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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."
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.
Having trouble making a good conversion from pad to keyboard is one thing, but not being able to remap the keys is just stupid.
"...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.....
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.
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.
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!!
Yeah, clearly Bungie was stupid for targeting Halo 3 for that crappy 360 and selling 8 million copies in 3 months when they could have gone straight for the Linux gaming market and have garnered 15 sales in a year.
The measure of a good input device is how accurately it can transform what the user wants into what happens.
So how would you feel about having a single button labelled "Shoot enemies" that, when pushed, shoots all of the enemies on the screen? It'll translate what you want into what happens much more accurately than a mouse will.
On the other hand, when it comes to playing games, I'd say that the measure of a good input device is how fun it is to use when playing the game.
I can say that when playing MP3 with the wiimote, it didn't feel quite as accurate as using my highly-tuned mouse skills to play Quake or Half-life -- but it was still accurate enough to make me feel like I was completely in control of the game, and it was a lot more fun than a traditional mouse/keyboard setup.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Final Fantasy XI on the 360 allows you to use a USB keyboard as a controller, to include full WASD movement and not just typing messages.