potato_hamster said:
zorg1000 said:
I clearly don't have any background in any type of software development so I can't really claim which one of you is right, but I do have a couple questions for you.
Vita released in 2011 so I would assume the majority of R&D for it came around 2007-2009. With NX likely to release in 2016 or 2017, that would likely mean primary R&D for it occurred about 5 years after Vita, wouldn't that be correct to assume? Isn't it also true that mobile technology has come a long way in those 5 years?
If those things are all in fact true, than isn't it possible that the tech wasn't there yet for Sony to truly fulfill their original vision for Vita/PS4 but it's possible for Nintendo to effectively execute such a strategy due to the massive gains in mobile tech in those 5 or so years?
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Technology has come a long way in five years, this is true. But as JustBeingReal has pointed out, the concept in as of itself is a rather old one. PC games have been doing this for years. But like with every design ever made in the history of mankind, there are trade offs in doing so. Those trade offs still exist. Now while it true that gains have been made in terms of making APIs more capable and more lightweight than ever before, many of those same principals can be applied to the APIs used in console game development making console-style APIs still much better suited for consoles. A broader API that is made to encompass multiple processors, memory allocations etc will always be more bloated, slower, more obtrusive, and more resource hungry then simply hardcoding variables for one specific hardware specification, and the differences between the two are still substantial even to this day.
Another point, this technology is already used in multi-platform engines developed for the PS4 and Xbox One. Sure the operating systems and APIs for those devices are different, but coding the engine (which is in a lot of ways a high-level API, along with a lot of other things) that communicates directly with these APIs and OSs still needs to be made as capable and as resource-lite as possible. Yet what do we still see from developers? Time and time again, first party exclusive games consitently look better and perform better than multi-platform games, and I don't see that gap shrinking, do you? That's not just due to the spreading of resources over mutliple platforms, it's due to the simple fact that developing an engine that only has to deal with one API, one OS, one hardware spec gives makes the engine smaller and more efficient, leading to significant performance gains. It's the same concept, just applied literally one level higher.
But let's move on from APIs, as they are just one part of it. Let's discuss infrastructure. It's one thing to say "you can create development suite which will allow developers to simply just scale the settings up and down and it "just work" because it's all basically the same hardware". Well it's not exactly the same, and it's not that simple. It would be like saying "i have these two rockets, one 1/2 the size of the other, and I want them to land 100 yards away from each other on the moon, so I'll just make a big panel with a button on it that says 'launch big rocket' and another button that says "launch little rocket" and there you go! Two rockets on the moon". People have to put a lot of work into developing the underlying infracstructure to those two rockets to launch correctly, and land them exactly where you intend on landing, and as it turns out the little rocket's fuel tanks aren't big enough to get it to the moon, and the big rocket won't fit right on the same launch pad. But, it's just a couple buttons, right?
Now I'm not calling video games rocket science, but making the infrastructure that would allow developers to develop, compile, and test games on two similar but different hardware specifications, with two different screen resolutions, and two similar but differnent everything else and making it so even a few hundred settings can be tweaked and a "just work" on these two similar but differernt hardware specs is an epicly huge undertaking, and a lot more complicated than making two sepearate developer kits for two similar, but separate devices, and just letting developers make what they want for each hardware spec.
M mainy point of contention is this - If there really is that insigificant of a difference between console-APIs and PC counterparts, then even in 2007-2009 Sony had all the means of making an API that was "slightly less efficient" than the one they created for the PSV and PS4, and develop tools to make that porting games from the PS4 to the Vita a much simpler process than it actually is. When it comes to development kits, development tools and support, in my experience Sony is marginally better than Microsoft and Nintendo is a very distant third. The developers kit and developer tools for the PSV when it came out were industry leading. Also, there's no reason why Sony couldn't have leveraged new techology over the PSV's life to make APIs and new OSs for the Vita to do just that. But they haven't. Maybe they have in the years since I worked on that port (I haven't worked on a Vita game since) but still, the OS is more or less the same, and from what others have told me, it's still no walk in the park to port a game to Vita. These two devices barely interact with each other even though they were developed at the same time, and lead by the same person, all the while Sony was (and still is) one of the industry leaders in the very technology JustBeingReal believes Nintendo can leverage to do just that.
I really don't think Nintendo could pull that off. In fact, even if they could, I don't think it would be wise of them to do so.
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