Interviews// Rare Senior Programmer, Nick Burton

SPOnG: (Grinning) So, you basically sit in the studio thinking of ways to kill the 360?

Nick Burton: That's what Damiano (Iannetta, graphic programmer at Rare) says, “Atmospheric scattering is computationally very expensive, but my dev kit, I've not killed it yet.”

No, you're not going to write something about killing the 360, are you? When we're talking about killing it we're going "Oh, three frames a second, I see".


SPOnG: The 360's a constantly evolving platform, with all the changes that are made to Xbox Live and so on, and of course you've got the avatars that Rare's doing at the moment. Does that evolution affect you on a programming level?

Nick Burton: It always does, yeah. But sometimes there are challenges that are not barriers. But, for instance, something I was working on the other day; I was writing some particle systems and it was almost back to an N64-like day. It was very, very tight on resources, not tight on computing power, but literally down to the wire on what memory we had because of some things with Live, and the avatars and stuff.

That kind of challenge breeds creativity, as well, and myself and our art director sat down and he said, "Can you make it do that? Can we have more textures?" and I'm saying, "Oh, we can do that through the shader!" But is that going to make it too slow? It doesn't even know it's rendering it, let's face it. It's ticking over, graphic-wise.

So, you get this whole new kind of creativity that restrictions always place on you. That's almost what being a programmer in this industry's about. We always want more memory, always want more GPU power, always want more CPU power.


Even if you gave me a new... (if you gave me) the Xbox 720! I'd say, all right, it's got 32 GPUs, a terabyte of memory and we've got rid of hard disks, it's stored in the cloud. You'd go, "Yeah, it's all very well, but can't we have five audio processors?" It's about analysing what you've got and the new ways you can do things.

That's where the 360's great. It's very flexible (is) the architecture. So, we can take things that in the past we'd have had to have done that way. Now, we can take them and we can (mix) them up and then do seven different things with them here and then put that into this and a completely different thing comes out of it that looks fifty times as expensive as it actually is.

One of the good examples is posture system in Kameo, where there's really only 16 trolls on the battlefield but it looks like there's 4,000 – a bit of creative thinking. You couldn't have done that, realistically. Well, you might have been able to, but it would have been really difficult.

It still amazes me now, we've got guys that (not at Rare, but on the Internet) but they're still programming the Sinclair Spectrum and the Commodore 64, and you look at what they've done with it and think, "How is that even possible?" Because the challenge is that closed system. I find that fascinating! They're going to be really good programmers.