With PlayStation Vita, Sony believes it has learned from its past hardware's reputation for being difficult to develop for and, thanks to feedback from first and thirdparty studios, has produced its "most developer-friendly hardware yet."
Speaking at Develop In Brighton this morning, head of developer services Kish Hirani gave a blunt assessment of the insular approach Sony has traditionally taken in development of its hardware. "Typically, hardware would have been designed by R&D teams in a bunker somewhere in Japan," he said. "This was very different.
"We started in around 2008 and immediately had a lot of feedback from firstparty and thirdparty studios. Every single person asked for dual analogue sticks. A lot of the tools and asset systems were developed internally by worldwide studios.
"This is a platform that has been designed and developed with developers in mind. It has been created by the developers, for the developers."
Hirani's references to the Vita development kit are peppered with the words "optimised" and "simplified", when describing its video and audio libraries, with special emphasis given to PhyreEngine. Sony's cross-platform development environment, now in its third iteration, is provided as source and free for developers to use, and compatible with other tools from the likes of Scaleform, Nvidia and Havok.
Neil Brown, senior engineer at SCEE R&D, said the range of tools available proved Vita had been greatly influenced by the desire to make things as painless as possible for developers. "We've never had tools at such a mature state before the launch of a platform," he said. "To make this a developer platform, we've made a real commitment to top-quality tools.
"We've tried to make creating a game on PlayStation Vita as straightforward as possible...through a combination of dedicated hardware and dedicated software. Vita has been created from the very start from input from developers on every party of the design. It's our most developer-friendly hardware yet."
It's a bold claim, but a necessary one: Sony has to show it has acknowledged and addressed its reputation for unfriendly development architecture. Not only will Vita's success hinge on the ongoing support of thirdparties, but on independents too: the portable will also play host to smartphone-like game experiences thanks to PlayStation Suite.
Comments
7Sony have never EVER provided good tools, so i would be suprised if things have changed with Vita. That said the PS1 and PSP were both fairly easy to get to grips with, the PS2 & PS3 were/are complete abortions which dev's hate.
I'd be interested to see if the Vita source examples are full of japanese comments as were all of their other sample code for the PSP, something which sony flat out lied about when questioned regading it with PSP.
One of the big reasons Microsoft have done well in the games industry is because they make great tools, with the xbox you use Visual Studio as both the ide and debugger (and much more) whereas with the PS3 you are stuck with crap like ProDg which cannot even remember breakpoints over multiple runs.
Dude you're smart. You must be a CS major!
He knows what he is talking about actually - I can vouch for that (although ProDG can actually integrate into Visual Studio though).
However, I'm not so sure you know what you're talking about OpinionatedMike - more like you're firmly stuck in end-user land and like to dole out sardonic comments towards devs based on more or less ignorance.
Wrong. PSX had some of the best middleware in the history of consoles. If not the best.
I never mentioned middleware, why are you?
jb1 - It's because there's nobody on these boards that can even consider themselves devs. The audience is mostly composed of kiddies/kidults firmly rooted in end-user land.
This should mean that vita ends up with a healthy library then, right sony? Because if you are learning from past mistakes then you have no excuse to mess this up.