Went to Nanyang Polytechnic today for a talk on the development of games.

The speaker was Mr Yuji Yasuhara, a programmer who single-handedly programmed a game for PS, and now part of a team that created Gran Turismo 3 and 4 for PS2.

Listen to him talked, was haha, abit uncomfortable, because he's a Japanese and his English isn't good. He spent all the time talking about how he designed and created his game for PS, everything from scope of vision to Assembly code that accesses the register. He even went into the ever-so-familiar C, talking about floating point operations (or rather, the fact that PS lacked floating operation and everything have to be done using integers).

Later he showed us the game, using a PS2 plugged in there, then pressing cheat codes that unlocks all the levels (he told us only he knows the cheat code), and explaining to us the game.

Running out of time, he gave a quick description on the production of GT4, like about him going home only 3 to 4 days in a month, taking only 3-4 days leave in 6 months, 60 people spending 3 years on the game etc etc.

A Q&A session followed after that, with a panel consisting of him, and people from local game companies.

Well, I have learnt abit from this talk, and I guess its not easy to whether set up my own game company, or joining a game company and working under the noses of others. Still, a career in this field is not bad, and I shall seriously consider that.

He revealed something interesting. Although CPU and memory speeds are getting faster and faster, acessing registers is getting slower and slower, because of the fact that CPU speeds are increasing much faster than memory speeds (err something along this line la).

Time taken:
PS1: 16 cycles
PS2: 50 cycles
PS3: x000 cycles (he declined to reveal the actual figure haha)

NAPFA's tomorrow! AH!