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Opinion: How will Project 2025 impact game developers?
The Heritage Foundation's manifesto for the possible next administration could do great harm to many, including large portions of the game development community.
State of Emergency (SOE) was developed as a PS2 game; the underlying rendering and animation technology consists of over 5000 lines of hand written vector unit assembly code. The biggest hurdle to overcome was the fact the entire game was built around code that was hand-tuned to derive the maximum performance from the PS2 architecture. This article describes the challenges that were encountered when porting SOE from the PlayStation 2 to the Xbox. This article shows that the approach taken was to develop a very specialized Xbox rendering engine that was optimized to perform extremely well in areas of the engine that had relied on the high-performance of specific PS2 hardware. In particular, the code that previously had utilized the vector unit processors.