Xbox release

[chrisragnar]

How do you think the Xbox release will effect develpoment, and development times?
Would it not have been better to push development of the game further before spreading resorces to Xbox aswell?

 

[xyphic]

I suspect a lot of the work will be done by existing Xbox teams within Frontier's wider team (specifically those who worked on Zoo Tycoon and/or Screamride), as a lot of the work will be relating to getting the engine working well on the Xbox hardware. There should be little effect from the game logic side, which I'm sure will plough on regardless of the Xbox work.

One of the good things about doing the Xbox work is that they'll need to make performance optimisations, some of which will benefit other platforms. Another consideration is that the sooner the Xbox port releases, the sooner Frontier can start raking in the cash from it, and the more stable and secure ED's future will be. So my feeling on it is that it's absolutely the right thing to do, and will be beneficial to everyone (and won't push development schedules out too much).

 

[Ancipital]

One of the good things about doing the Xbox work is that they'll need to make performance optimisations, some of which will benefit other platforms. Another consideration is that the sooner the Xbox port releases, the sooner Frontier can start raking in the cash from it, and the more stable and secure ED's future will be. So my feeling on it is that it's absolutely the right thing to do, and will be beneficial to everyone (and won't push development schedules out too much).

I'm not sure that this actually all that likely. The XBone's GPU isn't at all bad; probably in better shape than slightly aged Macs, for example (a lot of which have really underwhelming graphics hardware, and no DirectX either). ED already has a fairly slight memory footprint, too- a common bugbear for consoles. Control schemes might be a headache, and the XBone's CPU is obviously quite poor- a budget low voltage AMD part with a good few cores but poor single thread performance (typical of modern AMD CPUs, sadly). Maybe we'll see some threading improvements that will tangentially benefit the Windows version a bit, perhaps. However, don't count on a console port producing massive performance bumps.

I guess it all comes down to what sort of framerate and detail settings they're happy with for the XBone. If the tradeoffs don't shake out well, maybe the pressure to make more optimisations like that would be more keenly felt. If they're happy with shedding some of the eyecandy, it might not be a terribly tight fit. Only FD will know when they try it

 

[Snakebite]

How do you think the Xbox release will effect develpoment, and development times?
Would it not have been better to push development of the game further before spreading resorces to Xbox aswell?

I think its the other way around, IE the xbox release will bring in revenue that can be used to speed up development of the game. My biggest concern is that the game has been dumbed down right from the beggining because of the need to release on consoles. I'm sure that they have dumbed it down as little as possible though.

I'm also concerned about sharing the game with immature players, but thats a bit selfish I guess after all I was only 13 myself when I first played Elite.