potato_hamster said:
JustBeingReal said:
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.
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Again, I make console video games for a living. I'm not sure what kind of experience you have (it appears to be PC games to me, based on your "slider" comment"), but every time I've worked on a game, part of that work has been developing the engine. Now granted, there are people that do far more work, or exclusively work on the engine than I ever have or likely ever will, but that engine development is part of the game development. It's not like you just order a game engine from a company and it "just" work. They have to be optimized for the console and the game you're making. The "coding team" as you call them handles things such as Engine, AI, UI, controls, game modes, etc. These things do have specialists within the "coding team" that tend to focus on one of those major categories, but we all get our fingers in all of those pies. Also, nice touch on glossing over the enhancement, refinement or development of new engines as "gradual iteration" on past code. I'm sure folks at Naughty Dog that went from Uncharted 1 to Uncharted 3 on the same engine would love to have the years-long work of dozens of people as "gradual iteration" trivialized in such a way.
In console game development there are no sliders. Those optimizations, those ideal settings are hard coded per console, and a team needs to figure out what they are and tweak and retweak the engine as development, and things like memory budgets shift. I also don't know what kind of teams you've worked on but based on my experience, it's not always artists that have to re-do 3D models, or rigs when optimizing them for a different platform. I've done work such as that as a programmer. It certainly isn't trivial and it certainly is platform specific. I mean in all seriousness look into how much work that has to go into an "HD" remake of a game that is already made. By your comments you must think it takes a handful of people a few months to churn one out, that is of course, after that engine work is trivially done.
Its absolutely hilarious to me how you trivialize all this work you've apparently seen colleagues slave over for months if not years. Great job. May I ask what you do in terms of video game development? It sounds to me like you're either an audio engineer (who quite literally use the tools other people develop for them while they mess with audio), an intern who doesn't know any better, or maybe low-level production who has little to no programming experience, if you're not blatantly lying. You've certainly not worked with Nintendo if you seem so confident they can develop a "solid and straightforward API". They might have been making video games for over 30 years, but to date this is something they have never ever done.
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So you claim, anyone on the internet can claim to be anything they want, but it doesn't make it true, I can't buy your claims based on your posts.
I'm not going to make X, Y or Z claims, my knowledge speaks for itself.
Naughty Dog can't possibly be used as an example of what we're talking about here, since they make exclusives, not multiplats, the only time a game of their's gets moved to another piece of hardware, they basically have to remake it, because it was made for a lower end system in the 1st place (they don't port down). Hell The Nathan Drake collection is an example of a group of games being completely remade, because the PS3 releases were made to only be on that one platform, SCE and ND decided later that they wanted to put Uncharted 1 to 3's single player campaigns on PS4, X86 is also very different from RISC, so code has to be re-written to make those games work on PS4.
Even if you do work in the industry, as a developer that makes console games, that doesn't mean you're in a position to comment about porting titles and how that work can be made as seamlessly and efficient as possible from a productivity perspective.
3rd party developers want the process to be as easy as possible, hence why they use a game engine that will allow for asset/feature scaling and one that can incorporate various different APIs.
I'm most certainly not talking about PC specific development, what I'm talking about is the easiest and most logical way to make a game that can work on a host of different platforms, including PC and console, in this case console and handheld.
As I said iteration happens over the life of a game engine and over the time developers work on each generation of hardware, so if you do work in the industry (in a position to grasp this stuff) then you would know that when I say "Alterations are just options within the game engine", I'm talking about how assets are first and foremost made to the highest standard they're going to be needed at (high end PC level in the case of games that come to PC, PS4 and XB1, etc), then those core assets are altered, artists don't make a single set of assets for each platform, they build everything that will go into the game and then work from there, porting down to the weaker systems, with less resources.
Coding is something that is specific to each platform, but it's not the case that you build entirely new code for everything for each platform, per game, besides in your 1st game on that platform, unless your initial code was absolutely rubbish or you've discovered an entirely new way of doing things and that yields far better results than an older method. No you make one version of your code and over time rework it to get more performance per platform.
You're making it seem like each game gets made from scratch for every platform it's going to be released on, which definitely isn't the case.
