Developing for PS3 is “fun”

Hotly anticipated third-person shooter Kane & Lynch will run equally well on PS3 and Xbox 360, despite Sony’s console requiring “special effort“, its lead PC programmer has revealed.

Speaking to Pro-G in an interview yesterday, Morten Heiberg, of Hitman developer IO Interactive, said that while the assets were very similar across the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC versions of the game, the team had experienced some challenges “getting up and running” on Sony’s next-gen console.

He said: “It’s a new platform for us. It’s our first PS3 game. It’s a challenging platform to develop on, but it’s also one that has a lot of potential that’s just waiting to be unlocked as people get to know it better and as developers get more skilled at utilising the machine.”

Kane & Lynch: Dead Men is an adult third-person action shooter which draws inspiration from classic heist movies like Reservoir Dogs. Its two main characters, Kane and Lynch, are anti-heroes with dodgy pasts and questionable morals. In the game you take control of Kane as you battle to save his family from the clutches of brutal gang The7. A second player can drop in and out of the campaign as Lynch to play the game co-operatively.

When asked what exactly makes it a challenging platform to work on, Heiberg pointed towards the way the PS3’s CELL processor works and said that game code “ends up being rather different” compared with Xbox 360 and PC versions of the same game.

He said: “The Xbox and the PC are very similar. They are just two very powerful CPUs and you can make it through your threads and be sure that it’s going to run reasonably OK. The PS3 doesn’t have many general purpose CPUs like a multi core system has on the PC side. It has a CELL processor which is itself a pretty powerful processor, but if you’re really going to get something out of it you’re going to have to utilise the SPUs on it, which are small special purpose units that you write little programs for doing whatever you need to get done.

“Those are not just standard threads that you just spawn like you do on a PC. You have to really think it through and identify areas in your game that will benefit from this and isolate that code and make the cuts so you can transfer the minimal amount of data to and from those units and get the most processing power out of them.”

He added: “It’s a very different approach. The code ends up being rather different than it is on the Xbox and the PC. You can start with something that’s pretty much the same and then you try to run it on the PS3 and it doesn’t run very well. Then you start to optimise it and optimise it and you get further away from where you started but you really start to unlock some of the potential of the PS3.”

Despite these challenges, Heiberg confirmed to Pro-G that there was no frame rate reduction in the PS3 version of Kane & Lynch: Dead Men. When asked if developing for the PS3 was a headache for IO, Heiberg said that despite it requiring additional resources and special effort, most developers are “keen” on the platform because of its interesting architecture.

“Well obviously it’s something that requires a bit of resources and special effort, which costs money“, he said. “But on the other hand it’s something that I think most developers are rather keen on getting into because it’s a new fresh system and it’s an interesting architecture. Development wise it’s fun. It brings back a lot of memories from college and university. In many ways it’s a fun architecture to work on but definitely one that’s also going to cost you some money because you need to write special purpose code for it.”

For Pro-G’s full interview with Morten Heiberg, where he discusses getting the game heard during the busy holiday season and why its multiplayer is more interesting than Gears of War’s or Halo 3’s, check elsewhere on the site. And if that’s not enough, we’ll have a hands-on preview of the game later in the week.

Kane & Lynch: Dead Men is out for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC on November 23.