How To Port Video Games Into A Different Engine

Short answer, No.But without a doubt, the world of video games is changing. Literally 3 days ago I wrote this on my Facebook and I think it will answer your question:In the 80's they had the Great Video Game Crash of 1983, caused by developers overconfidence and little care about quality. I have a strong feeling we're very close to another video games crash, this time caused by greedy practices of Triple-A developers.Children are going to be a major contributor. With the release of that Harry Potter game recently it became evident those companies will squeeze anyone for money, sometimes in the most blatant way. A lot of the kids in the past have spent literal thousands of dollars on micro transactions in games like Candy Crush or Smurf Village. If this trend continues, parents may get fed up and pretty much stop their kids from playing it. Regular gamers may turn into Indie market. Big publishers will fall.This is a terrible news to console players. PC gamers are going to prevail simply because PCs will prevail, but with so many consoles now focusing on always-on internet connection, once the publisher goes down the drain, the console will become a paper weight, as opposed to PCs where even I can code a simple game.I think I'm glad this will happen.

This answer is written keeping two things in mind. First,about steps & ways to port a console game to a PC. Second,why it takes a long time to create a successful port.Controls and Gameplay : When you're playing on a console, this alone puts certain limitations on what you can do, since all the user has is a gamepad,unlike in PC there can be a pad,a stick or a classical keyboard.mouse combo. Simply creating 1:1 mappings between keyboard keys and controller inputs is not always a good idea. So sometimes it takes longer to figure out a good solution.Hardware : When you develop for a dedicated console, you know exactly how a console will behave, because all consoles are identical hardware wise. This is not true for PCs as you have many different graphics cards and CPUs, and sometimes something won't work on some of them. Hence, a lot of testing & fixing is required for the said project .Resource Management : On consoles, the game doesn't have to compete with an OS for resources, etc. - not a whole lot of stuff goes on in the background.On a PC, you have the OS running, you have a plethora of background programs, and this all means you won't get as large a share as you were hoping for. This means you sometimes need to perform additional optimizations, especially for players on lower end systems.Prior Experience : So,you've never used your engine to make a PC version of your game. This alone causes several problems to occur as you need to code your hardware abstraction accordingly or even from scratch. Some games want to support multiple DirectX versions and/or OpenGL for Linux/Mac, and all of that takes time to write if it hasn't been done before.Assets & Performance : In a console,you know your limits & develop assets that work within those parameters.On a PC however,graphics cards support more advanced features & textures than your average console. Hence what was ‘ok’ for a console might end up being ‘basic or rudimentary’ for the PC scenario. Hence you need to add assets such as textures,shaders etc or improve them before you can launch your tittle.

Generally is co-developed. All of the console focused games I've worked on were developed on windows machines using visual studio and had an editor and standalone game you could run easily on the PC. 90% of my development time was done on the PC. I'd only build, cook and copy over to my dev kits if I was working on console specific features or bugs.Once the consoles versions are done (or mostly done) then you split off some of the team to start doing the PC specific stuff  - installer, new UI for menus (graphics, sound, etc) and matchmaking (assuming you are doing a multiplayer game since you aren't using the sony or microsoft backends for that.) There might be a little more work - like friends list and social graphs. You need to do different key bindings for keyboard/mouse and maybe joystick (depends on the game) but most of that is already done - again, you've been doing years of development  work on your PC at your desk. Its just a matter of polishing it up for the consumer.IF (huge huge if) the market is expected to be a decent size AND you have the budget, you might (but rarely do) optimize things like level streaming size or texture maps for the PC. Maybe you had an HD pack (as an option) so you have a solid 4k experience (something you won't have on consoles for a while) But that doesn't usually happen. For mixed release games, the PC market is fractional. And the current performance is good enough. Sure, we could make streaming seamless by using all 16GB or whatever you have but then you have to either raise the min specs or have multiple streaming versions depending on ram AND test all of those. Testing gets expensive when you are talking about 20+ hrs of gameplay. And the benefit is marginal  - a 15 second loading screen really isn't the end of the world.

Yes. You really only need the latest hardware to play at 4K. I survive on 2GB at 1080p (and I have a 1st-gen 40″ 4K display, but run it at a lower resolution sometimes, partly because it has a low screen refresh rate, but, when it was available, it cost way less than the ASUS high-speed 4K displays with the NVIDIA port). Video memory is generally a function of how high resolution you want your textures to be. There is usually a setting to decrease texture detail and increase frame performance. Likewise, full-screen shading can also be tweaked, as can other ‘cpu’ related game settings.

Thanks for the A2A.It depends. There are several different “specialties” in game programming,[1] though there is considerable overlap. There are also numerous different types of games.A triple-A first person shooter is considerably more difficult than a platformer, like Super Mario Brothers. A puzzle game like Tetris is much easier than a MMORPG like World of Warcraft.When you settle into your niche, the work can be pretty straight-forward, though not really “easy”. Focusing on a specialty lets you get your part just right, without having to worry about everything else going on in the game. For example, if your niche is AI and pathfinding, you can concentrate on just that and don’t have to worry about how the models get imported into the game, how they’re rigged, how the lighting works, how to exporter and importers work, how the level editor works (except that it has the hooks for your pathfinding), how input is handled (as long as you get the input you need), how the networking code works, how network latency is handled, how the freaking UI widgets work, how the music is generated, how the levels are loaded, how gamestate is saved and about a hundred other details. Working on just your aspect of the game makes it much, much easier.Which is probably why most homebrew games fail. For a homebrew game, you have to do everything: from art to sound to code. It’s all yours, baby!So, game programming can be hard, but being allowed to focus on just one aspect of a game makes it easier. It doesn’t make it easy, but it makes it manageable.Footnotes[1] Video game programmer - Wikipedia