Jesus
2005-10-03, 18:35:16
http://eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=61021
Eurogamer: On the technical side, Spartan's impressive. Hundreds of people on screen, in a total - er - war. What's intriguing to use is that how that games, even this late in the software cycle, are visually impressive. Last time, PS1 games were looking distinctly shoddy. But not the PS2 Spartan: Total Warrior...
Clive Gratton: It's interesting - and Sony is going to love me for this. I'm not even being facetious. Stop me if I'm going too techno, but there's a number of sub-processors in Sony's PS2. And there's one which no-one uses ever: Vector-unit Zero. Sony engineers, they'll continually say "Use Vector Unit Zero. The secret to speed is User Vector Unit Zero". And no-one does, as no-one can find a decent use for it. And the secret is, I have.
I'd written the framework for the game, the display engine and the AI. All of that during pre-production. And then we got the rest of the team on board, who didn't really know what they were getting into. I'm constantly, throughout the entire project, cracking the whip to make thing works faster, better, smaller, faster, FASTER! Any bits of code which were taking too long, I'd first sit down and look at them algorithmically. If it was doing too much work, I'd write a load of hand coded assembly language. A large chunk of this game is written in hand coded assembly language on the vector units. It's... a miracle of technology!
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For example, everyone's talking about High Dynamic Range for next generation platforms, and we've got it running on PS2
Eurogamer: On the technical side, Spartan's impressive. Hundreds of people on screen, in a total - er - war. What's intriguing to use is that how that games, even this late in the software cycle, are visually impressive. Last time, PS1 games were looking distinctly shoddy. But not the PS2 Spartan: Total Warrior...
Clive Gratton: It's interesting - and Sony is going to love me for this. I'm not even being facetious. Stop me if I'm going too techno, but there's a number of sub-processors in Sony's PS2. And there's one which no-one uses ever: Vector-unit Zero. Sony engineers, they'll continually say "Use Vector Unit Zero. The secret to speed is User Vector Unit Zero". And no-one does, as no-one can find a decent use for it. And the secret is, I have.
I'd written the framework for the game, the display engine and the AI. All of that during pre-production. And then we got the rest of the team on board, who didn't really know what they were getting into. I'm constantly, throughout the entire project, cracking the whip to make thing works faster, better, smaller, faster, FASTER! Any bits of code which were taking too long, I'd first sit down and look at them algorithmically. If it was doing too much work, I'd write a load of hand coded assembly language. A large chunk of this game is written in hand coded assembly language on the vector units. It's... a miracle of technology!
.
.
For example, everyone's talking about High Dynamic Range for next generation platforms, and we've got it running on PS2