GS: I've been talking to people recently who said that they're actually trying to get the PS3 version of their game up to speed with the Xbox 360 version, because it's a different way of developing – cores versus multithreading, and all.
JE: The way you should start out programming on the PlayStation 3 is probably not by jumping on to the SPUs like crazy, and trying to write everything on the SPUs right away. The PPU in the PS3 is essentially identical to one of the cores in the 360, so your multithreading even comes in handy if you do PPU code first on the PS3, the same way it works on one of the cores on the Xbox. We're doing quite a bit of multithreading on the PPU.
Then of course, when you're done with that, and you've got your initial stuff up and running, you say: "Oh yeah, ok! So now I can move 80% of my game onto the SPUs". Of course, for us as a first party developer, this is easier, and we can just totally focus on that. But it's not like the PPU and multithreading are useless or anything. It's a great first start - then you analyze what exactly goes into SPUs and so on.
GS: What are you most looking forward to in 2007?
JE: Actually I'm really looking forward to 2007, because we're going to finish Lair, which is my biggest concern right now, but also, I'm really looking forward to working on a couple of smaller projects [for PlayStation 3], with the so-called EDI [E-Distribution Initiative] from Sony, which I think has huge potential, and personally as a director, I think it's one of these things that we in the creative community need a little bit."
"People who work on these two and a half year, three year projects have a chance, even within an organization like Factor 5, which usually works on these large games, to work on something small again. That's the biggest thing I'm looking forward to in 2007, which is also going to be a challenge, because of course we were there about 15-20 years ago doing these small titles, so suddenly you've got these production challenges with working on something really, really small."
