http://www.gameplayer.com.au/gp_documents/090605SonySecret.aspx

So I had a really good chat with Richard Lemarchand, Co-Lead Game Designer on Uncharted 2: Among Thieves today. With the conference now officially done and dusted I can confidently say that it is game of the show. Especially since God of War III was trumped by Dante’s Inferno, Modern Warfare 2’s demo was not quite as impressive as Homefronts and because Avatar for all its wickedness needs a TV you don’t have to reap its full potential. Anyway, more on my E3 thoughts when I sober up…

Back to Richard: I was so impressed with the visual quality of Uncharted 2 we began discussing the game engine, which is called Naught Dog 2.0 by the way. I was curious as to whether or not Sony had urged them to share the engine about the other Sony affiliated studios. It turns out that the engine is all Naughty Dogs, but that there is another secret developer within the Sony family that feeds off all the advancements from internal and second-party studios to chip away on a base set of tools that are utilised across all games. These are constantly refined to maximise the strengths of the PS3.

It is called Edge Tools, and the development team that is working on it is called The Ice Team. Based in Naughty Dog’s studio, Richard described these guys as being the very best developers within the Sony family and their sole goal is to continue to make sure that the exclusives coming to the PS3 look like they have the Cell edge. So in a convoluted way, elements from Uncharted are passed onto other Sony studios.

It makes perfect sense, and knowledge of its existence can’t help but increase your respect for the way Sony handles its internal software development, even if it is slightly disappointing that it doesn’t help its third-party friends by passing on the goods, given the well documented problems multi-format games have had at the hands of the PS3’s architecture.

if only they used their powers for Good

Yeah, not passing this on to 3rd parties seems dumb. They built the black behemoth, they should support it as well as they can.

Oh well, at least Sony has a whole bunch of first party devs.

I thought everyone knew about the edge tools and the ICE team

Anyway, there is no reason to pass it onto 3rd parties, it gives Sony games the edge over everyone else, they have to compete with 3rd parties, and so the edge tools helps the SCE games be the best on the system

first time ive heard of this

If they shared the tech with Kojima, could MGS4 maintain the same quality graphic with no loading and eliminate the install like Uncharted?

God of War III was beaten by Dante's Inferno?

lolwut?

Dante's Inferno trumped God of War III?

Haven't you heard? The divine comedy is so in.

(And the Gods of Olympus are so passe... at least the ones who've been dismembered by Kratos)

Were has everyone been for the last 2 years. Sony showed off the Playstation Edge tools at GDC 07 along with Home, and Little Big Planet. Also, the Edge tools are very much available to 3rd party developers. That is basically the preimes of the name. These tools are developed to give all developers the Edge to push PS3 games above the competition. The only thing holding back PS3 from topping the competition is the publishers, and the user base. Publishers don't want to appear to be favoring anyone, so they do their best to make games equal across both HD platfroms. This takes away any advantage the PS3 gets from Cell, the standard HDD, or Blu-ray.