IO: PS3 Development “Fun” but “Costly”

Not many developers think coding for the PS3 is easy, neither does Morten Heiberg of IO Interactive, the developer behind the upcoming action game Kane & Lynch. He, interestingly, believes that developing for the Sony console is “fun”, but admits that it is “costly and challenging” process over its PC and Xbox 360 counterparts.

“The Xbox and the PC are very similar,” he said. “They are just two very powerful CPUs and you can make it through your threads and be sure that it’s going to run reasonably OK. The PS3 doesn’t have many general purpose CPUs like a multi core system has on the PC side. It has a CELL processor which is itself a pretty powerful processor, but if you’re really going to get something out of it you’re going to have to utilize the SPUs on it, which are small special purpose units that you write little programs for doing whatever you need to get done.”

He continues, detailing the amount of work needed to transfer the code to the PS3. “It’s a very different approach,” he said. “The code ends up being rather different than it is on the Xbox and the PC. You can start with something that’s pretty much the same and then you try to run it on the PS3 and it doesn’t run very well. Then you start to optimize it and optimize it and you get further away from where you started but you really start to unlock some of the potential of the PS3.”

Finally, however, he concludes that developers should be more interested in the PS3 due to the different architecture used in the system, which offers a challenge, but when used properly can give terrific results.