Mepps or somebody please explain.....

I know its probably not a popular opinion, but I kind of hope that after the PS4 comes out and they stop supporting DCUO on the PS3 (IF they stop supporting it) that they take advantage of the increased capabilities of the PS4 and make a DCUO2. I love this game, I've invested a lot of time and money in it, but I don't think its by any means perfect. I think there were some major issues in the beginning and further down the line the game has suffered from a lack of financial support and manpower. Rather than have them try and bandage the game to use the full capabilities of the PS4 (which I have absolutely no faith in the bigwigs and money men at SOE to do) I would rather they give the development team a fresh slate where they can really take advantage of the two systems and (hopefully...) produce something incredible. Just my personal opinion thought.

I don't believe SOE would ever make a DCUO2. If I recall correctly, at the SOE Summit after SWG closed, John Smedley made a comment that DCUO was SOE's final licensed product, as it would benefit the company more to focus entirely on their own I.P. games.

I'd expect SOE to be focusing on new Everquest spin-offs, Planetside type games, and so forth for PS4 than worrying about a new version of a game with a license and royalty fee, never mind the ol' external red-tape and content approval process.

I would be surprised if, in whatever year down the line it finally expires, SOE even sought a license renewal.

It'll come down to the money. If they are making money from their micro-transactions and subscriptions they will renew their license or else they'll shut down.

I remember somone a month or two ago on Twitter asking about DCUO on the PS4. Basically Mepps tweeted back "Can't say ". So take that with a grain of salt and it's not meant to start a flood of rumors.

They have to have general hardware specs available, or nobody could develop games for it. No games at launch means you just bought a really expensive paperweight.

Exactly... which kind of reminds me of the rut that the PS3 was stuck in when it first launched.

Character names, item etc are kept on the server side. thus they are not in question. What OP is asking is since the PS4 will not play PS3 games it is assumed then that you could not re-download the game on a PS4 and play. This is very worrisome as if that is true eventually the PS3 will not longer be made and it sets a timeline for eventually the end of DCUO/PS3. Since PS3 has 70%+ pf the sub market if it fails the DCUO/PC would likely as well.

Thought console makers would get this by now, always make a new system backwards compatible. But I will say this, if the PS4 is incompatible with DCUO and it ends DCUO prematurely, players will not likely touch a console based MMO for a long time. But its too early and too little is truly known right now to say anything concrete.

Not possible. The PS3 architecture is (was) unique, and it's impossible to make x86 programs compatibile to it, without extensive porting. Using the same architecture was again out of the question because it was quite a big fail from a development perspective.

Backwards compatibility makes production costs on a console skyrocket... just look at the PS3's launch, Sony couldn't even turn any kind of a profit.

/shakeshead.....thumbs up for your informative post. Makes me glad to be a PC gamer really, I can upgrade all I want.

I am going to take my PS/2/3 sega saturn and all my other old disc based systems and gut them and see if I could place them inside a PC tower so that when nostalgia hit everything is in one place.

Unique? Time Warp back to 2006...

Of course every developer is going to have a different take on PS3, but this is what one of them had to say...

First of all, as with Killzone developer Guerrilla in a recent online Q&A sesh, they were happy to point out that PS3 is not as complicated to write for as we've all been led to believe. Apparently, the machine's use of Open GL as its graphics API means that anyone who's ever written games for the PC will be intimately familiar with the set-up. In fact, PS3 employs a cut-down version named Open GL ES, which is even simpler - as Volatile's lead PS3 programmer, Lyndon Homewood explained:

"ES is designed for things like set-top boxes and mobile phones, where you want the fundamental graphics but don't need some of the fringe stuff that Open GL has. Because you've got that on PS3, it's going to be much easier than the PS2 to get something up and running - there are hundreds of books out there for it, so you can do your background reading. All the documentation is there."

We also got onto talking about how PS3 will deal with Cg - a version of the programming language C, which allows developers to code for advanced graphics processing units, specifically in the area of 3D shaders. (You can read more about Cg here and here). You may be completely up to spec on how this works, but Lyndon gives a decent beginners guide if not:

"Cg gives you a standard documented API for programming graphics chips. The main two segregations of Cg programming are the vertex shader and pixel shader. With the vertex shader you can act on 3D models at the vertex level, so for each triangle you can do something on each corner and then everything in-between is interpolated. So if you want to make your whole shape bigger, you can just push all the vertices out a bit. In this way you could, say, morph your character into a giant just by scaling up all the verts. It's a lot easier to get to that point in the graphics pipeline.

"And then you've got the pixel shaders. When you render each triangle on screen the GPU asks whether you want to do something to each individual pixel you render... so at this point you could run some sort of mathematical algorithm on each individual pixel - perhaps a lighting effect like high dynamic range lighting (a rough Wikipedia entry on HDR lighting can be found here). And that wasn't possible on PS2.

"All of this is already available and won't be a massive leap from what you're seeing on PCs with high-end graphics cards. But obviously on PS3, you've got eight chips to spread the processing cost over - the main PowerPC chip and seven SPE chips. In a PC, there's just one CPU, two in a dual processor machine. Having an eight CPU multi-processor system in your living room is pretty flash.

"At the end of the day it's just a multi-processor architecture. If you can get something running on eight threads of a PC CPU, you can get it running on eight processors on a PS3 - it's not massively different. There is a small 'gotcha' in there though. The main processor can access all the machine's video memory, but each of the seven SPE chips has access only to its own 256k of onboard memory - so if you have, say, a big mesh to process, it'll be necessary to stream it through a small amount of memory - you'd have to DMA it up to your cell chip and then process a little chunk, then DMA the next chunk, so you won't be able to jump around the memory as easily, which I guess you will be able to do on the Xbox 360.

"The graphics capabilities of PS3 will, I think, be slightly above the absolutely top-end graphics cards on the PC, but you've got much more processing power in the box so you're going to see a lot more physics, a lot more generated geometry. With water ripples, for example - they're pretty much algorithms, you have a flat plane of triangles and you run some sort of mathematical algorithm over it to generate a surface rippling effect - well, you will have the processing power to do these sorts of generated geometry effects On PS3. You could actually put one chip aside just to do that..."

According to Homewood, the management of the SPE chips is going to be a major consideration. One way is to assign specific roles to each of the chips - get one handling physics, one working on AI, etc. This might sound tidy, but Volatile are not convinced - partly because certain gameplay events, like a massive shoot-out, are going to create spikes in demand for, say, animation, collision detection and rag doll physics. One SPU working alone on each of these elements won't be able to deal with such spikes efficiently. Also, there's the question of co-ordination:

"The way we're thinking of doing it ourselves is via a job queue. We'll stick the jobs we want to do into a queue on the main processor and then we'll get the SPEs to pull off a queue entry and process it whenever they're free. You want to make sure all of your processors are always running. If you give the chips specific jobs, you'll end up with a lot of them being idle - you won't get the maximum out of PS3 doing that unless you time everything perfectly, so that the time it takes to do the animation on the first chip is exactly the same amount of time to do the physics on the next chip, which is exactly the same length of time it takes to do all your AI on the next chip - I think that would be extremely problematic."

One last thing. Volatile reckon PS3 is going to be much better for HD cinematics than Xbox 360, thanks to its Blu-Ray storage medium. 20 minutes of HD-TV footage takes up around 4.7GB, so an Xbox 360 game would quickly run out of space. This is going to matter more in the coming years as movies and games merge and we see more film elements being brought across to games.

So there you go. PS3 is relatively easy to program for if you have experience with high-end PCs - certainly more straightforward than PS2 with its proprietary graphics APIs. We've also heard lots of talk - from various studios - that Sony's developer support will be a lot stronger with PS3 (it's already much, much better with PSP apparently). Time will tell.

Just look at the previous ps systems... Did everquest get potted to ps3????????

Then why would you think Dcuo will get ported to ps4?
Dcuo will stay on the ps3, it will be up for years but will drop I'm popularity as the new system comes out.

Unique compared to other end-user machines, yes. Here's the gist of it:

- PS3 - CELL architecture, SIMD (single-instruction mutliple-data) parallel processor with 7 slave cores and 1 master core
- Xbox 360 - Xenon architecture, MIMD (multiple instruction, multiple data) 3 dual-threaded master cores
- PC - x86-64/32 architecture, MIMD, scalable and variable number of cores

This is just the CPU part, let's not get into GPU arguments, those are largely similar, outside of the fact that the PC and Xenon are DirectX machines, while the PS3 is not. Fortunately CG makes stuff be easily portable on all three.

The main difficulty in porting stuff from anything to CELL is that the 7 cores need special management so that they are actually doing stuf optimally. Combined with the tiny (256mb) RAM of the PS3, that makes for a monstrous task in optimization and maintenance to actually write PS3 code that doesn't grind to a halt when you run it.

In comparison, writing code for the Xenon and PC is mostly interchangeable, and a lot "nicer" from a developer's perspective. As someone who was unlucky enough to have had porting to CELL tasks, I can tell you it's far from being a picnic.


Sorry for the post, I'm largely verbose when asked about computer architecture. If anyone wants to continue the conversation in a private medium, please PM me.

I really don't think they will ever completely abandon games that are licensed.... Every Lego game they've ever produced has been profitable for them and guess what those are licensed games... The advantage of releasing a title like DC is the advertising that has to be done is lets face it minimal... Everybody already knows what DC stands for.... Where the problem lies with projects of this nature is that anything that is already licensed like this comes with high expectations which I don't necessarily think is a bad thing...

Honestly a super hero MMO game that is DC or Marvel themed is a necessary evil...
The main demographic that plays video games are also very much fans of superheroes
So your telling me that in an ultra competitive video game console market Sony will just call the whole superhero franchise a "done deal"

I'm not sure if this type of mentality makes any kind of sound business sense....
If Sony doesn't make another DC or Marvel Super hero MMO I guarantee another game console manufacturer will there is definitely a demand for such a product/service currently as well as in the future...

I'm not sure how eliminating a guaranteed revenue stream makes good business sense....
I know personally that I don't want to play Everquest or Final Fantasy... I do however want to play a better DC Universe and I do think that hardware restrictions prevent this game from becoming bigger and better to a certain degree...
Everybody who plays on the PS3 I think would be more than excited to actually have a gaming experience better than what is currently being offered to them..... I know personally I would definitely purchase a PS4 sooner if I know my favorite PS3 game is going to be available on a better hardware system therefore having the ability to provide a better overall experience...

First of all who's actually rushing out to get a ps3 and why?
Secondly ps2 was barely retired last month. With future content planned for release I could care less about a ps4 even if I get wild hair up my (redacted) it's not like I'm going to just toss my ps3 or quit playing. And trading it in isn't an option GameStop will give you $20 if you're lucky