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[gofreak]

Ben-Nice on Beyond3D wrote this piece for The Guardian, about his visit to the developers of Possession. There isn't a whole lot new in there, but still, it's a dev talking about PS3 development

Some quotes (there are more in the article, I didn't want to copy it wholesale):

First of all, as with Killzone developer Guerrilla in a recent online Q&A sesh, they were happy to point out that PS3 is not as complicated to write for as we've all been led to believe. Apparently, the machine's use of Open GL as its graphics API means that anyone who's ever written games for the PC will be intimately familiar with the set-up. In fact, PS3 employs a cut-down version named Open GL ES, which is even simpler - as Volatile's lead PS3 programmer, Lyndon Homewood explained:

"ES is designed for things like set-top boxes and mobile phones, where you want the fundamental graphics but don't need some of the fringe stuff that Open GL has. Because you've got that on PS3, it's going to be much easier than the PS2 to get something up and running - there are hundreds of books out there for it, so you can do your background reading. All the documentation is there."

"The graphics capabilities of PS3 will, I think, be slightly above the absolutely top-end graphics cards on the PC, but you've got much more processing power in the box so you're going to see a lot more physics, a lot more generated geometry. With water ripples, for example - they're pretty much algorithms, you have a flat plane of triangles and you run some sort of mathematical algorithm over it to generate a surface rippling effect - well, you will have the processing power to do these sorts of generated geometry effects On PS3. You could actually put one chip aside just to do that..."

"The way we're thinking of doing it ourselves is via a job queue. We'll stick the jobs we want to do into a queue on the main processor and then we'll get the SPEs to pull off a queue entry and process it whenever they're free. You want to make sure all of your processors are always running. If you give the chips specific jobs, you'll end up with a lot of them being idle - you won't get the maximum out of PS3 doing that unless you time everything perfectly, so that the time it takes to do the animation on the first chip is exactly the same amount of time to do the physics on the next chip, which is exactly the same length of time it takes to do all your AI on the next chip - I think that would be extremely problematic."

Full article: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/games/a...sion_and_the_art_of_ps3_programming.html#more

 

[Amir0x]

isn't Possession that hideous looking game that got revealed early on for both 360 and PS3?

 

[gofreak]

Yes :lol According to Ben-Nice they don't actually have a hardware PS3 kit yet, but a software emulator (I'm guessing more than the IBM Cell simulatior, something for the whole hardware). I guess they have a publisher now? Or did they always?

 

[Sean]

isn't Possession that hideous looking game that got revealed early on for both 360 and PS3?

Best part about it is how it says "Actual In-Game Screenshot" like people would mistake it for CG or something.

 

[llTll]

Best part about it is how it says "Actual In-Game Screenshot" like people would mistake it for CG or something.

hello xbox1

 

[RaijinFY]

I love the "in-game screenshots"... :lol

Sure it's not like SC4! No doubt it's in-game!

However, it's a picture of an old build though. I have seen this picture before E3 if I remember correctly...

 

[Chris_C]

I thought [hoped] this game was canceled?

 

[boutrosinit]

Actually, it does look A LOT better now. This was taken pre-E3 (before everyone got actual specs to work with and other things that NDAs do not allow the discussion of...)

 

[thorns]

programming is not an art.

 

[Nightbringer]

programming is not an art.

Programming isn´t an art.

Is knowing how to program the art.

 

[blindrocket]

Yeah, that game looks lame but it was an interesting article anyway.

When I first heard of the game I was like, "oh cool! A zombie game!" And then I saw the screenshots.

 

[Chris_C]

Actually, it does look A LOT better now. This was taken pre-E3 (before everyone got actual specs to work with and other things that NDAs do not allow the discussion of...)

Where are the new screenshots? Couldn't find them in the article.

 

[Mrbob]

This pretty much contradicts the programmer in Mushashi's thread who talked about next gen systems having too much focus on graphics, and not enough on other details (Like physics). Of course he said he didn't know much about the PS3 at the time.

Advances in game physics is the true next gen imo.