a question I just had when watching this, they talked about the ps3s very powerful math SP units (or w/e they're called).
How did they port everything they did on those units to the ps4 since it doesn't have that hardware? Is it just by bruteforce because the ps4 is that much more powerful?
The PS4's cores are probably much smarter and faster than the PS3's. The speed of the PS3's SPUs was, I'm guessing, relative to the time they came to market (2006) and compared to the other cores in that system. Hearing Cowboy talk about the SPU's like that I was reminded of GPU programming with CUDA or OpenCL. Lots of cores that are great at crunching numbers but terrible at branching.
I found a very interesting (but very technical) talk Christian Gyrling (lead programmer at ND) gave at GDC last year that goes into some of what ND did to port Last of Us to PS4 at 60 FPS. It sounds like it was far from easy.
Seems pretty cool, although I have a problem with them using "jump." I mean it's basically equivalent to a "goto" statement which is considered a terrible programming practice these days. They make code needlessly complicated. So take it with a grain of salt and don't go out trying to program like this.
Also the Fibonacci scale is much simpler than it looks. It just involves adding current number to the last number in the scale. ie. 0 + 1 = 1, then 1 + 1 = 2, then 1 + 2 = 3, then 2 + 3 = 5, then 5 + 3 = 8. etc.
This game is meant to imitate assembly programming, where jump and jump if whatever are your bread and butter. Most high level languages don't even have a goto statement anymore.
This game looks super rad! The "String Storage Floor" assignment is basically how copying strings is implemented in C as well (if you ignore security considerations).
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