InsideQC Forums

Working around hardware limits or with reduced feature sets is fun, up to a point. The unfortunate thing is that if you want to or need to go beyond that point it becomes most definitely Not Fun. It turns very quickly into a grind, into not delivering, into trading off features for performance and an arms race which can never be won.

As a content designer (as opposed to engine coder), having to conform to resources this small would certainly kill the fun for me. Using Quake 1 tech is already a struggle.

It's a fact that however great you are with lego bricks, the general public will applaud the guy who has more eyecandy. Lego bricks or PSPs (or Quake, even) can't compete in the big picture. Unreal and Cryengine can. Heck, people at Mapcore will applaud you for things like fog and sun shafts that take 5 minutes to make, but look pretty.

It's not low spec that's really the problem

but legality of making a game depending on a unauthorized exploit of a closed platform

Coding, and building, to this kind of spec worked for the original Quake, but that's more or less the kind of limit you need to set.

Legality aside (and despite the legality issues it's still interesting to talk about this kind of thing in more general terms), where PSP ports go wrong is that they start out quite ambitious and then hit a wall. Not only is the hardware spec too restrictive for those ambitions, but the capabilities of the Quake engine, Quake tools, Quake formats and other Quake-level technologies are too restrictive and too primitive. There's a reason why Quake's original hardware requirements were so low, and that reason is because it couldn't really do much and what it could do involved compromises and tradeoffs to fit into those low requirements. So the appeal of Quake as a modding platform for something (and I'm talking in general terms here, not just PSP-specific) with such a low spec is only valid if one is willing to work within those limits.

People often seem to choose Quake as a platform out of an impression of simplicity, low requirements and a large body of community work to draw on, but Quake is really unsuitable for what they actually want to do. Something like Q3A would be much better, for example (and Q3A did run in 32mb of memory on the PS2 so it's not that far-fetched).

True, true. :?

mh wrote:(and Q3A did run in 32mb of memory on the PS2 so it's not that far-fetched).

They had to cap the framerate and use an exclusive skeletal model format to save memory though.

The Dreamcast version uses the same MD3 format as the PC version, but with PVR textures, and runs on 16 MB or RAM + 8 MB of video RAM.

However, comparing a professional port done by a whole team against a hobbyist port made by (in most cases) a single programmer is not fair.

mh wrote:People often seem to choose Quake as a platform out of an impression of simplicity, low requirements and a large body of community work to draw on, but Quake is really unsuitable for what they actually want to do. Something like Q3A would be much better, for example

True. But once you get into an engine, it's hard to get out of it. If I need to implement something in the Quake engine, most of the time I know where to look for to change the engine code, and how my changes may affect the rest of it. In other engines, I'd have no idea.

mh wrote:Sony aren't dumb; you can bet that they have a longer-term strategy here, and that this strategy will likely involve a move into the iPhone-alike market at some point in time. They already do standard phones, it's a natural move for them. Another big player in this market with a lot of customer mind-share and brand-loyalty would ironically also play nicely for Apple, as I can see the spectre of anti-trust looming over them at some point in the future.

Sony did make this thing (Android/PSP phone). As far as I can tell, it went nowhere (it was released a year ago):

http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/28/sony ... ay-review/

The iPhone/Android market creates an expectation of free or $0.99 games or maybe $5-$9 for a "great game". Sony is used to selling PSP games for $30. I think someone looking at a phone would wonder why they should pay $30-$40 for a PSP or Nintendo DS game when the games on phones are free/cheap. Sony and Nintendo could get away with that kind of pricing in the portable market because they were the only ones there.

So it isn't really just a hardware issue, I'm not sure how Sony could successfully participate in the phone market. They like to leverage their hardware to create a closed-ecosystem, but in the phone market they could never achieve a presence large enough to do that. Plus trying "to keep up" with the rapid pace of phone evolution wouldn't be pleasant, they've released essentially 2 generations of the PSP over 7-8 years, in a phone market a generation of hardware is maybe a year or 18 months. They don't want to deal with that.

The PSP is a nice platform, but for Quakemodding i will say no...
The reason are just the limits: Nobody knows them, and almost every engine
is random crashing with no reason...
I am thinking about to drop every PSP modding stuff because it isnt funny anymore,
its annoying.

I'm thinking most random crashes happen on console ports is due to shitty compilers in general.
I've had issues with .spr files freezing on PSP and Dreamcast and having to remake them, it's a really weird issue to work around along with the limitations of RAM/CPU/GPU.