
Bethesda admits they can't get Skyrim Dawnguard running on PS3 - ukdm
http://www.geek.com/articles/games/bethesda-admits-skyrim-players-may-never-get-dawnguard-on-ps3-20120831/
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Eclyps
It sounds like the article is implying that the PS3 itself is too difficult to
release DLC on... which I find to be a load of crap. There's plenty of good
DLC coming out for other games. It just sounds like Bethesda developed the PS3
version as an afterthought and now can't manage the crappy code they wrote.

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w0utert
While I don't rule out that the PS3 port of Skyrim is a crap translation done
as an afterthought, there are some technical constraints to the PS3 hardware
that would make it very difficult to get a large open-world game such as
Skyrim to work, and be able to extend it with DLC. The most important one
being the memory model, where you can only access 256 of the 512 MB RAM
directly from the CPU.

Most other games 'solve' the memory limitations of the PS3 by chopping up the
game world and introducing lots of load screens, or by streaming as much of
the content as possible. My guess would be that the Skyrim engine does the
latter, which doesn't fit the PS3 memory model very well. The Blu-Ray drive is
very slow for random-access, and I don't think you can stream textures and
geometry directly to the 256 MB RAM segment accessible to the GPU, which means
you would have to allocate part of the already-scarce 256 MB RAM in the other
segment, and DMA it to the GPU-segment.

I'm not a PS3 developer and I don't know anything about the Skyrim engine, but
it's well-known that the PS3 memory model can be a real PITA, and I can
imagine this makes it very hard to get certain optimizations that work well on
other systems to work on the PS3.

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TillE
The RAM constraints are the reason I'm eagerly looking forward to the next
generation of consoles. When you're trying to cram fancier and flashier
graphics into the same hardware every year, there are severe limitations in
what else is possible in the game.

Give developers 4GB of RAM and better CPUs to play with, and we're going to
see some more interesting cross-platform games.

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lloeki
Some data points:

Dawnguard on the Xbox is ~600MB, while Skyrim itself is ~4GB.

> _releasing sizeable DLC is a complex issue_

By comparison, Mass Effect 3 Extended Cut DLC is ~2GB.

There may be some weird technical limitation, but it's not just size.

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dagw
By the sound of it the problem isn't the size of the DLC download, but the
size of the game state they're trying to keep in memory. The Xbox and PC
architecture makes it easier to large game states in memory.

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ukdm
If I remember correctly, doesn't the PS3 split the available memory in half?
Therefore limiting the options you have. Where as on Xbox it's up to the
developer how they use all of the available memory.

EDIT: See w0utert's comment in this thread for more info:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4459260>

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bsphil
Half of the 512 MB is dedicated to video, IIRC.

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dazzawazza
This sounds more like political manoeuvring to me. If they've got the game
running on the PS3 then there is no reason that the DLC wouldn't 'work' it's
just a patch.

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jameskilton
No, this sounds like typical Bethesda. Their games have been the epitome of
everything that's wrong in software development. I've yet to play a Bethesda
game that wasn't a technical and bug-ridden nightmare, so much so that I've
stopped supporting them entirely.

Their dev teams can't code themselves out of a paper bag. I'm not at all
surprised that the PS3 is giving them serious troubles, given how it requires
concurrent software to use all of the hardware (8 smaller cores over the
Xbox's 3 larger ones, iirc).

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programminggeek
Their dev teams can't code themselves out of a paper bag? Really?!

Given the complexity of the world simulations they are building and that they
basically are successful at creating, I don't think I'd use such strong
language. It takes a lot of talent and hard work to ship something like
Skyrim.

Bug ridden technical nightmare? I don't think I'd go that far either. Skyrim
was very playable on the Xbox 360. Not too many bugs that I noticed, but I'm
sure they are there if you look for them.

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stonemetal
Not sure I would have put it that harshly, but Bethesda does seem to be a
content company not a tech company. They tend to license their engines, and
the tech parts they do build tend to be buggy(i.e. their homegrown AI system,
cool as heck but pretty buggy).

