priteshmodi said:
No. Hisiru means an internal engine that Microsoft has created for first party devs that will take advantage of the quirks and nuances of the 360's hardware set up. More info: http://www.vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=78013 Since that article I haven't heard anything about it though. The 4A games engine is very very impressive also. Here's some info on it: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/metro-2033-4a-engine-impresses-blog-entry http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-metro2033-article
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FTA regarding architecting on PS3 then porting to XBOX:
"We don't have dedicated threads for processing specific tasks in-game with the exception of a PhysX thread," explains Shishkovtsov. "All our threads are basic workers. We use task-model but without any pre-conditioning or pre/post-synchronising. Basically all tasks can execute in parallel without any locks from the point when they are spawned. There are no inter-dependencies for tasks.
It looks like a tree of tasks, which start from more heavyweight ones at the beginning of the frame (to make the system self-balanced). The last time I measured the statistics, we were running approximately 3,000 tasks per 30ms frame on Xbox 360 on CPU-intensive scenes with all hardware threads at 100 per cent load."
And again, similar to Criterion's multi-threading work, 4A Games has found that a similar implementation works on the Sony console too.
"The PS3 is not that different... We use 'fibres' to 'emulate' a six-thread CPU, and then each task can spawn a SPURS (SPU) job and switch to another fibre. This is a kind of PPU off-loading, which is transparent to the system. The end result of this beautiful (apart from somewhat restricting) model is that we have perfectly linear scaling up to the hardware deficiency limits."
While the engine is described as a complete cross-platform development environment, there is to be no PlayStation 3 SKU of Metro 2033. The game will launch on PC and Xbox 360 only. However, the Sony console played a big part in the development work for the core tech.
"From the start we selected the most 'difficult' platform to run on. A lot of decisions were made explicitly knowing the limits and quirks we'll face in the future," explains Shishkovtsov.
FTA regarding KZ:
Looking at the engine spec published on Digital Foundry yesterday, there are many similarities in terms of technologies with Guerrilla Games' epic Killzone 2: pretty much the standard other developers have to aspire to in the console realm when it comes to first-person shooters. Guerrilla's engine is quite remarkable, geared completely to the specific hardware strengths of the Sony platform, but Shishkovtsov evaluates its performance from a different perspective.
"Their implementation seems to be badly optimised," he observes. "Otherwise why do they have pre-calculated light-mapping? Why do they light dynamic stuff differently to the rest of the world with light-probe similar stuff? From our experience you need at least 150 full-fledged light-sources per frame to have indoor environments look good and natural, and many more to highlight such things like eyes, etc. It seems they just missed that performance target."
Really, doesn't look like there's anything significant on a PS3 that can't be done on the 360 with the exception of more content due to BlueRay, especially considering the larger memory size and more flexible shaders on the 360. Engines are built to the strengths of the system - ex. Ninja Gaiden II on 360 had more enemies due to more flexibility in vertex shaders, whereas in Sigma 2 they had to cut the number of enemies but instead used more horsepower on the graphics due to the RSX restrictions, as well as less alpha blending scenarios which the PS3 is notoriously bad at.
So whether these games/engines are possible on the 360 would probably depend on how well the engine is written, but I'd bet anyone would be hard pressed to name a specific engine feature that absolutely could not be implemented on the 360 that could be done on the PS3, except of course BlueRay movie playback.
