Xbox |OT|

[Mnementh]

chakkra said:

Mnementh said:

Well, that is clearly an oversimplification. But it can depend. Modern game development often uses frameworks, that are available on multiple platforms, which makes the task much easier, not completely absent. Certain technical problems can make the task more difficult at times. But in general if you develop a new game with hundreds of people over multiple years, porting usually needs less than 10 people over few months. You don't need to remake all the art for instance.

That said, the above is clearly political, SE management decides what game goes where.

It is extremely hard for me to believe that when Gears Tactics came out 7 months later on Xbox and Flight Simulator 1 year later. Mind you, those games were supposedly being developed simultaneously.

Well, for Gears Tactics it probably was a political or business decision, as they assume that customers for tactical less actiony games is more on PC than console. Maybe they had some difficulties to map mouse-based actions to controller.

But Flight Simulator might be one of the few exceptions, where porting was actually quite difficult. To be frank, I think Flight Simulator is basically technically impossible. That this works at all is amazing and such a big technical feat. Given how technically impossible it is and how low probably is the userbase, I don't think MS makes money on Flight Sim at all. Maybe I am wrong, I don't know, cost usually scales with artists needed to design, and Flight Sim mostly is generated from sattelite and aerial images, laserscan of elevations and other such real world data. The packs for certain locations they release contain data, where they touch this automatically generated stuff with manual labor. But developing these automatic generation systems is so absurdly incredibly amazing tech and also being able to stream the appropriate data as they have data for the whole world - impossible to keep in memory at all times - so they need dynamic loading of dataset in a really massive database. I cannot stop marveling about this feat of work. As a programmer I have low interest in working at games, as it is mostly boring for a programmer and badly paid work with bad conditions, but I would love an internship at Asobo, as I think every programmer can learn from what they did.