Wax Free Vanilla
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Clive Gratton: It's interesting - and Sony is going to love me for this. I'm not even being facetious. Stop me if I'm going too techno, but there's a number of sub-processors in Sony's PS2. And there's one which no-one uses ever: Vector-unit Zero. Sony engineers, they'll continually say "Use Vector Unit Zero. The secret to speed is User Vector Unit Zero". And no-one does, as no-one can find a decent use for it. And the secret is, I have.
I'd written the framework for the game, the display engine and the AI. All of that during pre-production. And then we got the rest of the team on board, who didn't really know what they were getting into. I'm constantly, throughout the entire project, cracking the whip to make thing works faster, better, smaller, faster, FASTER! Any bits of code which were taking too long, I'd first sit down and look at them algorithmically. If it was doing too much work, I'd write a load of hand coded assembly language. A large chunk of this game is written in hand coded assembly language on the vector units. It's... a miracle of technology!
Clive Gratton: Since the CPU of the Xbox and Gamecube are very adept, all the work on the PS2 to make it fast enough to run it at 60fps there applies straight across. And the Gamecube surprisingly so. I had serious reservations about whether we'd achieve this game on the Gamecube, and it's running exceptionally well.
Clive Gratton: From a technology point of view, it's all about bespoke technology. There's nothing off the shelf in this game. And there's nothing that wasn't written specifically for this game.
http://eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=61021
