Corrinne Yu, who is the former Principal Engine Programmer for 343 Industries has now joined Naughty Dog. Prior to working her five years at 343 Industries Corrinne worked with developer Gearbox Software (responsible for titles such as Borderlands).
“I miss working with many capable developers on the Halo team, but am also excited to develop for PS4,” she wrote on Twitter.
This image was grabbed by a Neogaf member – and the tweet has since disappeared. After this, she posted another tweet – this time being thankful to being greeted to the Naughty Dog Development team:
So what does any of this mean? Well, already the internet is buzzing due to the comments regarding the thin software layer of the PS4. There is a natural indication that this isn’t the case with the Xbox One – and it has a thicker API layer. The idea of coding “close to metal” is simple – you’re able to code specifically to the GPU (graphics card) or whatever hardware you’re coding for. In this process, you don’t have a heavy abstraction layer in the way, these abstraction layers are there as a tool to make it easier to communicate with a large range of hardware. However the issue is that they eat up performance, which is a problem the PC and DirectX 11 are very familiar with right now, particularly with Draw Calls.
Microsoft’s Xbox One is using a version of Windows 8 and DX11, although has been “cut down” in the case of both. DX11 for example has had much of the bloat removed, MS say they’ve stripped away anything which doesn’t benefit the Xbox One. The Playstation 4’s API (application programming interface) and PSSL (Playstation Shader Language) from what we’re told by AMD have more than a few features akin to AMD’s new Mantle (article). It’ll be interesting what Miss Yu makes of such techniques after working with versions of Windows and DX11 for so long.
No doubt Naughty Dog (who’re not strangers with heavy code optimization with titles like the Last of Us on the PS3) will make great use of her skills. She is very “old school” with her techniques and very much enjoys the process of coding right down to the metal. No doubt she’s a perfect addition to the PS4’s development team.
Watch this space as right now, there are rumors from various leakers like CBOAT who’re likely going to have a few words to say about the Xbox One’s API.
