Fly in my eyE

Carmak on the 360: It’s a really sweet development system

Next Gen has this interview up with John Carmack:

On a new rendering engine

"For the last year I’ve been working on new rendering technologies. It comes in fits and starts. Our internal project that’ll incorporate it hasn’t been publicly announced. We’re doing simultaneous development on Xbox 360 and PC, and we intend to release on PlayStation 3 simultaneously as well, but it’s not a mature enough platform right now for us to be doing much work on."

Consoles vs. PC

"The difference between theoretical performance and real-world performance on the CPU level is growing fast. On, say, a regular Xbox, you can get very large fractions of theoretical performance with not a whole lot of effort. The PlayStation 2 was always a mess with the multiple processors on there, but the new generations, with Cell or the Xbox 360, make it much, much worse. They can quote these incredibly high numbers of giga-flops or tera-flops or whatever, but in reality, when you do a straightforward development process on them, they’re significantly slower than a modern high-end PC."

"...The graphics systems are much better than that, though. Graphics have an inherent natural parallelism. The capabilities of the Xbox 360 and PS3 are really good on the graphics side — although, not head or shoulders above any PC stuff that you can buy at a higher price-point."

Xbox 360: 'A really sweet develoment system''

"The Xbox 360 will probably will be id's primary development platform. As it is right now, we would get the game up on the 360. When I would do major hack-and-slash architectural changes it was back on the PC, but it’s looking like the Xbox 360 will be our target. All of our tools are on the PC, and we’re maintaining the game running on the PC, but probably all of our gameplay development and testing will be done on the Xbox 360. It’s a really sweet development system."

posted by Agent 1138 @ 12:38 PM