Sony has made a big deal about the accessibility of the PS4 hardware, and a key element of that would be the quality of the toolchain - the series of programs used to create compiled code. For the PS4 developers, the use of the established Visual Studio environment proves to be a key benefit, and the extent to which Sony has acknowledged and supported cross-platform game-makers is self-evident. There are even options within Sony's compiler specifically added in order to increase compatibility with the Microsoft counterpart used in compiling DirectX 11 games.
"One thing that definitely helped getting the game to work was that the engine uses quite a lot of middleware. Middleware supporters have been very active on PS4, so there are versions of all the middleware we wanted available," Jenner continues.
"It takes a bit of work and a bit of time to integrate as SDKs change to get new versions of the middleware you're after, so that can feel like a full-time job at times, but as the platform settles down and the SDK changes become less significant getting closer to launch that becomes less of an issue."
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A more crucial issue is that, while the PS4 toolchain is designed to be familiar to those working on PC, the new Sony hardware doesn't use the DirectX API, so Sony has supplied two of their own.
"The graphics APIs are brand new - they don't have any legacy baggage, so they're quite clean, well thought-out and match the hardware really well," says Reflections' expert programmer Simon O'Connor.
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In general, from a performance perspective, it seems that Sony's SDK is just about where it needs to be right now, in contrast to the Microsoft equivalent, where techs are still working on very significant improvements that will drive improved GPU throughput.
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What we didn't find out is how the Xbox One version is faring, or who is producing it. Our bet is on the Ivory Tower studio producing it in tandem with the PC version, owing to the use of the DirectX 11 API on two platforms. But Xbox One and PS4 both have much in common from an architectural standpoint, and questions we have about collaboration between the console teams resulting in optimisations common to both console versions remain unanswered for now.