PALGN: Can you tell us why Uncharted is only possible on the PlayStation 3?
EW: There are a few things. Primarily the whole experience is enabled by the use of the hard drive. If we did not have the hard drive then we could not present the game in the seamless load free way that we are. After you start until you turn the console off and go eat your lunch and come back there is not going to be another load time and you can play the game from start to finish. That was really key to us something that we established with Jak and Daxter and it keeps you immersed in the experience. As soon as you hit those load screens, as soon as you have to take that break, you may put the controller down, you may do something else we really just want to engross you in this experience. So, the hard drive really helped with that. The other thing that we've got going for us is the Blu Ray. We filled that thing up to 24 plus gigs, it was right at the end where we were literally running out of place where we were having to start pulling some stuff out, we ended up fortunately finding this unused cache of audio lines we were able to pull out to save some space so we could get everything in that we wanted to get in. I'm not going to stand here and say it would have been impossible to do on DVD but it would have been a different game, it really would have. It could have looked worse, we would have had to make concessions in terms of our compression. We would have had to spend a lot more developer resources focusing on how to get it on the disk when we could have been creating the game, making it more fun, making it more beautiful. So I'm really happy just to have that. We're still on single layer and this is our first game out of the gates. So I highly suspect that on our future games we'll even go to a double layer and we're going to even start putting more than 24-25 gigs into a single game.
The other important thing for us was the use of the Cell processor and how it enabled our animation system to work. Everybody who is working on the PlayStation 3 or the Xbox 360 gets this increase in the number of polygons they can use, they get an increase in the fact that now we've got these really cool pixel shaders and we can do these really cool materials like water and leather and put bark on trees. So you're going to get an immediate upgrade for free and you just get it with the hardware. But, what's not going to come for free is your animation and you're animation if you've got these really detailed environments it's not going to mesh. We wanted to put a lot of our engineering effort into making sure that we had an animation system that would allow, what I think are some of the most talented animators in the industry to really create and have their vision come through and be supported by the technology.
Basically, in Jak I we had somewhere in the vicinity of 300-350 animations for Jak and everyone was really happy with the fluidity of his movement and the response. In Uncharted, Drake has got more than 3500 animations and the difference is we're now taking the cell processor and we're taking say two dozen of those animations, like we've got his running animations, flinching animations, reloading animations, rolling animations, just dozens of animations all at once being layered on top of each other and then the cell processor recreates on the fly the single frame of animation that you need to be able to play the game at that moment and the fact we can just dump more and more work on that processor and its SPUs just means we can free up our CPU to do more general purpose tasks.
PALGN: So if you had to make an estimation how much % of the power of the PlayStation 3 do you think you used?
EW: Okay well it's not going to be an exact science but it's interesting that you bring the question up because we just recently before I came here as we were wrapping up production, we did do some profiling of the performance of the PlayStation 3. As far as the Cell processor and the SPU's are concerned we were only using about 1/3 to 1/2 of the SPU's at one time and so there is still quite a bit more we can do, I was also comparing where we're at at the end of development for Uncharted compared to where we were at the end of development for Jak and Daxter and we've been able to do so much more with the PlayStation 3 and there's still so much more on top potential. I really am excited about what we'll be able to do 2-3 games down the road, I mean just looking back on the difference between Jak I and Jak III is amazing.
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