Uncharted 2: Among Thieves was an impressive game graphically from a technical level. According to developer Naughty Dog, the game was so bleeding edge it nearly didn’t all fit in the PS3.
“If anyone on the team makes a face like, ‘Oh, we’re f*cked’, then we know we’re good,” said Naughty Dog co-president Christophe Balestra to Edge. “We have to be uncomfortable. Three weeks before shipping Uncharted 2, we couldn’t even fit the game in memory. The day we have no solution to that, that’s going to be a real problem.”
“We shoot for the moon, which is what the artists want to see,” added Balestra. “We’re driven by artists, and it’s the job of the programmers to make it fit, in terms of memory and frame-rate. The artists will always go beyond what we have at our disposal, and [newly previewed U3 level] Chteau is a perfect example.”
They’re not resting on their laurels either, saying that they’re looking to optimize the Cell processor’s SPUs as much as is humanly possible. “We’re at full speed, optimizing code specifically for the SPUs,” explained Balestra. “It’s a great resource because [SPUs] are extremely fast, and if you optimize they get faster than you ever thought they could be. That’s where the quality of our images comes from.”
Source: CVG
