Hi, i’ve played some games on pc and console and i’ve certainly seen bad ports and i believe the worst port i’ve ever played was Iron Man, a PS2 port.
But why do game developers do things like these, why do they end up creating terrible ports?
(1) Is it because they are lazy?
(2) Is it because they don’t have alot of time to develop the game?
(3) Is it because they don’t have the correct hardware or software?
(4) Or is it because the console can’t handle it?
Examples
Red Dead Redemption
Xbox 360 (No Blur) PS3 (Things are Blury so you can’t some detail, also lower frame rate)
Grand Theft Auto 4
PC (Runs terrible without a patch)
Resident Evil 4 (Don’t even need to say anything about the pc version)
Iron Man
PC (Is a PS2 Port, officially the worst port i’ve ever played)
Thanks for reading
(I posted this here because i doubt i’ll find it anywhere else)
Some platforms require you to use a different programming language or sdk which may have different limitations than what you were originally developing for, so the source code you made is not directly transferable to that platform. You’d have to make adjustments (worst case would be to rewrite your entire source code, but that won’t be a case if you use Unity), which lead to increased development time, and if you have a deadline, you’ll be forced to cut corners, which sometimes, sadly, lead to bugs, graphical glitches, missing functionality and the like.
Other times, the platform you’re porting to has different hardware limitations, like I heard that the PS3 has a smaller amount of usable RAM than the Xbox 360, which is why PS3 ports end up getting lower quality textures.
Ah i see, thank you for telling me, i wonder if Apple will release an I Game, that’ll be cool, oh and what are the Apple products such as the IPhone, IPods and IPads capable of in terms of graphics, do they have better graphics the the PSP or DS, or inbetween.
And how big can your Unity Game be if you develop a game for these platforms?
And how big can it be on pc?
I’ve worked on a few ports… probably my least favourite work.
You really do have to butcher them if the target spec is a lot less in terms of processing power (CPU/GPU), RAM, etc. Even if its a higher spec, it’s not your job to add new stuff, maybe just add a few eye candy features. Time = Money.
Some are farmed out to other companies, so they’re not even done by the original team. lol
I wouldn’t mind seeing a comparison of the current consoles, handhelds to Apples iPhone/iPad, in terms of poly count, texture size.
Consoles/Handhelds usually have a lot of custom chips. I personally liked working on PSP games (not Wii), but those smaller companies moved to iPhone development.
How big can games be? How much content can your team make or how patient are your customers waiting on a download?
It’s probably in range of 1Gb for iPhone/iPad… and 10Gb for PC.
Porting is tricky at the best of times… Unity is the closest I’ve seen to “easy” cross-platform, and that comes loaded with ceveats…
From the core game engine to the teams that do the ports (most times sub-contracted work - who wants to live the same nightmare twice?!? ) porting isn’t easy. Almost every aspect of a game is geared toward the main target platform(s), from audio and graphics to game engine and compiliers. If you don’t start with “we’re going to deploy everywhere” then you really get down a rat hole fast.
Then you need to account for moving from a platform with higher specs in X areas to a platform setup higher in Y specs. PCs!!! All bets are off. Pick a “minimum spec” and expect customers to have failures with 10x your dream specs. If you had 1 million customers they’d manage to have 2-3 million specs they expect your game to run on (usually they’ll have 2 machines right out of the gate, then buy one more later… and complain about something on all of them). Hll take 2 “identical” Dell machines right off the same production line and you’ll likely have some differences (one of which will completely scrw up your game ).
PC gamers expect high res textures and it’s this that will cause a major slow down when playing games like GTA IV. The system memory speed of a console and a PC will be roughly the same and so the PC doesn’t really have an advantage when streaming textures into video ram.
PCs are only at an advantage when they can preload all their textures into video ram when a game level starts. But this isn’t possible with a game like GTA IV that has 1000s of textures.
I’m not so sure, console gamers are connecting them up to 60" LCD HD TVs these days, and demand a decent FPS and visual quality even from a $199 console. PC gamers are usually a bit more forgiving, unless they’re the ones that spent $5000 on a badass rig.
Consoles have a small amount of video ram compared to PCs and so there isn’t much choice but to keep texture sizes to a minimum.
Some console games can manage to use high res textures because the games pace is set at walking pace and so there’s time to stream the textures in. Drake’s Fortune on the PS3 is one that comes to mind. Although in certain places you can still actually see the textures loading.
I remember Mass Effect 1 and 2 loading textures when you load up a new level.
I’ve played Mass Effect 1 on the Xbox 360 and Mass Effect 2 on PC, and i’m sure UT3 loads textures aswell, maybe it’s the Unreal Engine 3.
Many games don’t need to rely on streaming textures. A game like UT3 is a classic example of a game type that can load all map textures on startup.This is because the maps are designed with a deliberately limited number of textures.
It’s huge open world games like Grand Theft Auto IV that need to resort to streaming textures. Just the billboards alone must take up several gigabytes.
Nice theory, tell that my 18GB RAM and 4 hhd raid5 system who is at a benefit of streaming and caching and who not when the game realizes that it can pull sequential data at a rate beyond the 300mb/s The major player in “how to use whats there” is definitely WoW, I’ve never seen any other game that scaled up that well along my hardware capabilities in the past, be it ram, harddisk speed or VRAM
I’ve yet to see the game that slows down independent of how much stuff I leave open etc due to “loading”, even previous “neck breakers” like HL2 load within nearly no time (my previous game took that long that the initial boat racing sequence spent more time in loading than it did in playing)… and that although my raid currently is only a ICH10R present in a lot of systems that didn’t use $50 mainboards …
But yes, multiplatform development is a hard topic and ports are and never will be perfect. Most teams can’t afford to have full teams behind other platforms, they only have “portation staff” (only EA has such permanent platform teams as far as I heard so far) and portation staff normally has no impact on the original design to make it multiplatform friendly
As to why the Xbox games don’t port over to the PS3 very well, it may be because the Xbox has more video ram than the PS3.
The Xbox has 512 MB of system ram which is also used as video ram. The PS3 only has 256 MB of video ram. So if an Xbox game used 400 MB of textures then the PS3 programmers will have no choice but to reduce some of the texture sizes in order to make them squeeze into the PS3’s video card.
Yupp the RAM - VRAM difference is definitely of impact.
the architecture differences with 3 vs 1 general purpose cpus is another thing that impacts it or the T1 10mb ondie buffer memory the x360 GPU has which enables it to do post fx even faster than the ps3 as it has lower latency.
the ps3 on the other hand has the benefit that they near always sold with more harddisk storage while microsoft thought that 20GB was reasonable, selling the 120GB addon at unrealistic brainfart prices, which allowed PS3 targeted stuff to use installs much more commonly to overcome some of the loading speed issues though.
My point is that people aren’t using consoles with blurry CRT TVs in low res formats likes NTSC or PAL. HDTV is 1920x1080 which is a lot closer to what people are using on their PCs. Xbox/PS3 were state of the art on release, but well behind the curve now.
More on topic:
I ported some games from N64 to PSX… and PSX textures always looked better with a “gritty” look since it couldn’t do bi-linear. N64 blurred the crap out of everything lol
Yes, I know consoles are often connected to 1080p screens, but that’s beside the point isn’t it?
The point I was making is that PC users demand high res textures and so they’re given high res textures, then when their PC struggles to run smoothly then they’re left wondering why…
Of course console users also demand high res textures for their 1080p TVs, but they can only ever have what their console is capable of.
) porting isn’t easy. Almost every aspect of a game is geared toward the main target platform(s), from audio and graphics to game engine and compiliers. If you don’t start with “we’re going to deploy everywhere” then you really get down a rat hole fast.
