the crew Ubisoft Reflections doing the PS4, Ivory Tower doing PC/Xbone - [DigitalFoundry]

[Eudemon]

A very good but tech-filled jargon posting by DigitalFoundry on Eurogamer has just went live. In it we here how Ubisoft Reflections are not just working with or collaborating with Ivory Tower on the game, but in fact they are tasked with porting the game to the PS4 and from the sound of it they are enjoying what they have discovered and what possibilities may be implemented or played with in the PS4 version especially.

 

It's a really good read and well worth checking out.

 

 

However, what's curious here is that it's the UK-based Ubisoft Reflections tech team that is entirely responsible for the PS4 edition, while other staff in the Newcastle studio produce additional content for the game - specifically sound, script, the skill challenges and, remarkably, the entire state of Texas. For the PS4 staff, the task facing them looked rather onerous, with the developer taking on a massive codebase generated by an entirely separate studio, the initial aim simply to compile it on the new Sony hardware and try to get some kind of image on-screen.

 

With the basic porting complete, the Ubisoft Reflections team is now ramping up its staff in order to complete the PS4 game ready for the Q1 2014 release, but the core engineering effort in moving The Crew across to PlayStation 4 was accomplished in six months with a team of just two to three people working on it. Overall, Reflections felt that the process of porting over the PC codebase was fairly simple and straightforward.

 

Simon O'Connor did point out that Reflections considers its work on The Crew to end up being much more than a simple, feature-complete port. This is an opportunity to explore what the new hardware is available of, and there's a sense that the PlayStation 4's graphics hardware is not being fully exploited.

 

"The PS4's GPU is very programmable. There's a lot of power in there that we're just not using yet. So what we want to do are some PS4-specific things for our rendering but within reason - it's a cross-platform game so we can't do too much that's PS4-specific," he reveals.

 

 

How The Crew was ported to PlayStation 4 Eurogamer.net

[ScoobSTi]

PC port. Yay.

[The Compensator]

PC port. Yay.

 

Finally. Moar PC racing games.

[Eudemon]

The next-gen consoles being more PC based are only going to help PC gaming and probably even push multi-core development and progression, AMD are in a prime position to capitalise on it all too!

[Ryzza5]

Not a PC port, it's developed on PC (what else would they have been developing on since 2007 when the new dev consoles are only just becoming available now)?

 

It'll be a great time to be a PC gamer next year.

[The Compensator]

Yup.

 

This year: Assetto Corsa, F1 2013 (hoping to give it a try just because of the old F1 cars)

Next year: The Crew, pCARS, new Simbin game (GTR 3?), rFactor 3?

[Damys]

Yup.

 

This year: Assetto Corsa, F1 2013 (hoping to give it a try just because of the old F1 cars)

Next year: The Crew, pCARS, new Simbin game (GTR 3?), rFactor 3?

 

RFactor 3 ? 0.o still has to come out Rfactor 2 (currently in beta) :lol:

[The Compensator]

Ah, and I thought it was the third rFactor that is now in the making. :eek:

 

Thanks.