Mnementh said:
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. |
Amen to this (and your previous response mostly).
I also believe Tactics was an exception and esp. in the case of Microsoft; they are DEFINITELY providing the framework to do that. A lot of code/engines are platform neutral and the only remaining thing to do are stuff like UI specific, inputs and then of course, the assets. Even the rendering (if you take something like Unreal engine) can be simply tweaked with a configuration but at the end it is the same engine.
Microsoft is really pushing for this now; which is great. More and more games will def. release on many platform at the same time because of those frameworks.
And if anything Microsoft is def. in the best position to do that (compared to Sony or Nintendo); they know how to do that better than anyone else out there.
