The research and development team of console manufacturers are always hard at work on improving the software development kits for their platforms, and a new career opportunity ad from Sony Computer Entertainment Europe gives us some insight on what the Old Continent branch of the house of PlayStation is working on.

The SCEE R&D Development Team work on a range of projects geared towards helping game developers make the best games on PlayStation® platforms.

We are looking for an engineer with both strong technical skills and excellent written and verbal communication skills to join our team to work on R&D projects, tutorials and training materials for developers.

You will join a small team of engineers and a technical artist who work primarily on graphics related technologies.

Recent projects include Image based lighting, Gesture recognition, Image processing, Compute based image compression, Post processing and Shader static analysis tools. The team also produce a range of sample code and documentation for developers, including technical white papers, training materials and articles for our website on a wide range of development topics and we present regularly at developer conferences. Strong written and verbal communication skills are therefore essential.

Through these projects you will have the opportunity to expand your experience and develop expert understanding of PlayStation® hardware, SDKs and development tools while working closely with R&D and providing consultancy support to Develop Support teams within the worldwide Sony Computer Entertainment organization.

We are looking for a strong candidate with experience of a games development from working directly with platform SDKs, perhaps as part of a core technologies team. They should have a good understanding of computer hardware architecture, experience of low level coding, performance analysis and optimization and be comfortable with shader programming on modern GPUs.

Image-based lighting has already been used in a few games (Forza Motorsport 4 is an example), often in a limited way, and it involves lighting objects according to the colors and features of an image of the environment around them, normally projected on a dome-shaped surface. It allows for highly detailed and realistic lighting of a scene.

The rest is rather self-explanatory, with compute-based image compression meaning the shift of compression of textures and assets on the GPU, speeding up the process and making it more efficient. This is of course related exclusively to the PS4.

It'll definitely be interesting to see how far Sony will manage to push the SDKs in the future, especially for PS4. It's unlikely that the house of PlayStation will make any official announcements about most of this, as these are developer-facing improvements that normally result on a gradual improvement of the games over time, and the specific enhancements are often closely NDA-guarded secrets.