A Look At the Tech Behind Burnout Paradise

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday June 17, 2009 @10:33PM from the eight-cylinders-of-awesome dept.

Eurogamer sat down with Richard Parr and Alex Fry of Criterion Games about the evolution of the technology behind Burnout Paradise , and how they engineered a complex, open world across multiple platforms. "Criterion's method of exacting the most performance from the new architecture isn't so much about threading as such, it's all about parallelization. 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 optimized 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." The first part of their Q&A session has also been posted.

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If only they'd mastered some OLDER technology by kieran · 2009-06-18 01:49 · Score: 0, Troll

I played through BP on one-player a while back and loved it. I sold it, but re-bought it recently as a party game (now I have a console-friendly housemate) and we discovered it doesn't do f***ing split-screen multiplayer - even if you buy the add-on party pack, it's pass-the-controller action.
So if I want to race my friends, they have to be in another house. How sociable!
A**holes.