Floodgate engine to assist in cell processor programming

by Nick Doerr { Sep 13th 2006 at 9:30AM }

Emergent Technologies sat down with MMORPG's Aaron Roxby to talk about their new game engine, Gambryo, which powers games like Oblivion, Civilization IV, Dark Age of Camelot, and Warhammer Online. You can check out all the details of the engine if you'd like, but the real news (at least for us at PS3fanboy) comes in the flavor of, well, the PS3. Namely, Emergent Technologies is trying to optimize Gambryo for use with the Playstation 3.

To do so, they're creating a Stream Processing Engine dubbed Floodgate. To quote Emergent: "the PS3's multithreading Cell processor can make development complicated and Floodgate hopes to simplify the process. One of the more exciting aspects of Floodgate is that it is being designed as a cross-platform engine. So, once you have developed a game for the PS3, it can be easily ported directly to the Xbox 360 or PC." That would be great!

Floodgate may help developers toss up games to their maximum potential on the PS3 (a standard 1080p for more games, even multi-platform) and then easily change the necessary components to port them onto PC or the 360. We're not saying "downgrade" because that's not entirely fair or true, since we've not had the chance to see Floodgate in action, let alone the PS3 sitting on our shelves (it's invisible, too). What do you guys think? Will this Stream Processing Engine help pump up the more hesitant developer's support for Sony's new console?

Tags: Emergent Technologies, EmergentTechnologies, Floodgate, Playstation 3, Playstation3, PS3