Monday, August 15, 2005

The godfather of modern 3D gaming speaks out about development on the Xbox 360 and the PS3 as well as the tribulations of tomorrow's developers.

Carmack's platform of choice for console development is the Xbox 360, and he explained why ... the Xbox 360 was designed to have a very thin API layer. In Carmack's words, he can "basically talk directly to the hardware ... doing exactly what I want."

Carmack heaped praise on the decisions that Microsoft has made with the Xbox 360. "It's the best development environment I've seen on a console," he says. Microsoft has taken a very developer-centric approach, creating a system that's both powerful but easy to code for. This is in contrast to Nintendo, Sony, and (formerly) Sega, who generally focused on the hardware.