ND: Entire Uncharted source code available to Sony's first parties

Naughty Dog's co-president has revealed that the company is not only happy to work with other developers, but that the entire source code for their first PS3 game is available to all of Sony's first-party developers.

In a live PlayStation Blog interview, Naughty Dog's co-president Evan Wells has revealed that they've decided to share almost everything they can in their development of their PlayStation 3 engine.

"We're very fortunate to have a great group of first party developers within Sony that we're able to collaborate with. We're frequently exchanging technical ideas and even share some code from time to time," Wells writes.

"We've even posted the entire source code of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune to Sony's internal severs so that any first party developer can look through it, or borrow from it...and we plan on doing the same thing when Uncharted 2 ships."

But what if you're not a first-party (owned by Sony Computer Entertainment) PS3 developer? Wells highlights that Sony's ICE team is located internally at Naughty Dog: the ICE team has been writing optimised PS3 code for the past five years, with their work being shared with all PS3 developers in the form of the EDGE libraries.

Many agree that Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is one of the most graphically impressive games on the PS3, with it being wildly believed that its sequel, Among Thieves, could top all console games entirely.

So what are developers being given access to? According to Wells, Uncharted 2 includes the following techniques:

"Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, deferred rendering, cloud computing, parallax mapping, high dynamic range tone-mapping, per object motion blur, cascade shadows, sub surface scattering simulation..."

Exciting stuff and we hope that other developers really take note of Naughty Dog's work.

Find out more about Uncharted 2: Among Thieves here.