Please port to PS4.

[Jewy McJew]

Would the fine folks at Obi-Whatever please release this extraordinary game on PS4 so I don't have to get back my PS4 back from my sister's kid.

 

It takes about 8 hours to port a PC game to PS4 so if enough people complain to them, they will probably do it. 

[FearMonkey]

Probably not up to Obsidian. Should bring it up with Ubisoft.

[Apatia]

Like FearMonkey said, not up to Obsidian.

 

It takes about 8 hours to port a PC game to PS4

Umm no.

[Bryy]

It takes about 8 hours to port a PC game to PS4 so if enough people complain to them, they will probably do it. 

 

 

... what?

 

Who is telling you this crap?

[Jewy McJew]

Obviously I am exaggerating for effect. But to port a game to PS4 PC's architecture, if it does not require optimizations, is very straightforward process. The team behind 'Warframe' mentioned how quickly and smoothly porting was for them, and as The stick of Truth does not push the hardware, I can only assume it is a relatively easy process. 

 

Either way, I want it. I want it really bad. 

[Elerond]

PS4 uses different application programming interfaces than PC, and it's memory architecture, call hierarchy, etc. are different. Which means that you can't do straightforward ports from PC to PS4. Xbox One's API's are more similar with PC, but even for it you can't actually do straightforward ports.   And you need always optimize your ports and adapt your user interface to work with systems input methods.

 

But porting games from PC to current console generation is in most cases easier than what porting PC games for previous generation was, thanks for more mature SDKs than what XO and PS3 had in their launch and main computing power is moved from CPU to GPU, like in gaming PCs. But porting always need work, especially when you need to port your engine to new system(s).

[Jewy McJew]

I am not a game programmer, but for games that do not require extensive optimizations I would assume most of what you mentioned is abstracted in their engine code and could be fairly easily replaced with a moderate performance penalty.

 

The Battlefield 4 team mentioned that they were able to use regular expressions to convert DX11 to OpenGL during compiling (which is impressive).  I am very pleased that PS4/XB1 decided to go with a PC architecture. Programming exotic hardware like the Cell was not for the weak willed. Sure we will not see incredibly improvements over time as we did with the PS3, but the ease-of-use and reduced cross-platform costs will benefit developers and consumers.

 

This is a great time to be a gamer!

[Elerond]

XB1 and PS4 don't use PC architecture only but customized components that are use same binary code than PC.

 

There is lots of ways how you can design engine code to be easily portable, but even best multiplatform engines can't offer straight forward porting between platforms and if you need to port engine itself amount of work needed multiples.

 

For example porting games from Windows to Linux and Mac OS is not straightforward process even though they actually have same hardware as Windows machine. And this is result of different API in every platform, which usually cause performance problems, rendering problems, crashing, memory allocation problems etc.. 

 

But that said, porting games to new consoles is not any ultimate task that companies can't do, but it still big enough that it can be financial risk, which may cause publishers not to port games to new consoles that have been developed only older generation in mind.