| JGarret said: What is it like to program for next gen consoles?...smooth sailing? |
For the most part it has simply been a case of getting to grips with the new toolchains, while not much of it is stuff were unfamiliar with a lot of what we are used to doing during the course of developing a title is now done differently, a lot of dirty hacks and tricks used to achieve effects and graphical output now has purpose built functionality in place to better make use of the hardware, in previous generations you could program whatever you wanted but getting that program to run with everything else because a task of trimming off frills here and there, making sacrafices and shortcuts to reach a point where in the end you are balancing things such as complexity of a shader in certain areas to maintain a consistent level of performance, or debating wether or not the environment of a specific area is worth the added effects or if bumping areas you can actually see would make more sense.
For example in dark areas a lot of computation can be culled to increase performance in detail areas that you arent really going to see, and that saving is passed along to lighting effects, it was always a ballancing act between performance and output, one of the primary areas is output resolution versus framebuffer resolution, often times dropping the resolution created a better overall image because the savings made allows for better effects, shaders and so forth, in such instances its a case of dropping resolution in favor of overall visual aesthetics, after all sometimes the non-native resolution could produce a decent image and even hide some of the areas AA misses quite well, where as a sharper image with less effects can give a poorer overall look.
With the new systems, or at least one of them, its not so much been a case of "we can now throw everything at it and it will process it", but more a case of taking the previous bar of balance between performance and image quality and seeing how far we can push it, finding that natural balance is something almost all teams are actively pursuing, regardless of console.
The new hardware is much easier to work with, however.
