Well I actually have Jak and Daxter and I finished all 3 games on Vita.
Problem I have here is that Vita could handle better graphics and better fps. The port isn't bad because of the limitations of the hardware, Sony just found the cheapest company to port it and didn't care about the rest.
I'm just disappointed to see Sony doing the same mistakes over and over again.
/rant off
Does Sony choose who ports RE?
As a computer tech with vast hardware and software tear-down experience, I can assure you it'll run anything currently ported at 30fps with proper coding. The problem is with how they port the games, engine availability (and quality due to bad coding), time taken to code (usually limited by money), and coding ability.
Well, yes, I'd say you hit the three main points -- time, money, ability.
But while you hinted at it with the engine availability, a major element can be the quality/documentation of the original code. A small team with a small budget trying to optimize bad code they didn't write in the first place is a nightmarish situation... whereas if the original code is clean, documented, and easy to read it can be much easier.
Clean code, for example, might have many of the most important optimization chokepoints nicely laid out as easily changeable constants [ie, enemy_count = 10 or whatever], whereas spaghetti code can have piles of hidden interdependencies, badly named variables/procedures, hacked in 'fixes' placed in obscure functions for other badly written functions...
I've seen [non-gaming] codebases that I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole w/o a hearty budget and a straight forward and honest recommendation to the client they'd be better off starting from scratch.
I agree on your point that a lot of it has to do with how well documented or supported the engines are, but the lazy/low skilled programmers argument to me sound like pure speculations.
Thank you for some great reading. Couldn't one of the problems with porting be that you, before you even started the project, have a finished product made for hardware with higher specs in mind. What I'm trying to say is that instead of having to solve every problem in a chronological order at the time of creation you are limited to work on an already finished code that isn't even yours to begin with.
What I dont realy understand though, that you might now, is why so many games have crappy animations (not talking about soft body physics), is animation really that demanding?
I don't think he meant the skill of the coders as 'speculation' so much as simply listing it as a factor -- and it is a factor, for sure. Not all coders are created equal.
To answer your second question, it really depends on too many factors not transparent to us. As someone points out later in the thread, if you have a super powerful machine, you do not necessarily need to 'optimize'.
That is, say you're running SpaceGame on PS4 -- you can have ugly, atrocious, terribly optimized code but the PS4 has enough ram and power to simply power through it and run it at 60fps.Then you try to port it to Vita, where suddenly the obscenely unoptimized codebase hits you in the face like a ton of bricks.
A simple example -- say the game was capable of simply loading all assets at the very beginning of the game on PS4. This would actually be quite nice, and it would even make sense - now all levels and restarts can be near instant. But doing so required, say, 3 gigs of RAM. And now you're on Vita... and you don't have those resources available. You've now got to figure out how to intelligently load assets into a game originally coded w/o even thinking about this issue. It's not that the original coders were 'bad' in this case -- they simply had options available to them that are not possible on the Vita, which creates a serious issue for the porters trying to jury rig a solution into an already completed codebase.
Or, say the code to display 'realistic' explosions is a physics monster and simply brings the Vita to a halt. Do you optimize the code? Remove it? Rewrite it from scratch?
You get what you pay for, talent included
I'm not saying it wouldn't be more expensive for someone else (better) to port these games, just that all these games with issues could have run well if properly coded - they weren't, so they suffer.
Has nothing to do with the power of the Vita, other than more resource overhead would make it easier for sloppy coders to put out fully working products.
While true, it's not always sloppy coding. As mentioned above, there are definitely cases where you simply don't need to concern yourself with certain things if you have the power... because you have the power. Few coders optimize and clean up their code simply because they can -- they wait till they need to, because they've got other things to work on.
