This is ridiculous. The OP literally says that these are the profiles. That implies that is the profile in its entirety. How dare I make the assumption that the these are the only values for the profiles when it says that these are it? Nah. That's a totally reasonable assumption to make, far more reasonable than assuming this mean the engine will scale a Nintendo Switch game for you.

Your original point and something you've said repeatedly is that this IS a scalable feature, not "this could be used a building block to create a scalable feature". Those are two compeletly different things. That's like saying "I bought a new car", and then when you go and show it to your friends, presenting them with a piece of a door frame. Sure, you certainly need that door frame piece in order to build a car, but you're not exactly going to cart your freinds around town with your piece of a door frame, are you? Well I was arguing that you never had a car, and now you're acting like you talking about a door frame piece the whole time.

What do you mean no one was sure how development would work? This was obvious since the console was announced. The game would be required to have two operating modes. That means supporting both of those modes completely, testing those modes individually, and testing them while switching back and forth between the two. In many ways, developing for the Nintendo Switch makes it almost as much work as making a game for two completely different platforms. These profiles from UE4 does absolutely nothing to change that.

What a level of hyperbole, they have to put the best settings for every mode just as I can put different settings to run a new gen game even on a old potato laptop ( is surprising how many new games run fine at very low resolutions even on old laptops, Switch needs only 540p), many games are very scalable on PC, this is the same, you don't have to make 2 versions at all, focus on one and then change the settings until it runs ok in the other mode.

I really wonder if Square-Enix switching to Unreal Engine 4 had something to do with the Switch in that it would make it easier for them work with that way.

Because Luminous Engine is something they spent a ton of money and time on, and now that it's a finished/working engine it just seems odd to dump it.

But something like DQXI likely would be much harder to port to Switch if it was using Luminous Engine instead of UE4.

Hahahahaha you're funny are you really sure you worked on Engines mate? For one we don't know which specific file the profiles are from how many files are in the engine, what other profiles are in the coding, how the coding is referenced in other profiles etc..., Skyrim for example has many different text files relating to what the engine reads, after going on about the being thousands of code you try to play out that it's not possible for the to be more than the 7 features shown here? Please.

It is an implemented scalable feature that's what it's there for to be used for, the developer uses it to tell the engine how to adjust for each mode, your ananlogy is flawed because it's tailored to the context you're arguing which itself is based on your own assumptions that the are only 7 bits of code concerning the platform. You argue the car isn't the actual analogy here is someone is given a car to customize how it suits them, starting out it may not do what they want but with some work they can get the car into shape.

If you follow social media and some other boards people weren't sure how the development for two modes would work.

You'd have a point if console engines functioned exactly the same as PC engines. They do not.

Again, a console game engine that is optimized for one specific hardware setting (say Uncharted 4's engine) will run much more efficiently and more effectively than that same engine made to run on a plethora of PC hardware. You lose significant performance when you lose the ability to optimize for one specific hardware configuration
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Why do people fail understand or continue to underplay this significant difference? Developing engines for console games isn't at all the same as developing engines for PC games.

I never once assumed there are only 7 bits of code concerning the platform. I just don't pretend to make assumptions on what could exist elsewhere in the engine the same as you do, and extrapolate from there that this indicates that UE4.14 is going to support Switch operating modes and the scaling between all on its own.

If you are right, and that is something the folks at unreal do intend on putting in there engine, then this is undoubtedly nothing more than a placeholder of a feature that is likely going to be released in the future that might actually be able to do some of the scaling you're assuming this engine can do right now, because as it stands now it is entirely useless on it's own. Of course all of this could be serving a completely different purpose entirely, but hey, why don't we keep just taking your speculations as fact, shall we?

The problem is, going with my analogy, is that these profiles DO NOT represent a whole car as much as you like to pretend they do. This isn't a basic car that people can customize. It's not even an entire door. It could be a part of a door for a submarine or a helicopter for all we know at this point. So please stop telling people this means that UE 4.14 will take care of scaling for developers based on this information. It doesn't mean that at all based on what we know. If you actually know half of what you represent yourself as knowing, then you know that this doesn't mean what you're claiming it does. Not on it's own.

The things is, Switch is the same hardware docked and undocked so it should be even easier than when the game has to be able to scalate on a plethora of PC hardware, once you have the game programmed and optimized for one mode probably you alredy have most of the work done, is the same machine in both modes, is like when you put a laptop on low consume, it runs the same games than with high consume but way lower so you have to change the settings to have it running with the same performance, in this case the "low consumption" mode uses a 6" screen which makes easy a drastic change of resolution while still looking great (like 1080p to 540p which is a huge difference) that combined with lower shadow detail, texture definition, draw distance, antialiasing, anisotropic, occlusion ambient etc can make the same game run on way lower specs.

But that's what your argument is hinging on though that these 7 lines are all that concern the Switch, you're here raging on about assumption yet your stance in itself is also an assumption. Ofcourse the code is useless on it's own the developer has to tailor it to their project.

The problem with your analogy is that you're arguing only these two profiles a context that is exclusive to you and you alone, I'm talking about a whole scaling feature in the engine which is factoring in other possible profiles and codes that an engine will obviously have, this is why that analogy doesn't mean much to me because I'm talking about the whole car while you chose to only look at the door frame for you argument. I'll post what I want thank you even if you lose sleep over it because what I've said with this feature developed games can scale for both modes meaning that the possibilty of fully utilizing docked performance isn't as compromised by portable performance, you've decided to read it as games are compiled automatically for portable mode and have argued from that angle.

Yeah we all don't know all the details which is why it's just a basic summary of why the would be profiles of the performance modes.

So say a switch 3rd party multi plat runs 800p docked.... does it run like 540p in handheld mode?
Is that how this is to be understood? ei. handheld mode = about 66% of docked resolution?

Their probably aiming for 1080p docked, 720p handheld, for first party nitnendo games.

Yeah, that's how you're supposed to understand it, it seems. 1080p sounds really high for such a weak console, but it could work out with graphically simpler games such as Nintendo's (they're usually not very complex graphically). Mind you, that's just the default settings, and devs are free to do what they want.