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Liverpool-based studio Bizarre Creations is building its promising racing game Blur with the 360 as lead platform, and the studio assures it won’t fall into familiar traps when porting to the PS3.
In an interview with Develop, project lead Jed Talbot said that, unlike other projects in the past, Blur’s 360-to-PS3 port is progressing well.
The differences in hardware setup between both consoles – particularly in terms of RAM allocation – can often lead to problematic PS3 conversions.
Yet Talbot is hopeful that Blur won’t be added to the list of 360 games that strip off a few layers when converted to Sony’s flagship console.
“The PS3 port is coming on quite well,” he said. “I personally don’t play it that much because [lead designers are] on the thin-edge of development, trying to look at other things like how balanced the gameplay is.
“But we’ve got all the technical guys creaming over the PS3, and they’re saying that both versions work as well as each other.”
The issue of porting was illustrated when Develop took a studio tour of Bizarre.
Blur’s audio manager Nick Wiswell said that, typically, Bizarre allocates about 5 per cent of the 360’s 512MBs of RAM to audio production – just about enough size to work with the PS3’s audio memory allocation, which benchmarks at around 25MB.
“But the PS3 has its other difficulties as well, to do with compression formats,” added Wiswell.
“So we do ultimately end up with slightly less memory on the PS3 to play with, but at the moment every sound in the 360 version is in the PS3 version. There’s no difference between them so far.
"Obviously, we’re not finished yet, but as it stands things are looking quite promising at this point.”
