Eurogamer managed to get exclusive acces to Criterion Games for this interview with Richard Parr, technical director.We're talking about the evolution of the Burnout technology over the years and at this point, Criterion's methodology in its Face-Off defying cross-platform development. Eighteen months on from the initial release of Burnout Paradise, it is still the most technically advanced multi-format racing game on console, offering a gameplay experience that is to all intents and purposes identical on both major consoles, and now PC.
"Very early on we made a lot of very right decisions in terms of the architecture and the software and the way we were going to approach things, which has worked extremely well for us. Our aim was to produce an architecture that would work well on PS3, 360 and PC," Parr explains.
Criterion's method of exacting the most performance from the new architecture isn't so much about threading as such, it's all about parallelisation. Rather than lump different game aspects onto different threads (where massive latencies can build as each processor waits for the other to finish its work), game code is highly optimised to make use of what processors are available at any given moment on whatever target hardware, and by choosing the all-important balance points, the experience is like-for-like on all platforms. High-level management code that is unique to each platform then processes the game code according to the hardware that is available.
Read the full interview and see the video's here on Eurogamer...