With simpler architectures and an emphasis on social media and sharing, it’s been purported that the next generation of gaming consoles, namely the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, are little more than high-end PCs. In fact, several developers have proclaimed that as a plus especially in regards to the PlayStation 4 when you consider how difficult it was to develop for the PS3.
We recently spoke to CEO of Just Add Water and Oddworld Inhabitants development director Stewart Gilray, who has Oddworld: New ‘N’ Tasty coming out for the PS4 and PC, about the same, to which he replied, “Completely, it’s a high-end PC with extras, by that I mean the DDR5 RAM, the fact it doesn’t have an OS such as Windows on it taking up MUCH of the system resources, leaving us developers access to pretty much the entire hardware, meaning we can do more at with better performance than an equivalent PC spec.”
That last part is especially interesting, since rumours have been running rampant about the PS4 only allowing 5.5 GB of RAM for games (which some devs for the console rubbished).
We also asked about the shift to the Unity engine, following reports that New ‘N’ Tasty was on the Unreal engine. Did the team benefit from Unity? Gilray responded, “Not sure where that came from, we’ve NEVER used the Unreal engine and never will. We did switch to Unity at the end of 2012, but I’m not going to discuss which engine that was.
“Unity has been a breathe of freshair, compared to the previous engine. Unity is so modular and so so easy to work with, it took us around 3 months to get back to where we were before the switch, but we’ve made massive time savings thanks to the switch.”
Oddworld: New ‘N’ Tasty is currently scheduled to release for Linux, PC, Mac OS X, PS3 and Wii U this Holiday season while the PS4 version is due out next year.