The folks at U.K. consumer site Pro-G have posted an interesting interview with Morten Heiberg, a programmer for Eidos' upcoming Kane & Lynch: Dead Men (which ships next week).

The focus of the piece was on the game mostly, but Heiberg did provide some interesting responses when asked about developing on the different platforms (PC vs. Xbox 360 vs. PS3). Echoing what others in the development community have stated before, he said, "Development wise there's been some challenges on getting up and running on the PlayStation. It's a new platform for us. It's our first PS3 game. It's a challenging platform to develop on, but it's also one that has a lot of potential that's just waiting to be unlocked as people get to know it better, as developers get more skilled at utilizing the machine."

He went on to say that the Xbox 360 and PC are "very similar," so the development is more familiar on those platforms whereas the PS3 brings something entirely new.

"The PS3 doesn't have many general purpose CPUs like a multi core system has on the PC side. It has a CELL processor which is itself a pretty powerful processor but if you're really going to get something out of it you're going to have to utilize the SPUs on it, which are small special purpose units that you write little programs for doing whatever you need to get done. Those are not just standard threads that you just spawn like you do on a PC, you have to really think it through and identify areas in your game that will benefit from this and isolate that code and make the cuts so you can transfer the minimal amount of data to and from those units and get the most processing power out of them," he elaborated.

"It's a very different approach. The code ends up being rather different than it is on the Xbox and the PC. You can start with something that's pretty much the same and then you try to run it on the PS3 and it doesn't run very well. Then you start to optimize it and optimize it and you get further away from where you started but you really start to unlock some of the potential of the PS3."

He added that although working on the PS3 "requires a bit of resources and special effort, which costs money... on the other hand it's something that I think most developers are rather keen on getting in to because it's a new fresh system and it's an interesting architecture. Development wise it's fun."