Kotaku

PS3 Tough for Programmers? Pshaw!

Check out this entry on the Guardian's always brilliant Gamesblog. The author, Keith Stuart, spoke with developers who've been slaving over games for the PlayStation 3. They told Stuart that, contrary to popular belief, it's not that difficult to program the PS3. In fact, it's not all that different from writing games for the PC, since the machine uses a version of OpenGL

Key quote:

"... 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. This ... won't be a massive leap from what you're seeing on PCs with high-end graphics cards. But obviously on PS3, you've got eight chips to spread the processing cost over — the main PowerPC chip and seven SPE chips. In a PC, there's just one CPU, two in a dual processor machine. Having an eight CPU multi-processor system in your living room is pretty flash.

Frankly, I hope more developers step forward to talk—in detail—about what it's like to develop for the PS3. We've been seeing a lot of people staking positions strongly without giving evidence, which just amounts to trash talk.

Possession and the art of PS3 programming [Gamesblog]

1:18 PM on Sat Jan 28 2006
By Shaker
2,017 views