Re: Official PS3 Discussion Part II
Developing on the PS3 is "fun." From the developer of IO Interactive. (Hitman/Kane and Lynch)
Developing on the PS3 is "fun." From the developer of IO Interactive. (Hitman/Kane and Lynch)
He said: "It's a new platform for us. It's our first PS3 game. It's a challenging platform to develop on, but it's also one that has a lot of potential that's just waiting to be unlocked as people get to know it better and as developers get more skilled at utilising the machine."
He said: "The Xbox and the PC are very similar. They are just two very powerful CPUs and you can make it through your threads and be sure that it's going to run reasonably OK. The PS3 doesn't have many general purpose CPUs like a multi core system has on the PC side. It has a CELL processor which is itself a pretty powerful processor, but if you're really going to get something out of it you're going to have to utilise the SPUs on it, which are small special purpose units that you write little programs for doing whatever you need to get done.
"Those are not just standard threads that you just spawn like you do on a PC. You have to really think it through and identify areas in your game that will benefit from this and isolate that code and make the cuts so you can transfer the minimal amount of data to and from those units and get the most processing power out of them."
He added: "It's a very different approach. The code ends up being rather different than it is on the Xbox and the PC. You can start with something that's pretty much the same and then you try to run it on the PS3 and it doesn't run very well. Then you start to optimise it and optimise it and you get further away from where you started but you really start to unlock some of the potential of the PS3."
"Well obviously it's something that requires a bit of resources and special effort, which costs money", he said. "But on the other hand it's something that I think most developers are rather keen on getting into because it's a new fresh system and it's an interesting architecture. Development wise it's fun. It brings back a lot of memories from college and university. In many ways it's a fun architecture to work on but definitely one that's also going to cost you some money because you need to write special purpose code for it."
He said: "The Xbox and the PC are very similar. They are just two very powerful CPUs and you can make it through your threads and be sure that it's going to run reasonably OK. The PS3 doesn't have many general purpose CPUs like a multi core system has on the PC side. It has a CELL processor which is itself a pretty powerful processor, but if you're really going to get something out of it you're going to have to utilise the SPUs on it, which are small special purpose units that you write little programs for doing whatever you need to get done.
"Those are not just standard threads that you just spawn like you do on a PC. You have to really think it through and identify areas in your game that will benefit from this and isolate that code and make the cuts so you can transfer the minimal amount of data to and from those units and get the most processing power out of them."
He added: "It's a very different approach. The code ends up being rather different than it is on the Xbox and the PC. You can start with something that's pretty much the same and then you try to run it on the PS3 and it doesn't run very well. Then you start to optimise it and optimise it and you get further away from where you started but you really start to unlock some of the potential of the PS3."
"Well obviously it's something that requires a bit of resources and special effort, which costs money", he said. "But on the other hand it's something that I think most developers are rather keen on getting into because it's a new fresh system and it's an interesting architecture. Development wise it's fun. It brings back a lot of memories from college and university. In many ways it's a fun architecture to work on but definitely one that's also going to cost you some money because you need to write special purpose code for it."
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