Programming for PS3?

It is happy to point out that PS3 is not as complicated to write for as we've all been led to believe. Apparently, the machine's use of Open GL as its graphics API means that anyone who's ever written games for the PC will be intimately familiar with the set-up. In fact, PS3 employs a cut-down version named Open GL ES, which is even simpler.

The graphics capabilities of PS3 will be slightly above the absolutely top-end graphics cards on the PC, but you've got much more processing power in the box so you're going to see a lot more physics, a lot more generated geometry. With water ripples, for example - they're pretty much algorithms, you have a flat plane of triangles and you run some sort of mathematical algorithm over it to generate a surface rippling effect - well, you will have the processing power to do these sorts of generated geometry effects On PS3. You could actually put one chip aside just to do that...

Volatile reckon PS3 is going to be much better for HD cinematics than Xbox 360, thanks to its Blu-Ray storage medium. 20 minutes of HD-TV footage takes up around 4.7GB, so an Xbox 360 game would quickly run out of space. This is going to matter more in the coming years as movies and games merge and we see more film elements being brought across to games.

So there you go. PS3 is relatively easy to program for if you have experience with high-end PCs - certainly more straightforward than PS2 with its proprietary graphics APIs. We've also heard lots of talk - from various studios - that Sony's developer support will be a lot stronger with PS3 (it's already much, much better with PSP apparently). Time will tell.