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potato_hamster on 13 October 2017
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Shaunodon said:
potato_hamster said:

I'm sorry vivster but that's not what they're saying at all.  That's not how video games work. THere's no "base engine version" of a game. They might have used a more stock, non-console optimized version of their engine, and modified modified that to to work on PC and added some PC-specific enhancements, instead of removing console-specific enhancements from a console-specific engine.  But that's it.

The game itself? They 100% did port the console version, because there's no reason no to. The game interacts with the game engine which translates the game commands into hardware instructions to process those game commands. Because of this, the console game itself would only require slight tweaks in terms of things like controls, networking and graphics to be able to run well on PC.  The engine itself though in terms of how it takes those game commands and feeds it to the hardware, that's where the real work lies, and fortunately since console hardware is so similar to PCs, making these modifications have been easier than ever..

TL;DR: Console game port, yes. Console engine port, no.

I'm pretty sure I remember from earlier interviews that the base version of the game was initially designed for PC architecture, since it was supposedly easy for them to port it from there to PS4/Xbone because of how similar they were. But the original version they were using was running on a high spec PC and I'm not sure how outdated it would be.

I don't know as much about the subject as you obviously, but I do remember reading those sorts of things.

I believe the problem after that was trying to downgrade and optimise the game enough so that they could run it, and I think it was harder than they expected. Luminous Engine being a whopper to run on console didn't help (probably why they abandoned it).

Both what you're saying and I'm saying can both be correct. They could very well have had this up and running on a PC well before they started to dig deep into console development. I know of many console exclusive games that technically have running PC builds for this very reason.

So yeah, this "100x easier" bit could very well be grafting the final console build of the game to work with a PC compatible version of the engine they already had developed, revising the engine based on what they learned during the development and then making PC-specific tweaks and enhancements. That would be much much easier than the initial development of the game itself. My main point was they didn't just abandon the work they did on consoles and re-do it for PC, they repurposed the console build for a PC compatible engine (ie - ported it).