Some Heavenly Sword load time, demo, SPU usage details
A long time ago we mentioned that a demo for Heavenly Sword was in the works. No, we don't have a date for the demo yet, but from what was gleaned in the statements by Dean Calver, the lead programmer at Ninja Theory, it's coming along quite nicely. Just like the rest of the game. He said, "if you take the PSN demo we are currently doing, then we have a separate team (borrowed from Sony Cambridge) who are doing the work to make it a stand alone demo while the NT team are working on Beta. There's still work for the main team fixing bugs and balancing but it's much less than full time."
Having two teams is pretty wise -- that way no time is wasted making a demo. The "real" team can keep plugging away at making the actual game pure quality and that seems to be exactly what they're doing. An example of their efforts shines through with their approach to load times: " ... at the beginning of each chapter we have a introductory cut scene, while thats happening we are also caching data from Blu-ray to hard disk. This way when we actually are streaming while you play we can use both sources at the same time." We like the sound of that, because loading screens can be pretty annoying if they pop up all the time (we're looking at you, Magna Carta ... you really suck).
Finally, when asked about the percentage of the SPU the team has utilized, Calver has no idea. He said that you only really know stats like that when you feel bottlenecked by the hardware and Ninja Theory apparently hit no walls at all in their programming. This leaves us to wonder if they only used a fraction of the PS3's power, much like Motorstorm. We can't wait to play it!
