UBI talks Far Cry 2 engine

iceberg187

Regular
Far Cry 2 uses a proprietary engine that was built from the ground up for the game. The developers told me that about 150 people worked on creating the engine and then the game for the PC. Currently that team is working to build in DX10 support, though it wasn't ready when I had a chance to look at it.

Because the engine was built to work on a PC, bringing the game, with all of its bells and whistles, over to the Xbox 360 was a relatively easy affair, the developers told me. Afterall, they said, the Xbox 360 is essentially a computer. In fact they only have three people working on the team that is porting the game over.

The Playstation 3? Not quite as simple an affair. They have a team of 14 working on that port, mostly because of the "difficulties" of working with the Playstation 3's unique architecture.

http://kotaku.com/5011439/far-cry-2-dev-and-port-teams-range-from-175-to-three
 
That doesn't bode well for the PS3 version...

Depends on whether they take the time to talk to people like Naughty Dog or Insomniac and do the whole shared technologies scheme which has produced games like Uncharted and Ratchet and Clank.

They've proven the PS3 is more than capable of handling detailed environments, high res textures, and all the other glazing that seems to denote a good game these days. Whilst also having real gameplay elements in there. Also the size of the environment shouldn't be a problem if properly done, streaming from a BD gives you alot more room to play with.

It may actually bode very well for the PS3 version if they do take their time.
 
Depends on whether they take the time to talk to people like Naughty Dog or Insomniac and do the whole shared technologies scheme which has produced games like Uncharted and Ratchet and Clank.
Those games were created from the ground up for PS3. Porting systems from GPU to Cell isn't good. You need a system designed on PS3 to make use of the hardware. It depends on what they mean by 'port', but if they are taking elements of the existing code and shoehorning it onto Cell, the traditional idea of a port, it'll not use the system well. If they were rewriting from the ground up, it'll be better, but even then assets will be created without PS3 in mind. We've heard from the likes of Joker how porting techniques to PS3 yields rubbish performance, and we've heard from plenty of developers how starting on PS3 and porting the other way works out best all round.
 
i can see myself spending hours just to hunt down some big games, yes im into those safari games. nontheless the console versions looked great, ubi is finally understanding PS3 more i guess.
 
Here's hoping DX10 brings some nice graphical bonuses! Its certainly a pleasure to here of a game that has been developed first for PC and then ported to consoles. A rare thing indeed these days!
 
Here's hoping DX10 brings some nice graphical bonuses! Its certainly a pleasure to here of a game that has been developed first for PC and then ported to consoles. A rare thing indeed these days!

I don’t understand what you’re getting at…

Besides the in-house and first party FPS wares for consoles, haven’t all the major FPS titles been developed first on the PCs, then ported later to consoles?!
 
a vid from a french site:
http://www.jeuxvideo.fr/far-cry-video-consoles-actu-141808.html

Both versions looks the same, but in my opinion the ps3 needs some more work as the framerate (no matter the vid shitty quality) is clearly worse at this point (which is "far from release "anyway).

I certainly can't tell if one version is worse than the other... they both show some tearing problems and the PS3 scene seems to have alot more going on but videos are of completely different things so hard to tell. Either way, it seems to be an impressive port considering it will only get better.
 
i can see myself spending hours just to hunt down some big games, yes im into those safari games. nontheless the console versions looked great, ubi is finally understanding PS3 more i guess.
Eh, it's supposedly taking 14 people to do what 3 are doing on the 360 and the framerate (while not great on either platform) is still worse if the screen tearing is anything to go by.

I'm glad that they told the number of people working on the projects though, people crying about lazy developers and not devoting enough effort to PS3 ports need to realize that just maybe the problem isn't what they thought it was.
 
The 360 has very similar development framework as the PC. So it is very likely the 3 man team was able to reuse a large part of the code developed by the main team (150 men and women !).

The 14 man team probably needed to rewrite quite a few subsystems to get the engine running at a satisfactory rate on the PS3.
 
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Can it really be that simple to port from the PC to 360 though?

150 people on PC side, then 3 people to port to 360? Really?
 
That ratio sounds a little off if one is comparing apples to apples but considering 150 people were dedicated to creating the PC version "From Scratch", 3 doing the 360 port doesn't sound so unlikely. You'll never know how many of the 150 people were doing art assets, level design, etc... and how many were actually doing logic/engine work.

It's been said many times before that developers can basically take a PC game, port it to the 360 using the SDK and then fine tune some thread work to come up with a workable, releasable game (with framerate issues usually but "releasable" is a subjective metric, Quake4 anyone?).

I am not at all surprised with the numbers.
 
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Can it really be that simple to port from the PC to 360 though?

150 people on PC side, then 3 people to port to 360? Really?
I wouldn't be surprised. The Xbox 360 is remarkably similar to the PC - in part due to similar hardware, and in part due to the fact that they're both Microsoft platforms. The PC and Xbox 360 have almost identical development tools, and since they both use DirectX, the APIs between PC and Xbox are also very similar.

I haven't got any evidence for this, but I also wouldn't be surprised if the Xbox 360 has superior development tools compared to the PS3. Microsoft's development tools and developer support for the PC are, well, absolutely awesome. Since both platforms are Microsoft and largely use the same tools (Visual Studio, PIX, for example) it may be that the PC -> Xbox 360 transition is easier than the PC -> PS3 transition simply because of better dev tools/support. I don't actually have any idea what's available for the PS3, however, so this is just speculation.
 
Cant you qualify alot of electronics as ''computers''? I mean a mobile phone is as much of a computer as a x360 or a ps3 in the sense that they all have the compenents needed to let you run software.
Yup, exactly. What they probably meant to say is that the 360 resembles a normal PC more than the PS3. But the quote came across as quite funny to me. :)
 
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