7 replies to this topic

[TcM]

How is this done? how do they test the games etc.. they use emulators on PC's? or the use the console it's self? and what about the programming language? they invent their own or what?

[v0id]

What do you mean about console programming and games? Do you mean people who compiles their work, using the console?

[TcM]

No no I mean as making games for consoles.. like PS3

[G_Morgan]

It varies. The most common one AFAIK is to use a stock engine that runs on multiple platforms. Take the Unreal 3 engine, it runs on the 360, PS3, Windows PCs, Linux and probably every other platform on the planet with enough power. There are a metric ton of games coming out that use it (Gears of War is probably the most famous at this point).

Then you can develop on one platform and just build it for a console when it's ready.

[TcM]

So the programming will be the same on all platforms then you just compile it for the other platforms right?

[G_Morgan]

That's pretty much it. Obviously there'd be regular builds on the target platform to ensure the game is compatible.

It's a secret most of these game companies keep. Often, porting their games to another platform is near trivial. Even the ones that use DX as default will usually have several possible implementations (the Unreal 3 engine uses DX on Windows but OGL everywhere else. WoW has an OGL mode built into the standard binary). When they say 'it's too much effort to port' read MS/Sony paid us a lot of money not to port, hence we aren't going to do it.

[GMailGuy]

I never understood console programming personally.

G_Morgan said:

That's pretty much it. Obviously there'd be regular builds on the target platform to ensure the game is compatible.

What do you mean by regular builds? I am not much into this.

Quote

When they say 'it's too much effort to port' read MS/Sony paid us a lot of money not to port, hence we aren't going to do it.

Paid who a lot of money?

[G_Morgan]

GMailGuy said:

I never understood console programming personally.


What do you mean by regular builds? I am not much into this.

They'd have a build system which would automatically compile and prepare a version of the software that runs on the target platform rather than the development platform.

There are always portability issues, not everything works perfectly between platforms. In order to ensure that what they are seeing in development is what they will see on the console they must do this sort of testing.

GMailGuy said:

Paid who a lot of money?

The reason many games are tied to one platform is that the producers of that platform (either MS or Sony) pay them (the developers of the game) a lot of money not to put that game on another.

Put simply it would be trivial for most games to be portable to other platforms given that most games today use portable stock game engines. The reason they don't port is that they are paid money not to. Gears of War is the best example, there is no reason it couldn't run on OSX, PS3 or Linux tomorrow.

There are exceptions of course, I suspect Final Fantasy 13 won't trivially portable to the 360 since the PS3 uses industry standards (OGL etc) while the 360 use MS standards (DX). This will likely be universally true for custom built game engines for the PS3, most on the 360 would probably go through the effort of a OGL support though so they can do their work on systems other than Windows if they so choose (even if the 360 doesn't support OGL).