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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.
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.
Mac is also a PC.
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.
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.
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.