YouGamers: Is it a lot more difficult to design and make a game or engine that works really well on two, completely separate platforms, like a PC and an Xbox 360, compared to just one alone?
Mäki: [pauses for a moment] I think it is much more difficult to make a game that works on PCs and consoles; with a PC engine you can take a lot of freedoms. For example, in how memory is handled because Windows virtualises it all; hardware can scale and a PC game doesn't get bad reviews if it runs at 25fps but a console game is expected to run at 30.
So there are a lot of differences - PCs can load in data more quickly from the hard drive; consoles have a bit more limited DVD loading bandwidth. Yeah, it is a lot more work but the Xbox 360 and PC are similar enough platforms to make development quite a lot of fun.
Järvilehto: 360 and PC has been a fantastic combination to work with and I'm really happy that we dont have anything else to distract us on the platform front.
YouGamers: Are you or did you consider at any time using Microsoft's XNA middleware toolkit?
Mäki: Well, we naturally use the DirectX and Xbox SDKs - XNA kind of encompasses those two anyway
so I'll say "yes" [laughs] "sort of"
it would depend on what you define XNA as, I would say.
YouGamers: The one thing we really noticed in the demo were the real-time, dynamic shadows - nicely shown off with the time changes and movement of the Sun. Have you stuck to "well known" methods or did you use something pretty new and cool?
Mäki: There's lots of pretty new and cool stuff going on in the engine [smiles]; I know that some of the techniques have been shared by 3DMark06 in the past.
If you look at the volumetrics going on, there's lots of cool stuff going on
YouGamers: It looked like shadow mapping; with software filtering going on?
Mäki: Yeah, it's done in a graphics shader
YouGamers: So it's a known approach
Järvilehto: An "everything-but-the-kitchen-sink" approach. There's the dynamic lighting, ambient occlusion, volumetrics and so on
Mäki:
but the basic shadow solution is cascaded shadow maps.
YouGamers: A lot of people will be wondering whether there will be a significant difference in the, for example, quality of the shadows and textures or volumetric effects between the PC and Xbox 360 versions.
Järvilehto: The PC version will definitely be scalable - that means every PC experience will be a bit different depending on your setup, whereas the 360 is a fixed platform. So there are some differences obviously but at this stage in the development, both platforms are pretty much identical.
YouGamers: On the 360 version you're streaming the data from the DVD and hard drive for the PC, so is that technically difficult to do to accommodate those two different systems?
Järvilehto: Not really - you set everything up for the DVD and then it should work pretty good from a hard disk! [laughs]
YouGamers: Okay, time's pressing so we'll be quick! Of late, a couple of games installations have been well over 10GB in size, is Alan Wake going to be of a similar size or will it fit onto a single DVD?
Mäki: We'll fit it on a single DVD.
Ihre größten Kracher kommen eben früher oder später (meist eher letzteres) auch auf dem PC, aber Leadplattform ist da der kleine weiße Kasten mit dem Ring, der abwechselnd grün und rot blinkt. 
