What If The NX Console Is Portable Too?

[JustBeingReal]

potato_hamster said:

Miyamotoo said:

JustBeingReal said:

potato_hamster said:

80% in common would be less in common than a PS4 game has with its X1 counterpart. And again, when developing for those platforms they are treated as two separarate entities, because they are. You know not of what you speak. There is no reason to expect it will be easier to develop a game for both NX home and NX handheld than it will be to develop a game for PS4 and X1.

For example do you know much extra work it takes to turn an iPhone game into an iPad game? Do you think that's trivial or complex?

The NX being invisioned by most people basically has the same API running on handheld and console, also the architecture would be identical, with the handheld only packing a smaller amount of tech or different clock speeds for parts to allow it to run on less energy. Developers could build the console version of a game, made to run at 1080p 30FPS, but the rendering pipeline could have options built in it to simply turn off that 1080p option and run the game at 480p, same goes for disabling AA, AF or any major performance hog.

Platform specific optimizations would stretch to reducing settings, in much the same way you'd turn off settings on a PC game because you're rig can't handle the higher resolution or GFX version of a game.

The difference between NX console and handheld is power, not architecture or API based.

Completely agree, not to mention that developer kits would be identical or similar and tha NX will have same OS.

This is literally what iOS does, the API being the same, arcitecture being identical, but running at different speeds and have different resolutions. However, I still find it laughable that you just trvialize these optimizations as "the way you turn of settings on a PC game". It isn't that simple. You still have to handle the different control schemes. You still have to handle the different outputs. You still have to redo textures and simplify animations, AI, etc to run just as well off of more limited resources. These are things you need to do going from an iPad game to an iPhone game, or going from a game optimized for iPhone 5 to one that can run off of iPhone 4. These aren't trivial things to do. Again, it is not that simple.

Game engines we see developers use nowadays do the vast majority of the work when porting a title to each platform.

Artists make one set of high end assets, with high res textures, complex geometry, then the engine has a set of sliders to reduce the complexity of those options. Shading options would be another part of the package (any graphical features or even AI and Physics), sure you have a team of people that go in and alter those settings to make the whole game fit within each platform's hardware limits, but you definitely don't have to rebuild each model or draw new textures for another platform, that's just not how game development works nowadays, even when portion a title from PC to PS4 or XB1.

The alterations are absolutely just options within the game engine.

The code side of things is a lot more complex, but once the coding team have written XB1's version of DX11/12 or PS4's GNM/X into the engine it's just a matter of gradual iteration on past code to make better use of each platform and provide more capabilities for that platform.

Even separate Architectures of X86 tech aren't that much extra work once you've incorporated a new platform into your engine. So long as Nintendo writes a solid and straightforward API, that accounts for all of the platforms that could make up each system within the NX family (assuming NX is this), makes resource management easy, overall development would be pretty easy for developers.

 

This stuff is actually way more trivial than you're making it seem.