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Far Cry 2 devs pleased with PS3 development

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Far Cry 2 devs pleased with PS3 development

Though they do admit that the machine’s internal architecture has forced certain compromises compared to PC version

Ubisoft Montreal has said that the PS3’s unique architecture has proved a good fit for the technology behind its upcoming Far Cry 2 – though says that it has taken a lot of effort to get used to the machine.

"We were somewhat worried by some of the reported high complexity of developing for the PS3 but the raw processing power is impressive," tech director Dominic Guay stated, according to CVG.

"We made sure we had a group of programmers that were not scared by complexity and had a large console programming experience to work on the initial PS3 R&D of our graphics engine Dunia. At that point, we didn't know what to expect.

"One thing that we realized pretty quickly as we started R&D on PS3 was that the hardware architecture had a very nice fit with some of our technical design decisions.

“So while it did require quite a bit of R&D to understand how to use the system correctly, once we started having results we saw that it was a very capable console and that FC2 could run on it. The hard drive and Blu-Ray are making our life easy considering Far Cry 2 is an open world continuously streamed around the player. That streaming bandwidth and disk space is very appreciated.

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Koch

"However, the notable area where we had to make some tradeoffs is in some assets resolution which had to be brought down from the higher end PC configurations due to memory size difference.

"However, the good new is that since PS3 players are not outputting over the top resolutions like high end PC users, this is not a big deal. It's somewhat proportional to our video resolution output."

Nice I guess

posted by Chuck Norris Feb 11, 2008 at 3:46 pm
1
Chuck Norris

I feel that some sort of 'comfort' is required to PS3 only owners in regards to the many claims surrounding the difficulty in making games for the system.
Not all developers will claim the difficulty however given time they will obviously learn to adapt accordingly.

Of course games consoles are not as flexible as a PC's since PC's configurations are limitless as in more memory and latest graphics cards and processors.

Given the power in features in both the 360 and PS3 I have to say that that graphically many games are on par if not better than most PC games out there apart from games like FarCry and Crysis of course.

Compare Unreal Tournament 3 on PC vs PS3 for example and compare say Bioshock and Gears of war on PC vs Xbox 360, is there that huge of a difference running a system with say Sli 8800Ultra and 4gb of ram vs the specs in the PS3 and Xbox 360 at their price points?

No.

I would like to know however what Crytek are doing for the 360 version as well.

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Re: Nice I guess

posted by rhys Feb 11, 2008 at 5:38 pm
2
rhys

good work chuck, i wanna hear some stuff about how they're handling with the 360 version as i have scoured the internet for hours trying to find some comments on this, im hoping that not too many sacrifices have to be made to the game in order for it to run efficiently on the 360, i was a huge fan of far cry instincts on the xbox and so am looking forward to this game immensly, this and gta 4 are my two most anticipated titles for this year

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Re: Nice I guess

posted by Si Pie Feb 11, 2008 at 6:38 pm
3
Si Pie

Good to see someone taking up the "challenge". If you're going to do a bad job of making a console game on purpose, having paid for the licence to do so, what's the point? Glad someone has looked at it logically and said "this works pretty well when you know what to do". These guys are supposed to be professionals at this. Makes you wonder if all those "know-nothings" in society are actually right - all computer programmers are just kids in bedrooms that don't really know what they're doing and are obsessed with pixel sex!

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Re: Nice I guess

posted by dave Feb 11, 2008 at 8:55 pm
4
dave

When the PS2 came out, developers complained that it was difficult to work with and then went on over the years to improve their products no end as they got used to the hardware architecture, PS3 games are already starting to look better (uncharted for example), in another 4 to 6 months I think we are really going to start to see some amazing progress...

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PC or console development first?

posted by Zed Zee Feb 11, 2008 at 9:28 pm
5
Zed Zee

Isn't it the fact that both GoW and Bioshock were developed on a console first (X360), that's why the PC version looks and feels the same?

If you develop something for the PC first and then 'port' it to consoles, the latter will never match the former, because when it was written for the PC as much graphics prowess and tricks were used as the graphics card can provide.

Whereas if you write on a console first, you are immediately limited by the 'frozen' graphics specification and therefore, you may not bother/have the time/budget to 'enhance' the graphics for a PC version. You just port them, re-write the code to do the same under Direct X and there you go!

Does that make sense to anyone?

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