PS4 lead architect Mark Cerny has revealed that the next gen console from Sony would be as approachable to developers and as dev-friendly as the original PlayStation was. He said that the hardware team has learned a hard lesson from the PS3 and so have endeavored to make the PS4 less cumbersome.
During a keynote address at the GameLab expo in Barcelona, he explained the term “time to triangle”- which essentially denotes the time required by coders to create usable graphics. The “time to triangle” for the PS One was one to two months, whereas the PS2, remembered for its complex architecture, required three to six months of coding.
The hardware for the PlayStation 3 was the most complex that was ever built after Ken Kutaragi, the then head of SCE asked Cerny to focus more on the bigger picture of building highly sophisticated hardware. As a result the “time to triangle” on the PS3 increased to a period of about six to twelve months.
The resultant affect was that both the first party and third party developers came across much difficulty in coding for the PS3. So, keeping the disadvantages in mind, Cerny decided to take a different approach for the PS4 than what was the outlook of Kutaragi.
In 2008, Cerny sent questionnaires to third party developers to know their views on what they wanted for the PS4. The feedback received was properly evaluated and the hardware configuration was designed accordingly.
Cerny claims that the “time for triangle” of the PS4 is one to two months which, theoretically, makes it as developer friendly as the PlayStation One.
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