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The Problems With Porting Games
mr_sifter writes "There's a large lexicon of monosyllabic, four-letter words for describing something you don't like — but only PC gamers use the word 'port' with such a fervent degree of repulsion. Common complaints about console ports include meager graphics options, dodgy third-person camera angles, poorly-thought-out controls and sparsely distributed save points. In this feature, Bit-tech talks to developers of games such as Dead Space, Red Faction and Tales of Monkey Island to find out why porting games between the three major consoles and the PC is so difficult. Radically different CPU, graphics and memory architectures play their part, as do the differences in control methods and the rules Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo set about how games should work on their systems."
Ported game,
Crying shame.
Like lesser lather,
Endless flame.
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Well I'm a PC gamer and PC's are the far superior platform, as any real gamer like me knows. Anyone who doesn't use a mouse and keyboard is clearly inferior to me and lacks my intelligence and superior taste in gaming. If you want to know more on the subject, just come to the videogame store where I work sometime. I regularly spend hours there snobbishly berating console game buying customers and informing them of my superiority.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to play the pompous villain in an 80's teen flick. Ferrari is the ONLY car to drive, you know.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Since the vast majority of developers can achieve the vast majority of technical feats with enough time and effort. The problem is the fact time and effort costs money. The Guitar Hero 3 port was crap because no-one put any real money behind it, simply because chances are, no-one would buy it. That only makes sense.
I understand a lot of what the devs are saying, but if I'm going to be really negative about this I couldn't help get an uneasy feeling reading about Dead Space. So, essentially he's saying "don't blame the consoles for the restrictive PC experience, blame us, we chose to make it restrictive!" Surely saying they designed it explicitly for consoles, so natrually it wouldn't work well on the PC, is the epitome of consolification? If I designed a game that only worked "as intended" on my Nokia 3210, and thus doesn't work well on anything else, claiming no-one can complain because it was originally designed for a phone is not an excuse. It's still just poor design choices.
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
A hardcore, hard-hitting, take-no-prisoners storyline on a 360 or PS3 console would have a hard time making it past the nintendo comitees unscathed. See the Expurgation of Maniac Mansion for a famous case of this self-censorship that nobody really asked for: http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/maniac.html
All the stuff about CPU architectures and rendering pipelines and things falls into the "Hard; but we have smart people who can do that, if EA gives them enough time" pile.
Making an interface that actually works properly on both Mouse+keyboard and gamepad(never mind wii stick) falls into the "squaring the circle with world peace" pile.
...RTFA?
I am afraid something went wrong with the href to this 'large lexicon of monosyllabic, four-letter words'. And I was finally tempted to read the article!
Having trouble making a good conversion from pad to keyboard is one thing, but not being able to remap the keys is just stupid.
If I had a nickel for every time someone purchased a terrible port...
Oh wait, someone IS making that... and making alot of Nickels...
And I thought port was just some kind of wine... :|
Life is too good to waste... Read!
Oh course, I suppose having the entire original PC dev team involved along with some Wiiware developers helps.
There's a large lexicon of monosyllabic, four-letter words for describing something you don't like ...
... only to be disappointed because it is lacking heavily in four-letter words for describing something you don't like. now that would make a great article.
i glanced at 1st sentence of the summary, and got all excited to read the article
Unfortunately, porting games these days is almost necessary considering the recent economy and downward spiral of the gaming environment.
That being said, it makes sense that some of the ports are poorly done â" a company is only going to put effort into a product they expect to do well. For example, an ultraviolent game would not, or should not expect to do particularly well in the Wii environment given the restrictions of the console (lower graphics) and the demographics of the people who use the said console.
Thus, I would expect the total effort on the developer and QA side would be focused on the platform where it WILL perform well and is why we have disparagements between platforms.
It's split across six pages for no good reason. (and no printer friendly version)
/. should have better standards for posted articles.
I believe you mean ``bowdlerizing''....
spelling aside, Nintendo has eased the reins a bit, and one can find ``mature'' titles for the Wii now, even including WiiWare (though I'd be inclined to describe ``Sexy Poker'' as immature, puerile drivel).
A quick search reveals quite a few M-rated games:
Alone In The Dark
Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30
Call of Duty: World at War
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: Hard Evidence
Dead Rising: Chop Til You Drop
Driver: Parallel Lines
Escape from Bug Island
MadWorld
Manhut 2
Mortal Kombatâ: Armageddon
No More Heroes
Obscure: The Aftermath
Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers
Resident Evil 4
Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles
Target Terror
Tenchu: Shadow Assassins
The Godfather: Blackhand Edition
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Double Agentâ
&c.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
"...only PC gamers use the word 'port' with such a fervent degree of repulsion"??
How about Mac OS X users!!?
Every time they give us a "port" these days, it's just someone repackaging the PC game code around the Cider engine, tweaking some of Cider's parameters until it appears to "basically run ok" and then they turn around and charge full retail price for it, AFTER it's been out at least 3 months for the PC already!
Never-mind the PC version might ALREADY have just been ported from a console.....
Isn't a poor port evidence of a poorly engineered original software product? There ought to be a separation of the game logic layers from the actual hardware implementation of the details.
I'm not in that industry, but, I've come across hearsay that game development these days is pretty shoddy for the average title since all the money is poured into asset development (sound and visuals) and the software part of it is an afterthought.
More Twoson than Cupertino
If done right, almost any FPS should be portable from console to PC, and be FAR better on PC. (Mouse + keyboard is a superior control mechanism for FPS games.)
Most RPGs aren't too bad either, especially if you plug in a joypad to the PC.
Of course, frequently ports are NOT done right - the PC port of Final Fantasy VII is a notorious example of a port being done so lazily as to break compatibility very rapidly within about a generation of hardware releases. Nowadays it's often easier to get the PSX version running in an emulator than to get the PC port working.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The PC port of RE4 did not even contain a option to exit the game and even though it was a FPS did not allow mouse control.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
If it feels like it should be on a console, then one is likely to consider it a port, even if the development was done primarily on a PC, for a PC.
In other words, whilst not being particularly technically accurate, 'port' is a word that gets thrown around precisely because it is obvious that not all the pieces fit.
If you want to see porting done wrong, you should look no further than Valve's partnership with EA. I don't think anyone can argue that Valve makes some very good games. Half life 2, L4D, TF2, Portal, etc... are all excellent games. But their console versions are a crying shame. They range from passably mediocre (Orange box for 360) to downright awful unsupported shovelware (Orange Box for PS3). The only product that actually can be called good is L4D on the 360, and even that is a pale imitator to the PC version.
Much of this can be laid at EA's feet. They focus on hitting the maximum market spectrum and don't really care much about "after purchase support" Something that Valve (the L4D2 debacle notïwithstanding) is usually very good at. However you have to give some of the blame to Valve for licensing their product to a publisher who has a well known reputation for the slap-dash "screw the customer" business approach.
How can DirectX games be hard to port between PC and XBox as they use DirectX for pretty much everything?
Am I the only one here wanting that? Seriously!! It's not like linux doesn't run great on high end hardware or anything. So, don't worry about the poor little consoles for a moment and PORT to Linux!!
It's very important to point out that the porting task has everything to do with where you start. The PC is simply not the best development environment anymore, the Xbox 360 is-- and even Carmack would agree with me, here. You can get a game going really fast on 360, then it's a bit less difficult to go to PC. We can call this the best case scenario. Rapid time to market with superior development tools on 360 with familiar API's for cross-platform development on PC, along with similar TCR requirements between GFW and 360.
Let's say you started on the PS3, though. Maybe you took the time to learn the architecture and really take advantage of the cell architecture, so your game is basically hardcoded around the flexible pipeline and mass pararllelization, now it does things that even PC games cannot. Porting it to the 360 might not be so bad, but going to the PC is going to be a rough letdown. It feels like a dog when porting a console game.
So maybe your game started out nicely organized and clean in design, but in that last few months before release while your publisher is driving you up a wall to release, you're going to have so many hacks and messy revisions to the model to ship within your ridiculous timeframe- plus all the devs are tired and need vacations and such. Suddenly, the game is not so portable. It's the same for any platform, really- you go balls to the wall optimizing our game for the platform and you're going to spend a lot of your smooth portability.
Pay no attention to the "specs" of consoles vs. PC, it's basically meaningless. Consoles often run games almost directly, plus they have all sorts of architecture enhancements and little hardware tricks you don't find in PC's. A PC needs to have brutally more power to really match the sort of speed and power you can squeeze out of a console.
Let's say you developed on nintendo wii first... well, it's game over already, you just developed a last-gen, almost Xbox-looking game and tied it to the wiimote. Good luck porting that. That's part of why American studios don't throw big games at it, because it's too limited in power and the publishers just don't want to risk it. There are too many "hardcore" games, which need to push the envelope. The Wii is basically doomed to casual games and childrens' games because of this, because the marketing figures will always point it in that direction--and that's what really runs the game industry.
Technically speaking, you can probably see why people like the Unreal Engine or Source Engine, given the fact that all the porting work is done for you... well you still have to deal with the insane, i mean ABSOLUTELY insane requirements each console has for release... everything from trademarks to menu formats to the way control is expressed in the interface. The amount of attention to detail necessary blows away months of work. Consoles are not a free-for-all, you have to use the hardware in a very specified way.
In short.. yeah, it's rough. More difficult than most people will ever really know.
They are all PowerPC variants.
Some of us have to ship the same product on x86, MIPS, PowerPC and ARM from the same source base. ex: Cisco's CUE. While I admit the APIs for the graphics architectures of the different consoles are radically different, sometimes I can't help but wonder if some of the complaints from game developers are the typical exaggerations that everyone makes about how hard their job is.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
why can't games be ported to run natively in linux ? is it / more / same / less difficult to port a game to linux than it is to port, say, PS3 to PC ?
Dude. You forgot "House of the Dead: Overkill". Every other motherfucking word is motherfucker, gore out the wazoo, explicit sexual talk... it's an awesome game. It aims for "bad B-Movie video game" and hits it dead-on.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
All three consoles now have USB ports. Let us use a mouse and keyboard with games that are appropriate for this kind of setup (FPS, RTS, etc).
You don't play MegaMan with a godamn keyboard and mouse and you don't play Starcraft with a godamn gamepad.
I confess I'm a game porter, I'm deep into the bowels of finishing off a port of the original Call of Duty to Xbox 360 and PS3 at the moment. Most of the time the ports are outsourced to companies like ours rather than developed in-house by the original developers. We usually have a short development schedule and are pretty much stuck with the code as is, as excellent or crappy as it might be, and we do our best to make what we can from it. I actually find it very intellectually challenging and fun. The schedules are short, and there's always a new project to look forward to while being stuck in the muck of the current project. :) I get to look at a lot of different source code from a lot of different games and learn something new each time usually. Each project is different, sometimes it's easy (if the code is designed well or uses middleware that's available on the platform we're porting to) or a complete nightmare (very platform specific or the middleware it's using isn't available for the platform). At this point I've ported to or from just about every platform out there. Xbox -> PC, PC -> PS3,Xbox, DS -> iPhone, PC -> Mac, etc.
Would as soon see 10 great pc games a year as another 100 ports with absolutely SHITTY controls. I can live with poor graphics. occasional bad camera. Controls MUST be designed well and with ALL options for a PC.
For example. I believe Devil May Cry "or a similar port" Had a GAMES FOR WINDOWS logo on it. I attempted to play it with Keyboard/mouse and it was horrid "unable to play game breaking." So I got my PS3 controller and plugged it in. The Assholes who developed it only allowed a Xbox Controller scheme not a PS3 or another Standard Game Controller. So rather than being able to at least try playing the game I was immediately turned off it.
Good thing I didn't pay for it. If you want to design for Consoles then by all means do so. Unless you have prior experience making PC games with great controls. Then please stay the fuck away.
Inane Comments are Generously Disregarded
When i was growing up i always had consoles, i always had PC's but i never saw them as competitors. I saw them as complimentary to each other, action/arcade style games and sports title have always been console go to's. For something with a little more depth, complexity and dare i say it maturity it was PC all the way. I would play a few games of mario or sonic on my snes/megadrive, get bored then shift over to my pc for a bit of xcom, syndicate and dune 2. They were different platforms that catered for different tastes and i enjoyed both.
Fast forward a few years and FPS become the big thing, suddenly consoles are being built around their ability to play shooters. At this point the greedy publishers step in, they think to themselves these games are popular we must make boatloads of them. From there it was a short step to design them for consoles as its more profitable, its at this point the PC became their enemy. Now we have lost the level of depth that PC games used to specialise in, and i think thats what vexes the PC crowd. There are very few true PC games made anymore they are mearly console games that get ported, and regardless of the quality of the port they lack (in their very design) that special something that used to set PC games apart (fallout3 is a prime example of this, while a good game its not truely a fallout game).
Well, Bart, your uncle Arthur used to have a saying: "Shoot 'em all and let God sort 'em out."
PC = Personal Computer.
It does not, nor has it ever meant "Personal Computer with Microsoft Windows Operating System installed".
In fact, Atari and others had created many personal computers before Windows even existed. IBM also had put out personal computers prior to this. The Apple I actually was released in 1976, fully 5 years before IBM and Bill Gates got together to discuss creating an operating system for the IBM PC.
The first paragraph wasn't about Windows ports... it was about PC ports, many of which just happen to be Windows ports.
Many games I see come out in Windows, Mac, and Linux all at the same time (PC games, that is). Some even come out on a console at the same time as on various PC operating systems.
Games ported from game consoles, on the other hand, work from highest market share to lowest. Windows is the highest market share, so the most money is made from porting to this OS. Some companies find that there is a sufficiently large market in the Mac portion of PCs to port their game to that, and make some additional money. Linux generally gets the shaft because of it's very small market share in the PC gaming industry. It's simple economics. It costs money to rewrite the game so that it works on other hardware - why spend that unless you will get a good return on profits from that market?
Before commenting on the Bible, please read it first
The big attraction for console games is that the hard ware is so standardized. With the PC the possible combinations of hardware is probably in the thousands maybe even millions. Sure there is a standard and when everything conforms to that standard, everything "Should" work but not always. Companies writing drivers tend to rush-job it, or soup up the performance, pushing things to the limit and simple human error occurs and suddenly things don't work quite well as planned. With the console, writers for a particular console write the game, and if it works for one console, it works for them all because they are virtual clones of each-other. I have a problem with save points in games. I won't play nor buy nor even accept such games even if they gave them to me for free!! The number one biggest problem with save-points is that you are about to die and your death is saved. Sometimes it takes hours to get from one save point, to another in this one game and it would crash, or I'd get a phone call and have to interrupt the game to use my computer. After a few days of this I uninstalled and never ever bought another game from that company again and that was 14 years ago. The thing that folks who make save points don't realize is that folks do not want their computer held prisoner to one thing and that save points are not convenient. People need to be able to save the games when THEY need it saved, not when they don't want nor need it to be saved. how useless would a time machine be if the only point you could go back to was AFTER you made the mistake and never before? It would be a waste of airspace.
www.Migrainesoft.com - Computer giving you a headache? We can fix that!
I don't think the mouse is superior to the light gun for aiming/pointing.
But how many PC gamers are going to buy a Bluetooth adapter, a Wii Remote (the only widely available light gun that works with LCD monitors), and a wireless sensor bar? And given that figure, would it be worthwhile for major label video game developers to spend the time==money to support them? I'm not too optimistic.
Besides, how do you use a light gun to turn your character from side to side in order to shoot off-screen targets?
The only game port I know about are when companies say they will port a game for Linux, may as well send the announcement straight to /dev/null !
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_Forever
Take Nobody's Word For It.
One of the reasons I stopped taking the Mac even remotely seriously as a games platform - the butchered ports of Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights.
BG lost multiplayer and voice sample customization, required all four CDs and swapped continually, even on fast-for-the-time hardware.
Bioware or whatever company was subcontracted to do the dirty work couldn't be bothered to port the DM toolset.
iD and Blizzard games are feature-complete between platforms. The problem is obviously on the developer (or the porting company's) end.
If you won't take the time, you're not worth my money.
Cry me a river .. Back in the day we had to port arcade games with real sprites and dedicated sound chips to computers with 1 bit per pixel graphics and 1 bit sound (seriously). Oh, and controllers? You'd get the "key down" but not the "key up". Now get off my lawn :)
Yes, it's really fucking hard to have redefinable keyboard layouts. I don't know much about console programming, but if there's an event loop capable of calling a buttonpressed routine, you have no excuse.
Microsoft has a blanket ban on the use of USB keyboards as game controllers in Xbox 360 games; any game that does so doesn't get digitally signed for use on retail consoles. If step 1 involves hostilely taking over the parent company of the console maker so that it will make an exception to this ban, would that be an excuse?
I've stopped playing Rainbow Six after they made the same PC version for console as well.
Rainbox Six: Las Vegas only has a 4 player co-op while the old games had more.
I have more friends than 3!!!
All this to comply lame consoles that only have 4 pads.
I think it's safe to say there's a number of differences between the DirectX nature of Windows (98 and family) verus Linux of circa 1995-2000.
Yet in JUST TWO MONTHS, this company would get a title, and in about the time it took to get the boxart produced, the game was running under Linux. Now this isn't a simple process, but they did it, and they did it quickly.
Best yet, it didn't require the game getting watered down. Remember UnrealTournament? Now, remember UnrealTournament for XBox? See what I mean?
That wasn't the case in any of the Lokisoft games I bought before the turn of the century. I'm still amazed.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
I suppose the light gun is better for FPS games with controlled movement along a path
As I understand the common understanding of the term "first-person shooter", games like Duck Hunt, Area 51, and Time Crisis series are called "light gun shooters" or "shooting galleries", not "first-person shooters". Taken literally, they would qualify, but ordinarily, FPS encompasses "games with full freedom of movement" at least to the extent seen in Battlezone (1980).
The big flaw in all this is an assumption that any video game publisher wants consoles to be killed.
Some people develop video games but do not do so as a full-time day job. They want consoles to be killed because console makers (especially Nintendo) have an overt bias against teams who work from home. This means games developed in part-time have to be self-published for PC. And even among major labels, there have been a couple stories on Slashdot over the past couple days about publishers whining about console makers' fee structures. See, for example, this story and this story.
I know it sucks to port games to a new platform with nothing in common, but I hope that someday the game developers can port some Windows games to Vista. And yes, I've tried Wine but sometimes it has as many problems as Vista.
Game developers have the advantage over car manufacturers that they can produce a Ferrari for the same price a Volkswagen would cost
Since when does Crysis, your example of a Ferrari, cost the same amount to develop as something like Animal Crossing: City Folk, which had a similar day-one MSRP?
Then let me clarify what I believe Anonymous Coward meant:
Words mean what sufficiently large groups of people use them to mean. Definitions of words aren't really definitions. They're descriptive, not prescriptive.
Well, they seem to mention Dead Space alot in the article and from personal experience I can tell you that this game has one of the shittiest control schemes i've seen in quite a bit. Every time you switch to target(aim) mode, the mouse sensitivity goes to bollocks which makes aiming really really hard and forces you to up the general sensitivity just to properly play the game.
I can see why reducing sensitivity in consoles while targetting makes it easier to chop off limbs from the baddies as intended but there was no reason whatsoever to keep this feature enabled on the mouse+keyboard setup.
The general feel of the controls was more horrifying than the game could ever be, you never felt in control of your character. And it doesn't have to be this way. There are no excuses. Gears of War PC has the same 3rd person view carried over to the PC, but the controls and camera work is near-perfect. My 2c anyway.
Wasn't the whole hoopla of JAVA to be cross platform development?
I thought the whole deal was code in JAVA, and everyone will be able to run your app no matter what platform...
what a scam THAT turned out to be!
It still blows the pants off of the average desktop that most people are using to play games. This whole thing comparing gaming rigs to consoles neglects the fact that a gaming rig costs anywhere from 2 to 3 times as much as a console.
And the fact that you typically need four PCs and four copies of the game for four players. Given a random PC multiplayer game and a random Wii multiplayer game, the PC game is less likely to provide for 4 gamepads and a 32" monitor. In fact, the only Wii game I know of whose multiplayer is online-only is Animal Crossing: City Folk.
On the other hand, some people who only play single-player would prefer to compare the price of a gaming PC to the price of a console plus a "business" PC.
I'm going to be blunt: the problem with console ports is that the conversion process is usually outsourced to a 3rd party developer, usually a small shop desperate for work (otherwise they'd be busy with their own projects). The result is that the job is often done hastily by a group of moderately skilled programmers bound by small budgets and poor communication with the original developers.
It's the software equivalent of Leonardo Da Vinci painting the Mona Lisa, then hiring some kid down the street to make a black-and-white version. 99.44% guaranteed the kid will do a half-assed job and not show the same level of dedication and rigor as the original artist. Once in a blue moon, you might get lucky and find a guy who does remarkable work, but most of the time they just go through the motions and collect the cheque.
If these game companies had their own in-house platform experts, I think the quality would go up, waaaaay up. If your PC, PS3 and X360 gurus work in the same building, pile into the same car to go grab lunch, or partake in any other social engagement, they will be far more likely to cooperate successfully. Even better if they're all friendly with the UI expert, so they can voice their concerns over the utter lack of a remappable control scheme for the PC, or the clumsiness of having to hold 3 buttons to do a rocket jump on the Wii. A 3rd party developer will just do the work, whether it makes sense or not, according to the paper specs - nothing more, probably less.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Of course the gaming industry still goes on working on bare metal ...
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Honestly, I'm not sure why Nintendo doesn't just have the developer ship the IOS library with the game to save storage space in the flash.
That's what Nintendo did on the DS, and Wii games also come with IOS on an "update partition". But this time, to avoid homebrew-enabling bugs like the ones on the DS, Nintendo wants to be able to patch holes in IOS, such as the one used to start unsigned discs (see System Menu 3.3-3.4). That way, if a game uses IOS16, but it's vulnerable, Nintendo can patch it to IOS16.1 in an update to Wii Shop Channel.
I find it amusing that the final paragraph states that PCs is being taken at least as serious as consoles for gaming. Remember when this generation of consoles was first introduced? The talk then was that PC gaming was doomed.
It's been the same sort of nonsense the last few generations. People get excited about these new consoles and because they offer a technological leap over the previous generation they start expecting some sort of revolution. Once the consoles have been around a while people start noticing PCs again.
Consoles naturally have to offer a clear technological leaps given their relatively long life expectancies. PCs, however, never stop progressing so that within months they surpass anything consoles are capable of. And actually, at least with this generation it was more consoles caught up to the capability of PCs than that they actually surpassed them.
I expect that eventually the market will move towards a more unified platform. Given how complex games are getting developers will be pushing hard for something like this. And hardware makers are being put into a difficult spot where they basically have need to be confident their console will be successful because if it isn't developers will abandon them. Look at the challenges facing would-be competitors the handheld market. And it's almost pointless to even compete on hardware at least for consoles. I say competition will come from the games themselves and motion-control peripherals. Perhaps not for the next generation of consoles, but eventually.
[Time Crisis and the like are] "Rail Shooters" (as if the avatar were seated on a train/roller-coaster or similar rail-based, single-pathed vehicle)
"Rail shooter" sounds to me more like Pokemon Snap, where the player can freely rotate the camera while translation is automatic. Or it's like Star Fox for Super NES and Star Fox 64, where the player can't rotate the camera or translate it in depth but can translate it in width and height.
Bear in mind, a 'contemporary' PC is six years old with on-board graphics.
I agree. So here's something I want to get straight: Which is more powerful between the Wii console's ATI Hollywood GPU and the Intel GMA 950 found in a lot of low-end PCs?
You don't have to be a charity to treat Wine as an extra "flavor" of Windows in addition to 98 or XP (back in the day) or XP, Vista, and 7 (now).
Unreal Tournament 3 for PS3 for instance had no problem using a mouse and keyboard but inexplicably Epic decided not to do the same thing for the 360. Anyone with a 360 knows it already accepts a keyboard hookup (I use one myself) and should have no problem accepting mice (or other devices) even, it's in the studio's hands.
It's explicable. Unlike Sony, Microsoft lot check will FAIL any game for Xbox 360 that uses a USB keyboard other than to enter text. And without a PASS rating from any console maker's lot check, a game won't run on retail consoles.
Microsoft does not allow keyboards or mice to be used on their consoles. You are not allowed to make Mice and Keyboards for the Xbox and games are not allowed to support them.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
Seriously, you're going to complain about shaders? Shaders can be written by hand by anybody that knows basic algebra. It's not that hard.
Or, if you're a big bad gaming company, you can probably afford a license for AMD and nVidia's shader compilers, which do all the maths for you and do some optimizing too.
~ C.
The worst one I've seen is Fable The Lost Chronicles. They spent all that time adding like 20 hours more content to the game with new graphics and voices and quests and towns and yet they still left the entire engine and graphics system in such a non-working form that about 1 in 25 times that you tried to load a new area, the game simply crashed. They released absolutely zero patches for it too!!!! How do you release what's practically a version 1.5 of a game and not support it at all afterwards?! The people responsible for that atrocity should be shot.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
I don't care about any of this. But a new Monkey Island Game! And it's for PC! Stop the presses!
The problems with porting games really come down to getting through customs. If they would just declare everything, and not try to sneak in those exotic fruits, everything would be okay. Maybe next time they should just fly in, instead of sea passage...
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Thst's not too difficult when the entire original PC dev team is one person.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
The problems with ported software exist with all software, they are just much harder to hide in games.
An awful lot of software that appears to be available on more than one platform is smooth, sweet, and stable on one of those platforms, and weird, clunky, and unreliable on another. Things like odd screen refresh bugs. Sometimes, applications that just don't look or act like good citizens of the world then run in. Sometimes, the application will seem to run all right but there's some difference in buffering or caching or memory management strategy, and on the "bad" platform it will have a tendency to freeze up mysteriously for unpleasantly long periods of time, or crash. Or work fine when installed in the exact place the installer puts it by default but act funny if you put it somewhere else. Or fail to follow the proper OS conventions for where preferences and configuration settings and other persistent program "state" should be placed. Or show you a literal view of your disk volume and directory structure instead of the slightly abstract view that "normal" programs show (e.g. "Desktop" at the top, root level in Windows).
I think it's wonderful that gamers are able to yell and scream and try to exercise some market discipline about this. I think it's because a game you don't enjoy is valueless. Alas, when it comes to "productivity" software it's hard to quantify things like "feels klunky."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Just because you can find some obscure studio with 5 sales to it's name that wants consoles to die doesn't mean EA, Vivendi, Activision/Blizzard, aka pretty much all the major players in the industry, want consoles to die
My hypothesis: In general, major players want consoles to live, and minor players want consoles to die.
There is no "qualification" for a console license.
Nintendo Developer Qualifications would disagree with you. Executive summary: People who have a day job outside the mainstream video game industry and develop video games part-time would find it hard to qualify.
The problem with this article was demonstrated using the latest Sandbox development tools from Cyrtek. They clearly show how easy it can be with real time changes to the games on all three platforms at the same time. Developing cross platform games should be considerably easier in the future as developer's tools get better.
In theory, you might be right, but Cider hasn't really proven to live up to ANY of those promises you mention.
1. Enabling same-day releases? E.A. failed miserably at that with practically all the Cider-enabled titles they announced last year. Madden Football '08 for OS X? Nope... not same day as the Windows version release. Red Alert 3? Nope, had delays.... Ubisoft hasn't fared much better. Shaun White's Snowboarding was out for Windows first.
2. 80% to 90% of Windows performance? Again, maybe ideally - but I don't think Mac gamers are seeing anywhere near that on the titles they're putting out. Things like keyboard response and screen updates are far worse than with the Windows counterparts. I played NFS Carbon for OS X, for example, and on a 2.8Ghz octo-core Mac Pro with 8GB of RAM and an nVidia 8800GT video card, it was laggy/jerky and just all around not that fun to play. I tried it later on a PS3 and it was a night and day playability difference.... I'm pretty sure the Windows version isn't THAT much worse than the PS3 version.
3. Yeah, developers ALWAYS say the Mac doesn't have enough market-share, but that seems like a double-edged sword to me. Windows ALSO has so many more titles to choose from, you'd think you'd have far fewer buyers for any one game release, because the money gets spread out over so many more options. If you release a really good OS X native Mac title, practically EVERYONE interested in gaming on a Mac may well buy your game.
In order to develop the meme of "whoosh" it is necessary for some mods to practice anti-modding.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Yeah, TF2 on PS3 is plagued by glitchers, because none of the maps have been updated with fixes. It's particularly bad with Dustbowl and Gravel Pit.
The server situation has stabilized a bit. For a while, the US East servers went down, and many of us were unable to get connected--US West and Europe servers were too laggy, when they weren't going down because of load. I spent a couple of months pestering EA (and arguing back when they told me it was Valve's problem) until my support call reached someone who was able to reboot the affected machine(s). US East servers are back now.
But yeah, the limit of 16 players per server is still there, which sucks because some of the maps are just too big to work well with only 8 players per team.
Oh, and the sound bugs are still there. Headsets randomly stop working, sound from the game has crackling.
I've probably gotten my $20 worth, but I'd buy it again if Valve actually did a proper port and fixed the bugs. As it is, I've sworn off of buying anything from EA. (Downloaded the Battlefield 1943 demo, saw it was from EA, and deleted it. Really.)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Well I love all the old Williams arcade games and playing defender is very hard on anything apart from the layout on the old Arcade machine. The ergonomics of this can only be slightly improved. Bring back Williams arcade games. Every other games sucks!
All cows eat grass!
All these games should be made for the PC only because it's the only good gaming platform. Here's why: 1. Consoles are becoming more and more like computers, but in a half-baked and proprietary sort of way. 2. The Wii is only powerful enough to play watered down versions of today's demanding 3D games. 3. If developers don't have to port the PC game to consoles then you save costs and can afford to offer the game at a lower price. That can in turn bag more sales and save people money. 4. Computers offer freedoms that consoles cannot ever compare to. 5. Why buy a console for play and a computer for work when you can just buy the computer and save the money you would have spent on the console? 6. Games for the PC can be modded, extending gameplay and enjoyment. 7. Computer games are universal. You can't go over to your friend's house and play your PS3 version of Unreal Tournament on his Wii, but you can play your computer version on his computer! 8. Computers can play games, why should you spend more money on a console when you already have a machine that can (perhaps with a few upgrades) play games. 9. Playstation 3 = $300, 8800GTX = $100 10. You can build, upgrade, and repair a computer yourself. Try that with a console.
What's all the fuss? Game porting is a solved problem... there's even a book on the subject (cross-platform game programming) that taught me how to do it for my last job.