"It's very challenging to split those really closely connected pieces of functionality across in multiple threads. That's a very challenging thing to do because we're doing a lot of stuff - tracking all these different players, all of their movements, all the projectiles, all the physics they're doing. The biggest piece of engineering work that they're doing right now, and it's an enormous effort, is to go back through the engine and re-optimise it to be really, truly multi-threaded and break the gameplay thread up. We are multi-threaded, but the primary gameplay thread is very expensive. People who have AMD chips have a disadvantage, because a single core on an AMD chip doesn't really have as much horsepower and they really require you to kind of spread the load out across multiple cores to be able to take full advantage of the AMD processors. We have the exact same kind of Achilles heel on the PC too. The big challenge with the PS4 is its AMD chip, and it really, heavily relies on multi-threading. "The PS4 is a much more consistent, stable platform for us to be able to develop for. "It really is a challenge to optimize high-end PC games to be able to work on the pantheon of hardware that's available to players nowadays, it's just insane. "To engineer the game for the PS4 is a lot easier because you have a consistent set of hardware that you're optimising against," Higby explained. The PC version, which released in November 2012, has been heavily optimised since launch, and Higby said the PS4 is in some regards easier to develop for than the PC because it's a fixed platform. The character format's the same on both, it's just purely a matter of the server updates." "But we're also talking about having character portability, so a PC character, you could transfer it to PlayStation 4, and then back. "They might be a week behind in terms of patching, or a day behind or whatever it ends up being, and we can't really have that. "Because of the update cadence, and the additional steps you have to go through to be able to release an update on the PlayStation network, we're not going to be able to keep our servers in sync, so you won't be able to just play with the same people," Higby explained. In an interview with Eurogamer at the SOE Live event in Las Vegas, Matt Higby, creative director of Planetside 2, said all PC content patches will appear on the PS4, but with a slight delay for approval - and it's this delay that means cross-platform play isn't possible. While Planetside 2 will not feature cross-platform play, the developers at Sony Online Entertainment are trying to work out how the two versions of the free-to-play shooter can link up. Sony is exploring the possibility of letting Planetside 2 players transfer their character between the PlayStation 4 and PC versions.
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