Sony clarifies Home development roadmap

News

Ed Fear Jul 26 2007, 10:30am

DEVELOP CONFERENCE: But format-holder unwilling to commit on rough time-frames in public session

Playing his cards close to his chest, Home's tools manager James Cox showed a little of the roadmap for Sony's virtual world tools in a talk at yesterday's Develop conference.

Despite refusing to commit to even a rough timeframe for future Home Development Tookit (HDK) releases, due to the public nature of the event, Cox nevertheless was able to reveal some points.

The toolkit is currently at version 0.1 and contains the basic
necessary tools for creating 'scenes,' although with only Maya support at present.

He also revealed that 3D minigame authoring capabilities won't be in the HDK until version 0.8, alongside support for authoring custom avatar clothing, furniture and home items. Exporters for the 'trophy' game achievements system will not be in the HDK until version 1.1

A few details also surfaced regarding 2D minigames, including that they will be locked to a 1024x768 resolution and limited to a 6mb memory pool, which is to include all textures, audio, scripts and the Lua runtime virtual machine.

Sony is, however, still committed to the introduction of Home later this year - the service is already in a lengthy beta process. You can read our previous exclusive report on the platform, taken from information at this year's DevStation, here.