BUILD | TOOLS // PHYREENGINE
Opening Phyre
As the PS4 readies for release, a pivotal part of the PlayStation SDK is celebrating ten years of powering games. Will Freeman meets two of the creators of PhyreEngine, the cross-platform tech provided with full source code
Richard Forster (above left) and Jason Doig (right), of SCEE R&D, helped shape Sony’s open source games engine that started with graphics and now tackles much more
PhyreEngine is turning ten, and it’s been the same core team involved since the start. As part of that team, how did PhyreEngine come about? Jason Doig, Senior R&D Manager, SCEE: Initially, it was just three of us. Richard and I have been part of the team since the beginning of PhyreEngine, and in fact since the beginning of having a proper research arm within SCEE. Traditionally our research groups have been based in Japan or America, and until we set up there was only really a support team in Europe. We never had that full research arm. Then, around the beginning of the PS3’s
development cycle it was decided we should have a research group, and it was my job to head that up, and Richard was the first person to join me.
Richard Forster, Senior Engineer, SCEE: Yes. Up until then I was developer support, and then I moved across.
Doig: So I’d hijacked him really. The other person was a guy named Michi Eder, who is still with us, so the original team is still here. He came to us from SCEI. He’s actually Austrian, but had ended up in Japan, and was coming back to Europe, so he joined us and formed the original SCEE R&D. We immediately went and had various meetings to discuss what the PS3 was going to be, and very early on in the development cycle of the console people were discussing the software needs and where we should
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take it. It was said that a graphics engine was needed, so we said ‘yes, we can do that’ immediately. That was 2003, and that’s where the project started.
So what inspired those higher up at SCEI that a team of three in London were the people to produce the PS3’s graphics engine? Doig:There’s two things there. It wasn’t necessarily deliberate that we got that piece of work. There was a research arm in the US that had done work for the PS2, and that had produced the research behind the EyeToy, which was eventually developed as a product
Our own list of quite weird rules for how
PhyreEngine should be was where things like it being cross-platform came from.
Richard Forster, SCEE
here in London. So Sony’s research was always moving and taking place in different places. But it was also a matter of dividing up the
work that needed doing across the world, and at the point we formed – maybe a little late to the party – a lot of the work had already been picked off, but nobody had really wanted to tackle the graphics engine. It was quite a big bit of work, looking back.
But I’d had quite a lot of background in
graphics, and I’d worked on the PlayStation 2 Performance Analyser with SCEI, so I’d gone over to Japan to do that. They knew that we had the expertise here in London, so they were quite happy we were keen to take on the graphics engine.
Over the last ten years, what has remained the same about PhyreEngine? What are its consistent, defining qualities? Forster: We set down our own list of quite weird rules that we gave to SCEI for how PhyreEngine should be. That was at the very start, and that was where things like it being cross-platform and open source came from. That starting philosophy really shaped the engine.
Doig:We had very firm ideas about the engine right back then, and I’d done some engine tech stuff previously, right back when first-party was still called Psygnosis, so we’d already done cross-platform PC stuff and things for other consoles. And so when we were setting out that philosophy for a graphics engine to be released to developers, I said that it had to be cross- platform. Up until that point Sony’s SDKs and such had naturally not been cross-platform, but with this engine, I knew nobody would adopt it unless it was just that.
But why is that? Why would proprietary SCE tech be cross-platform? Doig: Well, we can write a really great graphics engine that isn’t cross-platform, but people won’t adopt it, because they need
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