http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/InsideXbox/Corrinne-Yu-Principal-Engine-Architect-for-Halo-Team-Microsoft-Part-Two/

Corrinne Yu is the Principal Engine Architect for Halo Team Microsoft. In this video, she drops by the Channel 9 Studio for Part Two of her interview. You can watch Part One here. All questions for Corrinne were asked by YOU, the Channel 9 audience. Here is a list of some of the questions she answers: 

JamboGT: I am currently at a University where I am studying C++ programming, game design and game system architecture as well as a few other related modules. What I want to ask you is what extra things should I take onboard myself to learn that would help in regards to the industry and help me stand out from the other prospective games programmers? 

Keithoconor: Given the possibilities the raw horsepower of the SPU has opened up for parallelizing graphics techniques that would otherwise be impractical in real-time, what sort of processor architecture would you like to see prevailing in the next generation of Xbox and consoles in general?

 
Ion Todirel: Suppose you are on a team who develops a game for 2 different platforms, e.g. XBOX360 and PS3. You (Corrinne) mentioned that you prefer to own the code bases, what would you do in this case, have 2 separate code bases with some common ground or use an engine that has ports on both platforms? Or port your own engine to PS3 (that would presumably end with another code base)?

 

Ion Todirel: What do you think about XNA, does it have a place outside of arcade games? Could there be a place for Bartok in the video games industry?

 

Magicalclick: I want to know, anything from mesh/texture generation concept? And tools that can produce a really nice looking mesh/texture during gameplay without much processing?

 

Ecaradec: You talked about frequency space in a precedent interview. What kind of issues are best solved in frequency space? How much of an engine is rewritten between games? Do you have some advice on software design?

Discussion of part one can be found here: http://www.vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=108982&page=1

Enjoy

Once again, completely lost. But her enthusiasm and knowledge is still quite impressive.

One thing I did catch, though, was how it seems that the designed ease of programming for the 360 vs the PS3 has caused devs to become lazy. She knows that there is more to be had from the 360's architecture and kept encouraging devs to reach out into different methods of coding to tap into it just like devs were forced to do on the PS3. Interesting conundrum, I must say ...

This is basically the biggest and most important part to take out of this.

I find it funny when at one point she mentions something about mutliplatform developers were optimising code to work on the PS3 SPU and it automatically ran better on the 360 using the same optimizations because the 360 can handle quite a bit of parallization as well.  Devs just need to stop taking the quick and easy route that the 360 provides out the door and tap further into what it can do.