New Skyrim DLC

[Jaysyn]

they could have put the time and effort into something else

Yeah this is my major gripe really, that they could of put the effort into getting fucking dawnguard working on the ps3 first. Wtf Bethesda.

It's not going to happen. The PS3 is too RAM poor. I am amazed they managed to get Skyrim running on 256 MB system / 256 MB video RAM to start with. Dawnguard apparently pushed the envelope too far.

[Napoléon]

It's not going to happen.

You mean at all?

What the?

[Jaysyn]

It's not going to happen.

You mean at all?

What the?

Doesn't look like it.

[Napoléon]

Doesn't look like it.

Dude I linked this very same thing on the last page.

I didn't see any talk about RAM or anything like that. How do you know that's what they're having problems with?

[Jaysyn]

Doesn't look like it.

I didn't see any talk about RAM or anything like that. How do you know that's what they're having problems with?

Sorry. It was discussed in depth on Slashdot. No one but Bethesda knows the exact reason, but if it's hardware don't expect them to piss off Sony by outright saying that.

Check out this post & this post in particular.

[Napoléon]

Interesting.

It's all just theory at this point though right? I mean, if that were the problem, I could see why they're having problems with it.

However, I find it highly unlikely. Why would dawnguard take so much more RAM than the whole of skyrim? Better question: Why is dawnguard the first of any game on the ps3 to have RAM issues? (that I've heard of).

I really find it hard to believe a company like bethesda would make such a serious oversight. I mean this should be elementary shit for them. For any company.

Surely they would not create dawnguard to have such obviously heightened requirements on the xbox system, and not clock that the RAM on this system exceeds what the ps3 is capable of. This just seems like such a ridiculous thing to do, not to mention incredibly stupid on their behalf, and downright ignorant to the fact that it needed to be released on all consoles.

Considering the fact this dlc is to be released on all systems, and they know that, I have a real hard time believing that they'd make this oversight. I know it came for the xbox first, but that's no excuse for an issue like this.

I hope, they've just got some sort of compatibility issue. Perhaps it doesn't run as well on ps3, it's more buggy or something.

I really don't know. I just wish they'd actually let their fucking paying customers have a bit more information that stabs in the dark. Hell, they could at least be honest and let us know if they think it will be released or not.

[Annik]

The Sims: Skyrim.


I'll admit I haven't played the other DLC for Skyrim yet, but that one looks at least interesting. I'm not really feeling this one.

[Jaysyn]

I hope, they've just got some sort of compatibility issue. Perhaps it doesn't run as well on ps3, it's more buggy or something.

Skyrim doesn't run well on the PS3 to start with. The DLC seems to be the straw that broke the camel's back.

---

Hell, they could at least be honest and let us know if they think it will be released or not.

That's not what the Bethsoft forum post was for?

[Napoléon]

Skyrim doesn't run well on the PS3 to start with. The DLC seems to be the straw that broke the camel's back.

Yeah supposedly.

I've never had any issues at all with skyrim on my ps3. I can't even remember it crashing once, never had any performance issues.

Considering so many people supposedly have problems with skyrim on the ps3, I can't say I'm one of them.

It's alright saying the dlc is the straw that broke the camels back but you don't know that. I'll admit it does seem the most likely issue than anything else, but I'll wait until bethesda actually give an answer.

Hell, they could at least be honest and let us know if they think it will be released or not.

That's not what the Bethsoft forum post was for?

Did they let us know whether they think it will be released or not? Not really.

They just said they were having problems getting it to work on ps3 and aren't 100% positive they can solve it.

What the hell does that tell me. Can I expect it or not? What is the problem you're having? What time frame can I expect it to be released in if I get it at all.

Didn't really answer anything, they just told us what we obviously already know. That they've fucked up.

[Jackalope]

Did they let us know whether they think it will be released or not? Not really.

They just said they were having problems getting it to work on ps3 and aren't 100% positive they can solve it.

Let me translate the business-speak for you.

"We can't get the DLC to work on the PS3 because our engine implementation isn't a good fit for the PS3's architecture. We are 100% sure we can't solve it, but don't want to piss off Sony by saying so, because as big as we are, they're big enough to squash us like a bug if we implied that our failure has anything to do with thier hardware architecture."

What the hell does that tell me. Can I expect it or not? What is the problem you're having? What time frame can I expect it to be released in if I get it at all.

Didn't really answer anything, they just told us what we obviously already know. That they've fucked up.

They're probably not going to tell you what you want to know. Expect them to quietly announce that the PS3 versions have been scrapped, but only after everyone has figured that out for themselves already.

From one of the posts Jaysyn linked from Slashdot:

It's a strange architecture. Most modern machines are symmetric-multiprocessor (SMP). That means programming is very straightforward - all the processors share the same memory space and each processor can do any work you like, so you just have to worry about the normal threading issues (race conditions, deadlocks, etc.) but it's otherwise just standard multithreaded programming.

The PS3 is not SMP - it has one main processor with 256MB of non-video RAM (a big chunk of which is reserved for the OS) and a lot of smaller coprocessors that have very limited RAM (256K). If you can fit chunks of work nicely into 256K, then the thing screams. If you cannot, then you have to do most of the work on the main processor, in less memory than is available on the Xbox360. In other words, you've gone from 6 hardware threads on the Xbox to 2 on the PS3. The combination of less general-purpose processing power and less usable main memory is a really hard problem to solve.

Now, for a lot of games, the Cell is great. Fighting games, puzzle games, art games, ARPGs, JRPGs, platformers. Any time you can offload individual character animation or rendering to the SPEs, you win. The PS3 can animate and render a whole lot more mobs in a scene than the Xbox360 can. If you have a physics calculation like waves on water or swarm movement that is easily separatable into small chunks, the PS3 is also superior.

But think about an open-world game - especially one with the sort of wide-open spaces and anyone-can-go-anywhere gameplay of Skyrim. We did open-world games and we constantly had trouble because physics and AI could interact over a long distance. We broke the world up into cells and aggressively limited the range of some computations to avoid this problem, but still, a lot had to run on the main processor because once the size of a physics calculation or a pathfind exceeded 256K, you couldn't do it on the SPEs. And believe me, pathfinding data alone in an open-world game is always going to be larger than 256K! AI in modern games is expensive, and we know that Bethesda takes their AI very seriously.

Maintaining a large, persistent world also means keeping track of lots of stuff, and that means memory. On the PC, you have practically unlimited swap and tons of main RAM, so it's not an issue. On consoles you have limited RAM and swap space and fragmentation can kill you if you dead. To be honest, I'm surprised the game runs as well as it does on the Xbox360, but again, you have more memory there and they have the ability to "steal" RAM from graphics if they need it, whereas you can't on the PS3.

So while I wish Bethesda had overcome the technical hurdles and made the game workable on the PS3, I can hardly fault them for coming up short. It's just not a platform well-suited to the type of game Skyrim is.

Emphasis is mine. I haven't developed for the PS3, but I am well-acquainted with coding multithreaded applications, and while what the above poster is talking about may not be the specific problem that Bethesda is encountering, it seems a very plausible educated guess.

There's also the issue that due to differences in hardware architecture, the PS3 version will require entirely different optimizations than the PC or 360 version. It may well be that the additional work has been deemed not cost-effective. Dunno.

It sucks, I'm with you there.