What If The NX Console Is Portable Too?

[potato_hamster]

JustBeingReal said:

potato_hamster said:

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.

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.

Hey whatever man, you don't have to believe me. That's not going to take my name out of the credits.

Of course every platform isn't redone from scratch. In fact I've said quite the opposite, that I'd say between PS3 and Xbox 360 the codebase was about 80% shared, and with the PS4 and X1 even more is shared since they are so similar. However, it still remains that for each platform you need to make non-trivial, non-significant modifications to the code base, engine, 3D models, animations, AI etc to optimize those for a platform. Depending on how well the engine is optimized (which is probably the least trivial part of game development) it can be easier, but you still have to make platform-specific revisions. And yes, you're certainly right that as you make more games, especially using the same engines, those platform based engine adjustments lead to less and less work, as you definitely don't need to reinvent the wheel, but my original point remains:

No matter how you slice it, there's no way on earth you make one game, for say the NX home, and Nintendo provides an API that makes that game automatically work perfectly on the NX handheld, or vice-versa. It simply isn't going to work that way. Every different version of the NX is going to require extra work, and extra testing. and add extra expense to develop for as a result. Yes, it'll probably be less work to do so than it was to make a game for both PS3 ans X360,  but at the end of the day it will be cheaper and take less time to make one game on PS4 than it will to make that same game to run on all the versions of the NX handheld. That type of additional cost will only be tolerable if the platform sells like gangbusters, and it's going to be very very hard to gain traction when the initial investment is higher compared to other platforms.