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So they have a web browser for the sole purpose of setting up an GLES context for their UI? On a video game console? I guess that's what you do when you suddenl
by kllrnohj 13y ago
So they have a web browser for the sole purpose of setting up an GLES context for their UI? On a video game console? I guess that's what you do when you suddenly have 8GB of RAM, you piss it away on useless shit...
- corresation 13y agoPlatform has a web browser anyways. Web technologies are brilliant for laying out user interfaces. Complain about it being useless shit. Where have all of these cynical people come from today? Every discussion I've wandered into today has had a good showing of judgmental, know-better, seemingly angry people.
- dman 13y agoTheyre all wondering the same thing that you are.
- kllrnohj 13y agoThe difference is the UI runs continuously and is RAM that a game cannot use. The web browser, by contrast, does not. It stops running when you leave it. Or it could, anyway, if it wasn't also being used as a GL container for the UI.
- baddox 13y agoWell, there's an actual user-accessible web browser as well.
- mkramlich 13y agoCounter-argument: the PS4's desktop is the one place where performance least matters. But they would like to add new UX features there, over time, with less dev effort. Especially basic UI content. That can be fetched remotely or locally, relatively seamlessly. Which is what browsers already do well.
- tjoff 13y agoIt's not like any of that is difficult to do when your ecosystem is closed and you are the only one in control of it regardless of how you decide to execute it. And (memory) performance is of critical importance if the PS4 supports multitasking such as the Xbox One does (don't know if it does).
- rm445 13y agoIt bothers me how little people care about responsive UI. I haven't used a PS4 yet, so this is more just a general comment than a criticism of the decision - but the PS3 is a bit of a clunker in its cross-media bar. There are spinning placeholders for a couple of seconds every time the icons load. It doesn't exactly scream raw power - why aren't devs embarrassed by these things?
- _frog 13y agoThe issue with the PS3's UI is that it's seen a marked increase in complexity since the initial release, coupled with less resource access. As it stands the PS3's XMB has access to about 80mb of RAM, the rest is reserved for games. Also everything I've heard about the PS4 makes it sound like the UI is incredibly fast and responsive.
- pyre 13y agoOn a machine with the sort of power that the PS4 has, how does "running a browser" need to be equal to "non-responsive UI?"
- wmf 13y agoJS+WebGL may make the store's development more agile compared to C/C++.
- kllrnohj 13y agoThey could still use JS and not use WebGL. WebGL is just GLES in a web browser. Slower than GLES running natively thanks to sandboxing overhead, for what it's worth. But I was more talking about the RAM overhead of using the browser just to create a window to render GLES into. You can easily achieve the same thing with EGL or SDL or whatever the PS4 natively provides to games. It's trivial to setup a GLES context.
- Narishma 13y agoPS4 doesn't have any form of OpenGL. In this case, WebGL is probably translated on the fly to calls to the proprietary low level graphics API.
- kalleboo 13y agoIs there any more public information available on this? I know the PS3 used a highly custom API that was nontheless based on OpenGL ES (and added stuff that was missing like shaders), it seems like with more standard hardware and the more mature OpenGL ES standards available today, they'd stick with something more standards-compatible.
- Narishma 13y agoThe PS3's API (LibGCM) had nothing to do with OpenGL. What Sony did however was provide an OpenGL ES 1.1+extensions implementation on top of the low level API. You can probably count on one hand the number of games that made use of it because it was too slow.
- pjmlp 13y agoThis is the typical information the FOSS spread about consoles. The PS3 has two graphics APIs, OpenGL ES 1.x with Cg for shaders and LibCGM. Most game studios never used the OpenGL ES API. The game industry does not care that much about open standards like the FOSS community does. What counts it getting a game idea sponsored and on the hands of paying customers, regardless of any tool religion. Porting to multiple platforms is an outsourcing business that is part of the industry since the early days.
- ErikRogneby 13y agoIsn't that what game consoles are for? =) Pissing things away like your time, money & health?
- shocks 13y agoYou're assuming to many things. You assume the renderer they're using uses a large chunk of RAM. You assume they use exactly the same browser for the home interface as the normal web browsing. You assume that they're keeping the home interface in memory (and wasting resources) when you're playing a game.
- kllrnohj 13y ago> You assume that they're keeping the home interface in memory (and wasting resources) when you're playing a game. Console has 8GB of RAM. Games are only guaranteed 4.5GB of that. You do the math.
- shocks 13y agoI'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you're not a game console developer. It's really not as simple as you're trying to make it out to be.
- drzaiusapelord 13y agoWhy is this pissing away performance? A web browser isn't some luxury. It affords them flexibility with ease of development and being compatible with the entire www. I really don't see the old days of proprietary junky interfaces being superior, especially on hardware that is close to what a modern desktop PC is today. Not to mention, my crappy phone runs Chrome. If it can do that, certainly a device that uses up to 100 watts, has 16x the ram, 100x the graphics/cpu can too without it being considered a drain.
- kllrnohj 13y agoI never said anything about performance? I specifically mentioned RAM. Although it is pissing away performance because WebGL is slower than running GLES directly, thanks to the sanitation of the GLES shaders that the browser does. But this is still a proprietary, "junky" interface. If it's WebGL, it's still entirely custom, with entirely custom event handling, and entirely custom accessibility (or lack thereof), and entirely custom everything. If you are just using WebGL, which is what they said, then the browser is a massive chunk of dead weight that's doing jack shit. All the browser did is setup the EGL context, create a GLES context from that, and then handed it to you. This is basic hello world stuff, that's the entirety of the browser's involvement in this scenario.
- bri3d 13y agoThe G+ comments seem to indicate that they're using the browser's event handling in some way. Plus the browser runtime still gives you things even if you're going the pure-GL UI route: networking, a JSON parser, a database (Local Storage), cookies and session management, a (arguably awful) security model... how is the browser "dead weight"?
- kllrnohj 13y agoAll those things are easily provided by libraries for every language with every API imaginable. The strength of a browser is HTML & CSS. And I called it dead weight because we're talking client-side offline UI here, so things like cookies and session management are irrelevant. But the dead weight is going to come from the bulk of the browser code that is HTML/CSS parsing, webkit/blink, the graphics model that's not being used, font support that's not being used, etc... Those things you list are all really small pieces.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- nly 13y agoHow else are you going to get ads in to the UI easily?
- BHSPitMonkey 13y agoIf they're using nothing but a WebGL context filled with custom code for text, layout, etc. then you have a fair point. I doubt that's the case, though. It seems likely that they're taking advantage of HTML/CSS on top of whatever WebGL parts they're using, allowing system UI work to be done by more general web design people rather than involving lower-level developers just to implement a new kind of dialog.
- edvinbesic 13y agoBut if you are already bundling the browser, is it really a penalty to utilize it, especially since both the ps and xbox reserve space for the UI thread? WebGL might be less performant but honestly, for a menu system it's plenty fast, so what's the big deal here? Honest question.