From what we understand, Uncharted is using some fairly intense technology that's proprietary to the PS3. Besides the high-dynamic range lighting and water effects showcased in the PSN behind-the-scenes videos, how are you utilizing the power of the PS3 in your game?
The PlayStation 3 has a lot of power. When we started Uncharted we were really ambitious and had no idea what the PS3 would give us. Once we got the first devkits, we realized quickly that we could do everything we had planned to. The three main points for me are the Cell, Blu-Ray and the hard drive. Weve been using the Cell for pretty much all our systems: rendering, particles, physics simulation, collision detection, animation, AI, decompression, water simulation, etc
and to give you an idea of the power of the PS3,
we're using only 30 percent of the Cell processor.
In terms of Blu-Ray, we just couldnt have made Uncharted without it; with Uncharted we have almost filled it (91 percent). We're also using the hard drive to pre-cache data from the Blu-Ray disc. That allows us to stream up to 12 streams for sound, load level data super fast and more importantly to stream textures constantly to guarantee high-res quality on the screen.
One of the on-going concerns about the PlayStation 3 has been that development is a difficult process. Frame rate problems, engine inconsistencies, and more seem to be par for the course, and we've seen third-party developers dropping title features and even games altogether because development is either just too difficult or too costly. What has Naughty Dog done to cope with these problems? What is the team doing differently than the competition?
First of all, Naughty Dog is exclusively focused on the PS3 which makes our task a little bit easier. That said, we are completely aware of some of the issues that teams can have and we've been trying to help them. Sony has released "Playstation Edge," a set of high level tools and runtime libraries to facilitate the use of the PS3. A big part of that technology has been developed here at Naughty Dog and we have a group of programmers dedicated to this effort.
We're also planning on giving a lot of talks about how we made Uncharted and have no secrets about our technology. I think the PS3 is the machine of the future, the transition might not be super easy but Sony knows and is helping third-party developers.
If you look at other industries we just have to deal with a multicore processor and in companies like Google programmers probably deal with thousands of machines, so in terms of complexity I think its totally manageable.
For more click
here