Sony Presentation

The other day at University, us games students were treated to a visit from 3 artists and 2 programmers from SONY entertainment Europe, and very nice chaps they were too in all honesty.

I'm in no way going to hide my innitial views upon those at Sony, I dislike Sony and never liked much that came from them, and i'm very against the idea of showering gamers with games in the hope that maybe one or two may be a hidden gem, but I decided that this push from Sony to make an adults game console deserved a fresh pair of eyes.

The short presentation was mainly aimed at the games artists, although they've only been game arting for 10 weeks, they had no clue what they were talking about, while us games programmers had already come across the majority of things discussed in our own renderers and own games. Alot of the presentation was also spent talking about the studio environment at Sony and how great they are to work for due to their 'relaxed' working atmosphere and what not.

It seems that sony have only had a finalised version of the PS3 for roughly 3 months, and have spent much of that time trying to figure out how to render even simple triangles. The system is set up so that vast amounts of multi-threading needs to be done to remain optimised, sample ps2 code seems to apparently only run at 3 frames per second on the PS3.

The artists spoke very highly of the hardware, allowing them to create scenes so detailed and highly complex that every asset had completely different scenes to be added to the level, they'd have a tree scene, a tarmac and grass scene, a crowd scene etc..

The programmers on the other hand were not so pleased, they spent much of the time trying to describe how the cell processors worked and linked if only for their own self knowledge, many comparisons were brought up with regard to Microsoft and the documentation produced to help code for the system, Sony on the other hand provide the teams with a console.. thats all, no paperwork, no documentation, no nothing... these guys have a mountain to climb.

They were also very unimpressed with the usability of the hardware, they described it as one computer scientists dream.. he made the thing then stated.. "hey there you go, maybe you could make games with that too"..

So aside from the big company sell they had a fully working PS3 with them, along with the launch title F1. First things first, the console was very quiet, nothing like the xbox, but it was still big and still resembled a black american fridge freezer. The game itself: well they provided their own disclaimer stating that it wasn't running in HD due to our equipment (funny.. HD settings on our 360s work with those tv sets) anyway, the games menu were like any other, no flashy effects and i wouldn't have expected any, in game the artists were VERY proud about 3 central games features;

- Trees - much time was spent discussing the trees, about how they were no longer the simple cardboard X's of the olden days.. now call me stupid, but i would expect this of a next gen console, and would feel ashamed at having to point this out as something new, but still they looked very nice.

-Water/Rain - this was something that apprently not many others had seen working properly (this late in development?) while the rain outside the cars proved nothing overly special, when in-car, the effect was very nice, watter slowly running down the screen, but changed trajectory based upon your movements, although this made it very difficult to see the track, it was a nice idea that hadn't been implimented very well in the past.
- side note- water reflections on the floor were very OTT, almost like glass

- Lighting - This i must admit i was very impressed with in real time, rays of lighting shining through trees was very nice, perhaps OTT again, but displayed some of the graphics power that could well be used in future titles. the car was slowed down to a stop to show the trees free movement and also its effect on the lighting.. was quite nice to say the least.

All in all, it was a very enlightening afternoon, and i feel that although launch titles are going to look nothing special, i do feel it will show its power very late in its lifetime. With titles like Gears Of War pushing more boundries for graphics, this is showing that its developers have a grasp of the way to use the hardware, and this is due to the vast documentation Microsoft supply to developers. I do feel that once the PS3 has harnessed its power, it will become a visual force in the games industry, but this will take a much longer time than for Xbox360, so maybe in a year and a halfs time (360 will be over 2 and half years old at this point)...