I could indeed, but i will keep at least one of those graph that will only take PC updates into consideration. I can always put a side note for the Mac Beta for the moment.
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Powerplay Discussion Thread
- Thread starter Arubeto
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I could indeed, but i will keep at least one of those graph that will only take PC updates into consideration. I can always put a side note for the Mac Beta for the moment.
No it isn't three times the work.
The main bulk of the game is written/created platform independent. Things like design, AI code, background simulation, 3D assets, sound/music, UI work and most of the gameplay code for new features is the same thing across systems.
Things that differ has to do with specific hardware and rendering pipelines and this can be handled by a dedicated group of people when "translating" these things to the platform in question. That (and work on paid) expansions is why they expanded the dev team at the beginning of the year.
Here is a quote from their website about the Cobra engine:
rootsrat
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Answer i short and precize
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/attachment.php?attachmentid=31447&d=1429882103&thumb=1
I love that meme!
Have some rep, Cmdr!
i guess it depends what one wants the graph to display. The frequency of updates by the devteam. Kinda checking their clockwork. Or the frequency of new feature releases for PC Commanders... both make sense.
Personally as a CS guy the former is more interesting to me ;-)
That's what i had in mind by keeping one of them "PC only", the original purpose was to keep track of (pc)updates and see how frequent they were, and not let it rely solely on fuzzy memory of us "impatient gamers", i'll try to figure out a way to take both into account now, and get ready for other platforms as well.
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The software split for ED is roughly:
- Server. Pretty much agnostic of platform, though there'll be some nuances around cross-play between PC/Mac and Xbox. Engineers working on the server solution will not be working on the client.
- Game engine. This is the ecosystem in which the game logic runs. The Cobra engine powers all Frontier's games including Zoo Tycoon, LostWinds, Kinectimals and Elite Dangerous. Much of the engine will be platform agnostic, but there'll be some underlying specialisation to interface with the OS, graphics APIs, networking, multithreading, etc. In general Frontier will try to decouple the engine from the logic as much as possible so that the logic is a "write once" affair rather than 3x as you assert. Of course, some game logic will require modification of the game engine. If that in turn requires platform-specific changes, the work will possibly need to be done multiple times. This situation should be rare.
- Game logic. The vast majority of the Powerplay update and bug fixes will be firmly within the game logic, and as such will be platform agnostic and thus "write once".
- Art assets. Used by game logic and interface with the engine. Theoretically shouldn't require engine changes, though there'll be some coupling (e.g. PG planet surfaces use graphics shaders, which have slightly different languages in DirectX and OpenGL).
Generally speaking, the skillset for each of the four disciplines above are disparate. Stepping between them requires not just specific skills to be learned, but also a large code base. Software resourcing isn't a simple case of putting engineers onto a problem and expecting it to be solved more quickly; this is a trap that a lot of people fall into (including some software managers!). Taking the Screamride team and dumping them onto ED game logic development would have been a hindrance to getting Powerplay completed. Instead it seems that they've put some of that team onto the Xbox port, and others onto their other new IP (Coaster Park), allowing the ED team to get on with what they were doing. It's good management all round. If you can't understand that, I'd suggest getting into software development and you'll find that many teams *aren't* as well run as Frontier's and that they fall into the same kind of trap that you have, thinking that throwing more people at a problem makes it go away.
Of course, I'm making assertions on Frontier's management looking in from the outside. The reason I think they're well run is that they continually produce high quality software in short order.