In a post over on the official Capcom Unity forums Christian Svensson, Vice President of Business Development, has explained a little bit about the problems faced when porting something like Marvel Vs Capcom 2 (released on XBLA yesterday and coming to PSN soon). It’s an interesting read because it sets a few things straight for the legion of people on gaming message boards who seem to think that it’s a simple case of clicking a few buttons and the job’s done.
Everything is relative… porting in general is as much art as science, depending upon what you’re porting from and porting to…
…MvC2 is another example, though it’s a bit different in terms of how the code is run…
Suffice to say, we’re taking what was Naomi/Dreamcast code that has been output in a way that 360 and PS3 can interpret it and making a whole lot of changes to it on the fly.
We have to add a new front end to account for all of the TRCs/TCRs that MS and Sony have with regard to interface standardization and features like trophies/achievements. We have to include new settings and options and online menu support. We had to plug in matching and lobby systems that never existed and that work with PSN and XBL. We had to optimize net code for a game that was never meant to support it (and that is VERY fast paced which makes it that much more difficult).
At the same time, we’re doing real-time sprite filtering of everything on screen. Rendering all of the 3D assets in resolutions far higher than they were intended and implimenting widescreen support (again, something the original code was never meant to do).
All of these rendering changes never come out the other side “perfectly” the first time so there’s a ton of tweaking that has had to be done to get everything looking just right. At some point, maybe we’ll show some of the early artifacts that we had early in development before those optimizations took place….
…We had to fix a few bugs that existed in the original version of the game too.
Suffice to say, the only thing easy about porting is that you know what should be coming out the other side when you’re done. In that regard, there’s fewer unknowns than with new development. The challenge is, the fans ALSO know what’s supposed to be coming out the other side… and if we don’t get it right, we certainly hear about it. With new development, those sorts of comparisons don’t exist. You can fail in entirely different ways with new development, but with ports, there’s no hiding anything.
It’s nice to hear a developer openly expanding on how the development process for porting these title actually works.
Source: Capcom Unity
