Naughty Dog has never been prone to keeping secrets, even during their PS2 days. They were more than happy to swap technology with notable PS2 developer, Insomniac Games, and work with other developers in order to get the most out of the hardware. And thanks to the efforts of Phil Harrison, this generous behavior has carried over to all first party PS3 developers. However, Evan Wells, the co-president of Naughty Dog, revealed that his team is taking the concept of technology sharing to an entirely new level.
“We’re very fortunate to have a great group of first party developers within Sony that we’re able to collaborate with. We’re frequently exchanging technical ideas and even share some code from time to time.
We’ve even posted the entire source code of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune to Sony’s internal severs so that any first party developer can look through it, or borrow from it…and we plan on doing the same thing when Uncharted 2 ships.”
But 3rd party developers, despite lacking access to this code, still get special treatment from the Dogs. Evan noted that Sony’s ICE team, located internally at Naughty Dog, has been releasing optimized PS3 code through EDGE libraries for years to all PS3 developers.
Here are some of the technologies that will be made available to first party devs through Uncharted 2’s source code once the title releases this Fall:
- Screen Space Ambient Occlusion
- Deferred Rendering
- Cloud Computing
- Parallax Mapping
- High Dynamic Range Tone-Mapping
- Per Object Motion Blur
- Cascade Shadows
- Subsurface Scattering
[Source]
