PhyreEngine - New Hotness Sponsored by Sony? (moved)

Wow, that's still impressive! 1200$, I mean, for a small startup, that's peanuts, especially if you can develop in part on PCs, as I would assume. It seems pretty complete too, with lots of connectors and support for other libraries (Havok, Collada) ...

Now, if as Titanio says, they can solve the part where you can cheaply and easily submit your game for publishing on PSN, that would bring it quite up to speed ...
 
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Anyway although already basically confirmed in the posts above, I 'officially' confirmed with Jason that PhyreEngine is a rebranding of PSSG. There have been some improvements made and obviously I think the name change alludes to a greater push to prime time for the engine. He's also proud to mention that CodeMasters won a TIGA award for their engine tech... which of course incorporates aspects of PSSG(Phyre). So, I would imagine things like that will help to raise its profile/mindshare... to say nothing of the catchy new name. ;)
He should be, "Dirt" plays and looks remarkebly good to be a first generation PS3 game. I am really looking forward to the sequel.

Would be really sweet if they made the PhyreEngine available to hobbyists, what is there to lose?

Where does the $1200 number come from? Is that an annual renting fee for a dev kit?
 
It's great to see that Jason's project is moving so close to the vision he had of it late 2006 before the PS3 was launched, in that excellent review by Carl B posted above:

PSINext: Can you envision a time when PSSG might be made available to an audience wider than licensed PS3 developers?

Jason Doig: Right now we have no plans to make PSSG available to unlicensed developers, but we have discussed the possibility. Given its high-level nature and the way it exposes features like SPE programming in a friendly manner, I think it would make an excellent tool for people to learn about PS3, and for people without a devkit to write software that runs well on our platform.

PSINext: Thanks for your time Jason! Before we wrap-up are there any thoughts or insights you'd like to share on the Playstation 3 platform in general, and where you see this generation going?

Jason Doig: I'm really fired up for this coming generation - Cell in particular is a very powerful and versatile piece of hardware. I think that we've only begun to scratch the surface of the things we can do with it, and I'm very excited to see what people will come up with a few years down the line. The level of improvement shown between generations of software on previous platforms could be even greater on PS3 - and considering how good things are looking right now, I think the future is very bright indeed.

On the industry in general, my personal view is that this generation will see a lot of change in the way things are done - notably the trend towards bigger projects cannot be sustained much longer. While this transition might be hard on some companies, I think ultimately we'll get back to an environment where anyone can make a game. Good technology will stop being a black art, and will become much more of a commodity you can buy in - either pre-packaged or by sub-contracting the right talent per-project (which is what happens in the movie business). What I'd like to do is raise the bar on the quality and value of the technology available, because right now a lot of people still think they're better off on their own.
 
There was a small but interesting comment from Mario on Neogaf, who apparently works for the company that put out Gripshift:

Mario@NeoGaf said:
we used a fairly early version of it for the PSN version of GripShift. Not sure we actually had much chance to make use of the tools around it. More recently we've been updating GripShift PSN to use a later and much faster version.

We also used it to develop GripShift for XBLA.
 
This thread is also interesting to recall, as it highlights some of the advances the PSSG/Phyre team were working on ahead of last GDC. (post #5)

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=39858

The impression I get today is that they've gone forward from there in terms of the terrain and lighting system, and more systems in general have been moved increasingly to the SPE's.
 
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There was a small but interesting comment from Mario on Neogaf, who apparently works for the company that put out Gripshift:

Now thats a nice piece of information. GripShift PSN is a quite good achievement, good game with solid gameplay. And they used an early-PhyreEngine to develop PSN and XBLA versions?

$1200 is too much to pay for getting own hobby project running on PS3, and then not much hope to give it to the community. But I dream Sony someday gives us PSN-game-youtube. I could buy X360, but I like more PS3 so my options are there.
 
SCE Announces PHYRE ENGINE 2.40 (PS3)

San Francisco, March 23, 2009 – Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) announced today that PhyreEngine™ 2.40, the latest version of the popular games development framework, has been released to PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3®) game developers and publishers, capping a successful year since its initial announcement at GDC 2008.

PhyreEngine is a graphics rendering engine provided under a license that allows it to be used by any PS3 game developers and publishers as well as Tools & Middleware licensees in their products. The engine uses sophisticated parallel processing techniques that are optimized for the Synergistic Processor Unit (SPU) of the Cell Broadband Engine™ of the PS3, but can be easily ported to other multi-core architectures. As a result, PhyreEngine has been newly-adopted by dozens of game studios in the last year, now appearing each month on the PlayStation®Store or on Blu-ray Discs.

Some of the more recent developers and publishers to adopt PhyreEngine include (in alphabetical order):

* Australian developer Big Ant Studios. Ross Symons, their CEO added “PhyreEngine has cut down Big Ant’s development time significantly while allowing us to fully harness the power of the PS3. PhyreEngine has given us the opportunity to focus less on tech and more on creating good games.”

* Veteran Ukrainian studio Boolat Games, who will self-publish their platform/puzzle game topatoi on PlayStation Store soon.

* UK-based studio Doublesix Games, whose game Burn Zombie Burn will be released in Europe and North America later this month. Jonathan Hobson, Lead Programmer, commented that “PhyreEngine allowed Doublesix Games to begin development of our first game Burn Zombie Burn immediately and rapidly, without initial financial outlay or dedicated tech development time. It is a neat blend of clever, high-performance code that the SCE tech teams are famous for, with a modern, well designed, and easy to use set of interfaces and tools. In a matter of weeks we had hundreds of animated zombies running around at a fairly solid frame rate. The extensive set of sample code meant that we always had an idea of how to do things and on the rare occasions that we didn’t, the PhyreEngine support team was fantastic.”

* Bristol, UK-based studio FluffyLogic, whose PlayStation®Network title Savage Moon was released in December 2008 in European regions and January 2009 in North America. Will Bolam, FluffyLogic’s Director of Technology noted that “PhyreEngine was a great solution for FluffyLogic during work on our first PS3 title Savage Moon - loads of useful components we could use straight away to get the game up and running, easily extensible during development of game-specific code and great support from the PhyreEngine team.”

* Tokyo-based studio Game Republic recently released Catan using PhyreEngine in Japan.

* Famous Japanese studio IREM published PachiPara DL (DownLoad) Hyper Sea Story In Karibu in July 2008 in Japan.

* Bulgarian studio Ivent Games, who are developing the third-person action game Strength of the Sword. Georgi Rakidov, Lead Programmer, commented “I see PhyreEngine as a complete game engine suitable for all types of games. The support is just outstanding, with a nice balance between improving old features and adding new ones – most recently the terrain and the foliage utilities.”

* New French studio Lexis Numérique whose PS3 title Brooklyn Stories (working title) is currently in development.

* New Portuguese studio Seed Studios, whose real-time strategy game Under Siege will be released later this year. Lead designer, Bruno Ribeiro, noted “PhyreEngine enabled us to rapidly prototype our game and provided a solid and efficient foundation to explore the potential of the PS3.”

* New Paris, France-based studio Spiders working on their as-yet-unsigned RPG/Action disc-based game Mars.

* US studio thatgamecompany, who released Flower in North America and Europe in February 2009. Their lead programmer, John Edwards commented, “Flower is thatgamecompany’s second game using PhyreEngine and it won’t be the last. Support is friendly and responsive and the code is mature to the point where you just download, build and go. PhyreEngine’s suit of PS3-optimized utilities lets us spend less time reinventing the wheel and more time making games.”

* VectorCell, Paul Cuisset’s new studio, whose PS3 title The 7th Seal (working title) is currently in development.

During the last year, a range of new fully functional “game templates” were released, including support for Havok Complete XS™, NVIDIA PhysX™ and Bullet for physics, making it even easier for game teams to kick-start their development process. In addition, a host of white papers have been made available describing the techniques used within PhyreEngine, helping a broader community of game developers to improve and extend the features of their proprietary game engine code.

Phyre Engine GDC 09: Developer Walkthrough HD

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/47235.html

"... and we got a zombie" :D
 
Nice find ! The demo looks beautiful. The narrator mentioned 24 dynamic lights based on deferred lighting, volumetric fog, etc in the trailer. Seems heavily used by the smaller developers.
 
SCEE R&D released the slides of their presentations:
http://research.scee.net/presentations

2009 Game Developer Conference - PhyreEngine™ - Deferred Lighting and Post Processing on PLAYSTATION®3
http://research.scee.net/files/presentations/gdc2009/DeferredLightingandPostProcessingonPS3.ppt

2008 Game Developer Conference - PhyreEngine™
http://research.scee.net/files/presentations/gdc2008/PhyreEngine-GDC2008.pdf

2008 CESA Developers Conference - PhyreEngine™ Terrain
http://research.scee.net/files/presentations/cedec2008/PhyreEngine_CEDEC2008Slides_e.pdf

2008 CESA Developers Conference - PhyreEngine™ Terrain
http://research.scee.net/files/presentations/cedec2008/PhyreEngine_CEDEC2008Speech_e.pdf

Should be an interesting read for some of you.
 
Thanks for the presentations ChryZ - very much appreciated.

It seems SCEE's work on this suite has been paying off in the last year with some building momentum among developers.
 
Cheers, guys.

I'm very intrigued by what they're doing. The RSX<->SPU stuff reminds me a lot of PS2's GS<->EE synergy. It's what enabled Killzone2's visuals, but the tech is now available to pretty much every PS3 dev. They can use the engine, just look at the source code or even copy pieces of it. This should be interesting and well worth to follow.
 
Cheers, guys.

I'm very intrigued by what they're doing. The RSX<->SPU stuff reminds me a lot of PS2's GS<->EE synergy. It's what enabled Killzone2's visuals, but the tech is now available to pretty much every PS3 dev. They can use the engine, just look at the source code or even copy pieces of it. This should be interesting and well worth to follow.

If this basically means that all that money Sony invested in KZ2 is now gonna benefit ALL PS3 devs, then this could be a big thing for PS3 programming, moving forward. I would love for a lot more games to have such impressive lighting/physics/particles/etc.

It sounds like this is finally becoming the realization of some of Sony's early boasts of the PS3's power.
 
Didn't a lot of the Edge stuff go into PhyreEngine though? Anyway, it's a very good move. I'm still hoping that one day you can download the PC version without having to fully registery yourself as a developer... then Sony will have its own high performance version of XNA, basically.
 
Seems likely... many of the things mentioned in the recent Phyre Engine pdfs from GDC where mentioned earlier in some Edge pdfs. Stuff like the culling and skinning on SPUs etc... (the videos of the "The Getaway" tech demo for example)
 
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