The article is mainly on Uncharted's trophy support, but Co-Lead Designer of Uncharted Richard Lemarchand also talks about Edge Tools for third party devs and Sony's First party devs sharing tools and working with each other.
Lemarchand also waxes lyrical about the culture of cooperation that exists between first-party Sony Studios: "We have this culture of open communication: we like to trade stories about what we found were ways of doing things that worked, and what didn't. We're always trading war-stories with Insomniac and Evolution and Sucker Punch. We're just one block away from Sony Santa Monica – the guys who made God Of War – and we get our designers together with theirs for formal lunches, and just talk about tools, design approaches and so on. So there's this town square feeling of everybody trading stories about our best practices, and I think it makes everybody stronger and smarter.
Richard Lemarchand
This is where he talks about using only 30-40 percent of the power of PS3 and why multiplatform games will start to look better on the PS3 soon.
"It's code that runs on SPUs, and it's to do with things like animation compression, generalised compression and rendering optimisations. These guys are really old-school programmers: guys who are always looking to shave another cycle off an operation. And part of the skill of developing for the PlayStation 3 is getting the GPU to farm jobs out to the six SPUs – seeing which SPUs are idling and can take up some of the slack in a frame-to-frame kind of way."
Here, Lemarchand comes up with an interesting revelation: "That's why we think we're probably only using 30 or 40 per cent of the power of the PS3 right now, and there's this great, untapped potential. All third-party developers can get the Edge libraries for free and are going to be able to use them in their own ways, to get more and more and more out of the PS3 over the years."
Richard Lemarchand
"There's a set of tools called Edge that were developed on the Naughty Dog premises, actually, by a group of very, very senior games programmer, some from Naughty Dog and some from elsewhere. I think it's tremendously visionary of Sony to make these tools, which are largely low-level libraries."
Richard Lemarchand
Taken from GAF. Original Article from Three Speech.
My opinion on this is that while 2nd and third gen PS3 games will obviously look better than 1st gen PS3 games, just like what happened in PS2's life cycle, they wont look TWICE as good. By saying that they're only using 30-40% of the PS3, they're implying that maybe one day they'll reach 80-90% or maybe use 100% of PS3 power, which to me says Uncharted 3 will end up looking twice as good on the PS3 and that just wont happen. :|
That said, ND is THE most talented dev working on the PS3 (IF Carmack picked them to do the port for Rage, then they have to be) and I do respect their opinion/claims, it's just that I dont think you can put a number on the capabilites of the PS3.
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