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I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Play-Go initiative which Mark Cerny spoke about, that’s something we’ve been bringing in and we’ve been heavily involved in the discussions on that. We know that that, combined with the Blu-Ray disc for physical delivery, the hard-drive is just going to allow us to deliver awesome experiences to players in a fraction of the load times and download times that players experienced on PS3 and Xbox.
From a GPU perspective, there’s a whole load of special sauce that’s gone into the GPU development. And that paves the way for us to do all sorts of general purpose compute work on there as well. It’s always going to be a balancing act between the kind of hardcore graphics guys who want to use all that power for what goes on the screen, but there’s some great complimentary stuff that we can do with the GPU as well.
With it being a very contemporary GPU core [there's] a whole bunch of new graphics features probably familiar to PC developers but we’ve spent a lot of time in PS3 land so we had to play catch-up on some of those. It’s given us lots of great things to work with, things like texture varieties, hardware instancing, volume textures, tessellation, texture compression, they’re all really cool features that we’re leveraging in all sorts of interesting ways.
The cool stuff, again from the announcement event, the suspend and resume side of things, that’s really exciting to us as well. That means, again, less time players will spend waiting for the game to load and more time spent playing. You get from school or work, hit the power button and very quickly you can be back in Drive Club and enjoying that social experience. There’s activity feed system, I can’t remember if it was talked about at the announcement event, I think it was around Mark Cerny’s presentation, he showed some things with both the game live-streaming and the activity feed. We’ve done a lot of work with those features so Drive Club will be out-putting all sorts of social, or status, updates that will drive social activity, giving important updates on what your friends are doing and will drive people to get involved in different things. And then the game live-streaming as well, that’s a really powerful tool to promote awareness of what players are doing and kind of encourage people to get involved in those kind of activities.
With the spectating functions, is there room to create an e-sports-type scene around that functionality?
Scott Kirkland: It’s awesome. I mean, the controller has a Share button on it. You hit the Share button, if you’ve configured your streaming service connection, then the stream is out there. I don’t think there have been any announcements about the kind of partner services who’ll be providing that, but in development we have simple tools, the service runs on my desktop PC, I hit the Share button on my devkit and I can just see what’s going on in my devkit through a web browser window. That’s brilliant. You get the output from the camera as well so you can see your friends’ reactions to your overtaking manoeuvres or spectacular crashes.
