potato_hamster said:
JustBeingReal said:
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.
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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.
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I know I don't have to believe you, your comments didn't sound legit, hence why I said I didn't. TBH it doesn't really matter who works where, what matters is the issue we're discussing here.
When I say "trivial" I'm speaking relative to building a whole game from scratch. I think for the most part we're in agreement that the difficult part in all of this is just making the game.
Relative to the years of work it takes to formulate your concept and actually make something that could be released on a single platform, moving that game over to another system would be a very tiny fraction of the whole development of the project, that's what I mean by saying it's trivial. Modern engines make the studio's lives so much easier compared to how things used to be in the past.
Now in a system like NX we're basically talking about the console having the full experience, both platforms share the exact same type of CPU, the exact same type of GPU and the exact same type of memory, the only difference is that the handheld or weaker version of that platform has fewer resources. The most ideal situation if it's possible is that NX handheld could basically just run the game at 480p 30FPS, with everything else equal to the home console, in that case the development teams making games for NX knows that the rendering pipeline will always need the option to disable 1080p and enable 480p, so it's built in as an option at the start of development on NX, from then on the action of tweaking the game to run on the handheld is simple, it becomes a trivial stage of development in relation to the whole development of the game.
Maybe Anti-Aliasing and Anisatropic Filtering are turned off if need be, but the amount of work to make that run on the handheld wouldn't be massively extensive, a small team of people could make that happen in a very short space of time, compared to how many were required to build the whole complete game and get it running on the console.
If we're talking about just Nintendo's own exclusives, for NX then customers now being able to buy a copy of that game on a system with a larger install base are likely to allow Nintendo to move significantly higher numbers than if the game was only available on the console. It's basically a business no brainer to remove the barriers between handheld and console to get software to move more units.
The expense to make the game run on the weaker system is going to be small compared to the whole development of the complete game.
The whole NX idea is one big opportunity for Nintendo to move more software, the portable is cheaper than the home console, so that platform has a significantly larger install base relative to the console.
The appeal of the console increases because people know from day one that all software available to NX is going to be available on either the handheld or console. It's all extra sales for Nintendo, for not much extra work per game released and they reduce software droughts to either system, which will help to raise the incentive for people to invest in this new Nintendo platform from the launch of the platform.
The potential extra sales massively outweigh any small additional costs for porting that is going to be accounted for by opening up where software is going to be available. There really aren't any negatives here.
