Factor 5's advice for cross-platform developers? Make the PS3 version first.

Julian Eggebrecht from Factor 5 once again gives his thoughts on the Cell and the PS3, and discusses the massive scope of his upcoming game, Lair.

By Eugene Huang

Factor 5 president and co-founder Julian Eggebrecht has stated in previous interviews that his team's decision to make their upcoming game Lair PlayStation 3 exclusive was based completely on the power of the console and nothing else. Still, even without knowing that, it takes just one brief conversation with Eggebrecht to discover that he and the people he works with are strict devotees of technology. So, it comes as no surprise that, in a recent interview with the San Jose Mercury News, Eggebrecht once again extols the virtues of the system he's currently developing games for.

"The interesting question becomes 'oh boy, we could go on forever optimizing for the PlayStation 3,'" he states. "The PS3 has more of the situation where you could go another six months easily and forever. You can get so much more power. RSX [the PS3's graphics processing unit] is a known quantity, but Cell is pretty limitless at this point."

Eggebrecht also comments on the number of development studios who have so far complained that programming games for the PS3 is far too difficult in comparison to the 360. In his opinion, the majority of these complaints come from development teams who try to port games from the 360 to the PS3 instead of doing it the other way around.

"[Microsoft] created the 360 engine with a unified memory architecture in mind, with the embedded frame buffer with its advantages and disadvantages, and not thinking too much in early stages about multicore," he explains. "If you try to get that over to the PS3, you're in for a bad surprise. The PS3 is all about streamlining about the two different memory pools. They are separate. You don't have to do tiling because you don't have an embedded frame buffer.

"If you create first on the PS3," he later adds, "it is pretty easy to port it to the 360. A lot of companies coming on board now will probably start on the PS3 and move to the 360. The lucky thing for us is we didn't have to think about the 360 at all.

As far as his own game goes, Eggebrecht boasts that, out of all the PS3 titles to be released so far, Lair is the only game that gives you the same amount of detail on both ground level and 20,000 feet in the air. It is this third-dimensional aspect of detail that he claims sets it apart from a game like Gears of War, for instance.

"In Gears of War there is no way you could actually go above the city and then basically go seamlessly from air to ground. Unreal Engine in the end just provides for corridor, and corridor being more a metaphor here in terms of design," he notes. "Our engine is always designed in a huge world bubble and that can be 32 kilometers by 32 kilometers. You can go anywhere at extreme speeds. Unreal Engine is dependent on the fact that you go relatively slowly through your world. With us, you can go through the world fast or slowly."

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