Details are still coming in as to what is new, but here are a couple things:

I’m really hoping that global remote play was added. Well I’m off to download the update and test it out.

[Edit by Gary:]

The EU backward compatibility list has also been updated with the latest firmware. Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition now works normally (woot!), as does Gradius V, Genji, Jak 3, Ratchet and Clank 1 & 2 (R&C 3 doesn’t work ) and a bunch of other games, including MGS 2 Substance, work with some issues.

PLAYSTATION3 Firmware 1.70 available now!

There were two launch games on my original PS3 must-buy list: Insomniac’s Resistance and Rainbow Six Vegas. Then Rainbow Six got pushed back to December. Then January. OK, I’m a software developer. I know how bleeding edge hardware is and I can understand an honest delay. Then the game got pushed back to Febuary. Then March. Then April.

Not a peep from Ubisoft on this at all. On their site, there’s all kinds of mention of the 360 version and 360 leader boards, and news regarding 360 updates, but no mention of the PS3 at all. I understand, that software is hard, and delays happen, but couldn’t we at least get an update? IGN addressed this in their mailbag, where I’m not the only one wondering about this title. IGN’s response:

First the good news: Rainbow Six Vegas is still coming to the PlayStation 3 (despite popular rumors to the contrary) and April looks like it’s the absolute “for sure” date. Up ’til now, there hasn’t been an official reason that the game has been delayed for so long (and there still isn’t), but my guess is [snip]

OK, fine. It was delayed all the way until April, but at least that’s the “for sure” date and no more mysterious and neverending string of delays without a peep as to what is going on. April is a pretty dry release month anyway, so that works out. Now, IGN lists a new release date of May 22. And I hardly have much confidence in that date either.

It’s disappointing that Rainbow Six didn’t come to the PS3, and if it eventually does, most PS3 owners will probably not care by that point. On the bright side, the PS3 will get plenty of other great content by next month including: F.E.A.R, the Ninja Gaiden Sigma playable demo, and Spiderman 3 (with the PS3 exclusive playable character, the “New Goblin”).

I wonder if the PS3 version of Ubisoft’s other big Tom Clancy shooter, “GRAW 2″ will suffer repeated mysterious delays like this as well? Regardless, I’m planning to give my PC a major upgrade this summer, so I will be able to play these titles if I still want to.

At my friend’s place one evening we all went online together in GRAW, and got our collective butts kicked. But it was still fun that the four of us could be sitting around an HDTV with an Xbox 360 and all go online together against a bunch of opponents.

This capability is also in Call of Duty 3 for the Xbox 360, but not in the PS3 version.

As a matter of fact, I know that this capability exists in many Xbox 360 games, but I haven’t seen it in a single PS3 game. I know that the PS3 is new and all, so I wanted to know if this kind of thing was even possible on the PS3, given the different ways of logging in to the machine etc on the PS3.

So it’s one of the questions I asked Insomniac when I had the opportunity. I’m sure many of you have read the Insomniac interview already, but did you really notice this part:

Splitscreen online play is certainly possible on the PS3. Resistance: Fall of Man did not implement this feature because as a launch title we had to make some compromises in the interest of time and that was a feature we didn’t get the time to complete. However, I wouldn’t rule out seeing it in future Insomniac games.

There are two things to take away from this quote by Insomniac. One, it’s possible to have this feature in PS3 games. And I really hope that developers do start using both splitscreen and online splitscreen in their games. This is an axe I’ve been grinding for a while, but I haven’t seen any results yet! Two, it’s possible that it may be in the upcoming Ratchet & Clank game. Notice that I said “possible”. Insomniac didn’t say that they would be doing this. They only said that it’s technically feasible and that they decided not to do it for R:FoM. But the possibility exists, and I for one would be really happy to see this feature implemented.

Impressive.
Most impressive.

Insomniac Interview, Part II

A little while ago Dell’s Bluetooth keyboard and mouse bundle went on sale on their online store. (Canadian link.) Normally it sold for $89, but with the sale it was reduced to $69, with no shipping charges. It was still on the expensive side, especially considering that I wouldn’t be using them all that much. But my coworker Ray convinced me to go for it. (I would be the guinea pig, because he has a PS3 too.)

Yesterday at work my 3-year-old daughter called to inform me that my package had arrived! Hurrah! I love getting packages in the mail.

Pairing my mouse worked just fine. Pairing the keyboard took two attempts, and you have to type in a 7 or 8 digit string to confirm the pairing. That was strange. After the keyboard and mouse were paired everything worked great. I didn’t have any trouble when I turned off and on the keyboard and mouse - my PS3 continued to find them just fine.

To enter text, you still have to bring up that little text-entry dialog thingy. But at that point you can just start typing on your keyboard and everything works. Browsing the online store is a lot easier with the mouse! None of the keyboard’s special keys seemed to do anything.

All in all, I’m quite happy with keyboard and mouse, though I wish the keyboard’s keys weren’t quite so mushy. The keyboard and mouse comes with a Bluetooth/USB dongle (which I didn’t need, of course) and batteries (two AA’s for both the keyboard and mouse). Note that the keyboard is full size. It doesn’t have a lot of excess space around the keys, as you can see from the picture. But they keyboard is still big.

Yesterday we kicked off the Insomniac interview with Part I and some great questions about Resistance: Fall of Man. Today we continue those questions, plus we have some questions about the PS3 in general that I think you’ll find fascinating.

5. Can you tell us what you’re currently working on? I assume Ratchet & Clank PS3 development has started, am I wrong? What about an R:FoM sequel? Any downloadable games?

TP: We’re working on more online content for Resistance: FOM and you can find the details in a recent interview we did on IGN.com. [Editor: I assume he means this interview.] And yes, we’re definitely working on Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction for the PS3 and it’s looking awesome. Amazing what happens when you move into developing the second wave of software on any hardware platform…I’m going to stay mum when it comes to the other stuff we’re doing.

6. Developers mention 1080p and splitscreen support as performance bottlenecks. For example, with R:FoM you went with splitscreen (which is great!) and 720p (instead of 1080p, which is fine IMHO). MotorStorm didn’t even do splitscreen. What kind of perfomance impact does 1080p or 4 player splitscreen support have on a game? Is it really that hard to do splitscreen? (I have a personal axe to grind on this one, because I like to invite friends over to play.)

Rob Wyatt, Senior Engine Programmer: Split screen is a difficult problem from a performance point of view and it is certainly more difficult from an engineering point of view than rendering 1920×1080. Both together, no doubt, requires a serious engineering effort but it’s not impossible. As the PS3 hardware is better understood it will become easier. Rendering 1080 is more performance intensive than 720 simply because it has two and a quarter times as many pixels, which is not only more pixels to render but also more video memory and bandwidth is used for the bigger frame buffers. The general overhead of 1080 is the same for full screen and split screen, whether you are rendering a single viewport or 4 viewports the total number of pixels on the screen doesn’t change. Independently of the resolution, split screen places a different set of demands on the graphics hardware and graphics engine. For each viewport the engine has to more or less reprocess the entire scene, this is a lot of additional work, and ultimately generates a lot of additional polygons for the graphics hardware to process. The combined overhead of the 1080 resolution with the extra polygon processing required for multiple viewports, while keeping in frame and not sacrificing AAA quality, is a very difficult problem. In the limited development time frame of a launch game there were bigger battles to fight but it’s certainly possible and you will see split screen games running at 1080. For Resistance: Fall of Man, split screen with co-op play simply brought more to the table so 1080 support had to wait.

7. There are some features we’ve seen elsewhere that we haven’t seen on the PS3, and I was wondering if it was because the PS3 was technically incapable of doing these things, or if developers or Sony just haven’t implemented the features. Could you help us clarify whether or not the PS3 can do them, and how hard they would be to do? They are: (1) bringing splitscreen players online with you (like in CoD3 for the Xbox 360), (2) linking several consoles together to play local online, and (3) global voice chat.

Eric Ellis, Multiplayer Team Lead: My first reaction to this question is that we haven’t yet seen a large number of PS3 games released yet, so it’s a bit early to be guessing the limitations of the hardware from the current lineup. And none of these features really pose any sort of a hardware challenge, so the PS3 is certainly capable of all of them. However, I’ll be happy to give you some more specifics on each of the features mentioned.

1. Splitscreen online play is certainly possible on the PS3. Resistance: Fall of Man did not implement this feature because as a launch title we had to make some compromises in the interest of time and that was a feature we didn’t get the time to complete. However, I wouldn’t rule out seeing it in future Insomniac games.
2. Local-only LAN play is also technically not difficult on the PS3, though we see the demand for this being less than some other features as most people who are doing a LAN party these days also have internet access so they can usually play together that way. Another thing about our game is that we use dedicated servers for online play, so it would be slightly more difficult for us than for a peer-to-peer game or a game using one of the consoles as the host.
3. When you say “global voice chat,” I assume you mean the ability to voice chat with anyone on your Playstation Network friends list, regardless of what game they are playing? Because we certainly have voice chat in Resistance, and not everyone realizes this, probably in part because of some of the confusion and questions about other games and the PSN as a whole. The only thing I can comment on with respect to the PSN voice chat is that there is no PS3 hardware limitation that would make this any harder than it is on any other console. We also know that Sony is deeply committed to continual improvements and upgrades to their Playstation Network and it is certainly possible that you’ll see this feature announced in some future update.

8. The PS3 has 256MB of fast video RAM and 256MB of normal RAM. But I’ve heard that all memory can be used either by the Cell or the GPU anyway. Is this split an issue? Does it hinder or help? Would a unified memory architecture have been better? Do you have any clarifying comments about that?

Al Hastings, Chief Technology Officer: In practice, the split memory architecture hasn’t caused us many problems. The GPU can access main RAM at high speed and with very few restrictions. And while there are some restrictions when you want the CPU or SPUs to access video RAM at high speed, so far they’ve been easy enough to work with.

For the PS3, I think the split memory architecture was the right way to go. It allows the Cell and the GPU to both do heavy work on their local buses without contending with each other. It should really pay dividends a few years down the road in the PS3’s lifecycle when everyone’s code has gotten more efficient and bus bandwidth emerges as a one of the most important resources.

The decision was made due to the fact that the consumer demand for the 60GB version was 10 to 1. At launch Sony offered two models to meet the different needs of the playstation fan base. But of course the demand was for the 60GB from both retailers and consumers. Me personally I like the look of the 20GB more, but I like the features of the 60 GB.

[via PS3 Fanboy]

Sony Ceases Production of 20GB PS3 in North America

Insomniac was kind enough to answer some questions that the writers here at PS3Blog.net have put together. It’s a long process, getting all these questions answered, and you can see that several Insomniac employees were involved in answering the questions. I originally contacted them last year, but they were so busy trying to get Resistance out the door that they suggested I contact them again after launch, which is what I did. We spent a lot of time thinking of what questions we could ask, so hopefully you’ll enjoy them as much as we did. Thanks, Insomniac! Don’t forget to check out the Insomniac Full Moon Show podcast for more about Insomniac and upcoming projects.

I’ve divided the interview into two pieces, here’s the first part. The second part comes tomorrow.

1. Generally, launch titles don’t sell a lot of copies just because there aren’t that many consoles out there yet. Why did you decide to make Resistance a launch title for the PS3 when you knew that sales wouldn’t be that great? How does Insomniac gain from that?

Ted Price, President and CEO: First, I think it’s important to note that Resistance: Fall of Man has been the #1 selling PS3 title since launch despite games like Madden and Call of Duty 3 being available on the platform. More important, as more PS3s make it into consumers’ hands, Resistance: FOM’s sales continue to increase. Finally, with the recent European launch putting Resistance: FOM atop the sales charts across all formats and more content coming soon, we’re expecting Resistance: FOM to continue to be high on gamers’ “wanted” lists.

We knew from the beginning that launching with the hardware would mean lower initial sales. But we also felt strongly that the opportunity to establish a new franchise in a very crowded genre was something we couldn’t pass up. With less competition at launch it meant that Resistance: FOM would get a fair shake as the “new kid on the block” and potentially garner more long-term sales assuming we did our job in creating a AAA game. In this business, exposure is EVERYTHING for a new franchise and had we released Resistance:FOM a year later, it would have been much harder for the game to get the attention it deserved no matter how good it was.

2. What development tools and languages do your programmers and artists use? I’m a former game developer myself (I worked on Wizardry 8 at Sir-Tech), so I’m really curious as to what compilers, IDE’s, languages, graphics programs, 3D programs, etc your software developers and artists use.

Luke Petre, Director of Tools: Our artists work with a variety of 2D and 3D applications including Photoshop (for texture painting, marketing art, etc.) and Maya (3D modeling). A lot of our 3D artists are using sculpting software more frequently as we continue to work with higher and higher poly counts to produce HD content. We export data from these 3rd party applications into internal formats in some cases, which gives us a degree of flexibility in choosing the right piece of software to produce specific types of assets. In general, we try to develop technology that allows our artists to work with whatever applications best enable them to produce high-fidelity content as quickly as possible.

Our tools are mostly PC-based and are predominately written in C++.. There’s also a fair amount of Perl that we use to automate tasks and tie various systems together. There are even some Python scripts and some batch files floating around. Our PS3 code is primarily developed using a variety of IDEs, Sony’s PS3 compiler, and SN System’s ProDG debugger. The runtime code is a mix of C++ in the higher level systems and a decent amount of C and assembly for the low level engine code.

Getting all these different environments and tools to play nicely together can sometimes be a challenge, but we try to be flexible in terms of what tools we use to attack different problems. This flexibility often pays dividends in how our games perform and the flexibility our artists have to bring their ideas to life in ever-increasing detail and depth.

3. How many developers and artists did you have working on R:FoM? Will other PS3 games get the same level of allocation?

TP: At times our team, including our quality assurance staff, was up to 100 people. The size of the team varied depending on the phase of production we were in. During Resistance: FOM’s production we developed a lot of proprietary software (our engine, physics system, animation system, level production tools, etc.) that we’ll continue to use and improve during this generation of hardware. Because of this the team was slightly larger than what we anticipate for future PS3 titles.

4. Why did you decide not to do online co-op in R:FoM? It’s something that a lot of people would have liked. I’m just looking to see what you guys were thinking in this regard.

TP: We had to pick our battles. Resistance:FOM is a very large game – most people spend 12-15 hours getting through the single-player campaign alone. And then there are the massive online multiplayer modes we implemented that offer a LOT more gameplay. While it would have been very cool to do online co-op, we opted for offline co-op partially because we simply didn’t have the time or manpower to make a game this large and hit launch at the same time. And I don’t think the game is any less great because of it.

Something I have also said in interviews is that during the design process we did discuss online co-op seriously during production. We concluded that it was just as much (or more) fun to be sitting next to someone playing offline co-op than playing online co-op with a potential stranger. Yet whenever I’ve mentioned that particular reason, people have sneered and said “yeah, whatever dude.” But that’s the way we felt at the time.

Come back tomorrow for part II of the Insomniac interview!

It’s been rumoured before but now it’s official, the Official UK PS3 Magazine will come with a Blu-ray disc containing playable demos and other content, starting with Issue 7 which is available at the beginning of June. Here’s Sony UK’s managing director, Ray Maguire’s view:

“We are very excited to partner with Future to offer a playable Blu-ray disc to UK PlayStation 3 owners. The high capacity of Blu-ray media is the perfect method to distribute large volumes of unique, existing, and user-generated content in HD, showcasing PS3’s multimedia capabilities to the full.”

Unless the demos and content are exclusive to the magazine I can’t really see the appeal in having playable demos on the disc. It was a good reason to buy the Official PS2 Magazine before, as you couldn’t get the demos from anywhere else but now you can download them from the PSN. The appeal to spend cash on content that is readily available on the Web and playable demos that you can download for free directly to your PS3, isn’t quite there anymore.

UK PS3 Mag comes with BD containing playable demos