Far Cry 2 Devs "Worried" by PS3...

via Computer and Video Games


Sony's complex PS3 hardware is a 'nice fit' for Ubisoft's ambitious Far Cry 2 - but developers Ubisoft Montreal admit that compromises have been made. "We were somewhat worried by some of the reported high complexity of developing for the PS3", reveals Tech Director Dominic Guay, "but the raw processing power is impressive".

After a slew of delays, and some unfavourable comparisons between 'identical' Xbox 360 and PS3 ports, it seems developers are finally getting to grips with Sony's machine. "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 Dunia (Far Cry 2's graphics engine). 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. We were positively surprised by how efficient the SPUs (the Cell processing units) were to do such things as run our vegetation simulation, our animations or our physics systems. 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."

Tech Director Guay is also impressed by the potential of Blu-ray and PS3's hard drive for streaming games in real-time. "The hard drive and Blu-ray are making our life easy considering FC2 is an open world continuously streamed around the player. That streaming bandwidth and disk space is very appreciated. So, in terms of AI, game structure, physics, dynamic time of day, open world gameplay, dynamic weather system, destructible vegetation, all of those things where we had really pushed the envelope technically, they run well on PS3."

The PS3 version, unsurprisingly, won't match top spec PCs. "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."

To read more about Far Cry 2, including an exclusive Q&A with Creative Director Clint Hocking, check out PSM3#98, on-sale 14th February in all major UK newsagents.