]  | Rate this article: -- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10  | Avg. rating of 10.0

Sounds like they are setting up excuses for when they have to delay. Halo 3 really screwing up my fall/winter gaming.

i'll co-sign that statement "neoimpulse"

for storage they need to talk to valve who apparently are capable of putting 5 games on 1 disk. I really hope they don't delay this one to 2008. This was my last must have game of the year.

Well if this link is true. Then at least they can put the game on 2 DVD's. Not sure how you work around the memory issue... It just goes to show that both the 360 and PS3 are far from perfect, and that if both console manufacturers had a chance to go back and redesign thier respective consoles they would have done things differently.

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Ubisoft said from the beginning that the Playstation 3 version of Assassin's Creed would not have Artificial Intelligence as good as the Xbox 360 version.

The reason for this is because the Cell CPU of the PS3 has only two threads, which means it can only send two instructions at a time, and obviously one of the threads needs to always be used for graphic instructions.

On the other hand, the Xbox 360 tri-core PowerPC CPU has SIX Threads, and companies like Ubisoft, Tecmo, and Sega have said they love it that there are times when an entire CPU core can be used entirely for Artificial Intelligence, where both threads are used for A.I. That is the reason why games like Assassins Creed and Virtua Fighter 5 have better Artificial Intelligence on Xbox 360.

PimpDaddy is 100% correct that if "space" was truly a problem, then Ubisoft could easily break the game into two discs where you play the first half of the game on one disc, and the second half on the other DVD disc.

But "space" isn't really the problem. The true problem is "compression." The developers at Ubisoft just need to figure out the best ways to efficiently Compress the data. In reality, that isn't difficult to do; it just takes more time than not using any form of compression.

The type of "Memory Problems" that Ubisoft is referring to for the Playstation 3 version are the sort of thing that could literally lead to one of two things:

(1) Cancellation of the game

(2) Delay - with significantly inferior game quality throughout the game in the PS3 version. For example, Oblivion on the PS3 does not have the same broad scope that the Xbox 360 and PC versions do--the entire game cannot be operating at the same time in the PS3 version, because of the memory bandwidth bottleneck problems of the PS3.

Ubisoft doesn't exactly explain which "problems" so we won't know for sure until they explain in more detai...but we need to remember that Xbox 360 has 10MB of eDRAM, and that's something that the PS3 has no answer for. Even Windows Vista doesn't use something similar to that; eDRAM is something planned for DirectX 11 and the Longhorn operating system...that just goes to show how far ahead of its time the Xbox 360 is.

The memory problems they're having have a lot more to do with the fact that the game was engineered for the memory architecture of the 360 which is very different than the PS3s than any actual limitations. Disc space issues however have nothing really to do with which platform the game was originally designed on. Splitting a game onto a second disc is not a great option because it greatly increases production costs. The production lines can only spit out half as many games in the amount of time they normally do, in addition to the increased material and shipping costs, which are a lesser issue.

What sucks is the 360 holds back PS3 gamers because game publishers will reduce the content of both versions to match the lowest common denominator, similar to how the 360 core causes developers to assume no hard disk. Thankfully, there are 1st and 2nd party developers as well as the PS3 exclusives that we can look forward to that don't suffer from those limitations.

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madgunde: Nice try. We all know from several developers that Sony f*cked up by splitting thier memory into 2 seperate pools of 256MB each instead of the unified 512MB pool of memory that the 360 has.

That is the biggest reason besides the Cells unique architecture that makes programming games for the PS3 so hard. I mean the PS3 cant even handle ports from the 360 without bogging down with bad framerates and missing other graphical effects. This is the "real" reason the PS3 is lagging behind the 360 in software development. But I guess your still hanging onto Sonys every word about how poerful the Cell porcessor is right???

Looking forward to your rebuttal.

POERFUL ...LMAO.. good one PimpD.

Actualy DVD problems are BECAUSE they are WANT to PUT FIVE LANGUAGES on ONE DVD.

FIVE LANGUAGES on ONE DVD what for?!

B1ueBurneR:Sorry my spell-check skills arent uo to par :p Allow me to repost for Madgunde.

madgunde: Nice try. We all know from several developers that Sony f*cked up by splitting thier memory into 2 seperate pools of 256MB each instead of the unified 512MB pool of memory that the 360 has.

That is the biggest reason besides the Cells unique architecture that makes programming games for the PS3 so hard. I mean the PS3 cant even handle ports from the 360 without bogging down with bad framerates and missing other graphical effects. This is the "real" reason the PS3 is lagging behind the 360 in software development. But I guess your still hanging onto Sony's every word about how poWerful the Cell processor is right???

I think these multiplatform games prove that going from more poWerful hardware (360) to less poWerful hardware (PS3) produced bad results. Whats worse is it takes a lot longer to make PS3 versions of games such as Oblivion and Dirt outshine the 360 versions. Face it PS3 is bottlenecked. At least with the 360 you can just add discs, you cant add RAM to the PS3. I mean look at the developer at Valve. He doesnt even want to touch the PS3, he sent it to EA for porting. Which means for sure that the PS3 version is going to SUCK.

Looking forward to your rebuttal.

i actually think that it has more to do with Cell and tha OS gobbling up more RAM to run extra system tasks/more memory needed to run same tasks when compared to the 360

HFG. Well ... Well.... the PS3 has only been out 1yr. (in retail market) & they're still having problems, That's sad. Now with the X360 the limitation is space... Hhmm... How about using Procedural Synthesis to generate the Maps for the game. From what I can gather, a game done with that programming technique will have tons of space left over to deal with. I guess the Guys from UBISoft don't use that programming Technique @ all. Take NOTE UBISoft.

It seems there are a few games that really use this technique. Oblivion uses a process call speedtree to generate all the trees on the fly. Speedtree was also used to generate some of the scenery in Project Gotham Racing 3. I thought since this is next-gen systems they should learn next gen programming methods. It would bode well for future programmers & developers to really learn how to utilize it.

well for now 360 has a plus cause its just storage,