News - Developer: "consoles couldn't possibly handle" Star Citizen

[DanceswithUnix]

How about the programmers amongst us? is it easy to code the game for consoles again and again baring in mind Consoles get new versions every few years, is it as simpe as changing controller algorithms?

It is only about every half a decade that new consoles come out. There would no doubt be lots of tuning involved, getting *something* up and running is the first rule of porting code to a new platform but then you get the incremental task of trying to make it work well rather than limp along with half the features missing. Also you rapidly learn to hide platform dependant code as much as possible. It isn't easy, but making code from platform X run on platform Y is a well trodden path.

So hence claiming it couldn't possibly be done comes across as both arrogant and stupid.

[keithwalton]

Its like going on an enthusiast forum for cars,and thinking everyone has 200BHP+ vehicles,with leather seats!

How did you know what I drove ;-) But you're right most people drive diesels and most computers are still running C2D's

But jokes aside the console makers were right to go with the AMD apu as there isn't anythng out there at the moment that can compete with it.
The atom always has been and probably always will be junk it was supposed to be a cheap chip for emerging markets but intel cant do cheap they have more overheads than a bureaucratic government but they do like to make an overall profit which gives them the power to buy themselves out of a hole.

Peforfmance wise haswell was hardly a jump at all and even TDP wise power usage went up. But the ULP chips still pack a lot of punch at 15w.
Personally I'd prefer a couple of quick cores to many slow cores, unless you need to exclusively dedicate a core to activity modern task schedulers are quite efficient at making the most of cpu time available.
It's like the current crop of phones running quad cores and soon to be eight core cpu's phone makers are having to come up with extra tasks in order to keep the cpu's busy. Does a phone really need to have 8 dedicated process at once...

But back to the whole point of the article as to why the developer has chosen not to pursue a console release, it could be lazyness it could be something like hard drive storage space / speed.
Space based games tend to take up a lot of resources and strategy games always tend to bog down the further you get into the game as it starts to do more and more calculations.
This dev is not the only one not to bite on next gen consoles. Grid autosport was recently released on pc and last gen consoles only. Because developing a new engine wasn't worth it for that game.
Which is a bit of a worry for F1 2014 as that uses the same engine, I do hope they're going to release it on the x1/ps4 as 8 months in my x1 has 3 games!