[Deano Calver]

This week Sony have acquired SN-Systems, hooked up with Transmeta and are providing Havok and Novodex for free and you get a 90 day eval of UE3.

SN-Sys have traditional been the favorite for UK devs, most PS2 dev-houses in the UK (and probably else where) use SN-Sys. It integrates into Visual Studio, provides a quality debugger (quality compared to GDB anyway...) and in recent years have started to develop there own compilers. Soon they will have a distrubuted build system (a god send for large games) and they also produce lots of 'glue' (from network stacks to DVD emulators). If this becomes the standard, this will be a really good move. SN-Sys stuff is far from perfect but its a lot better than the traditional basic Sony GNU tool chain.

I'm not sure what Transmeta will bring to the table... Internal to Sony there are already optimisation efforts, so who knows what Transmeta has that the internal groups don't...

NVIDIA have talked about a few tools, cgc and some performance tools. Basically the current PC bits ported, will we see if we get anything more.

Havok and Ageia for standard is nice, everybody I know is going with Havok (including us) so this good

UE3 eval... I can't see it making any real different, if you wanted a eval for UE you just have to phone Mark Rein anyway (I guess it might save a week arranging the eval license...). So coming bundled seems to make little different IMHO but it probably makes a good business discision for Epic.

Its a good move, anyway you look at it but one things for sure... MS are setting the pace for developer tools and Sony realise they have to keep up.