Insomniac Adds PS3-Specific R&D Papers

Author: by Staff

Insomniac Games (Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction) has announced the opening of a public R&D page on its website, with documents detailing the company's work on the PlayStation 3 and technical analysis. In a note announcing the page, Insomniac comments: "This page documents our current research and development in hopes of supporting the PS3 development community and enhancing overall development for its core technologies such as the CELL processor and RSX. In addition, we hope that giving interested tech-heads a deeper look into Insomniac's game development and production philosophy will let them see a bit more of what goes on behind the scenes here." Both Powerpoint slides from internal presentations and larger text files/FAQs have been posted, but the two largest presentations thus far include an article on dynamic SPU code from the company's Mike Acton and Eric Christensen, described as follows: "Using the OS provided system for launching SPUs and SPU code may carry too much overhead though. And sometimes dynamic code loading libraries are just over-complicated. So we've written up a little document to give those of you who want to dynamically load SPU fragments a really straightforward and simple way to do just that." In addition, there's a PDF file called 'Configuring VNC on PS3', explained as follows: "André Leiradella, who has started doing some consulting work for us from Brazil, has written a document describing how he set up VNC with his PS3/Linux box. We've been using PS3/Linux to do development here and there when we're working on something that can be built and tested in isolation from the rest of the system. We've found that to be a good, fast way to iterate on some of our code." Further presentations and documents relating to Insomniac's work are planned to be posted in the future on the webpage.