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This is an interesting article, and mirrors my experience of porting. I really loved seeing the advice from various other developers he consulted. It's a nice w
by binji 10y ago
This is an interesting article, and mirrors my experience of porting. I really loved seeing the advice from various other developers he consulted. It's a nice way to expand it from being just his experience to a more general statement about what it's like to port software. I never ported a commercial game, but did quite a bit of porting to Native Client. The parts about knowing your tools, knowing the project, and the process of porting are spot on.
One thing he didn't mention (or I missed it), is how it feels when your port starts to work. I found it to be thrilling to have a big pile of code that doesn't work at all, and it stays that way for a while, until suddenly almost everything seems to come together. It's very different from normal software development, which is more gradual. Porting software feels more like solving a puzzle.
- Cheeseness 10y agoIt's interesting - I feel like I've experienced that more from working on my own games/projects than doing this port. Perhaps it's difficult for me to reflect on that with regards to DotT at the moment - all I remember feeling whenever I got something working was relief, and that was usually fleeting because there was always something else that needed attention. Poetically, I feel a little cheated that having the renderer work out of the box meant I didn't have an opportunity to get screenshots of any cool mangled visuals (although I am glad I didn't have to touch the renderer at all) :D It's possible that I'll feel differently after the dust settles. If that happens I'll definitely update the article with some extra thoughts!