[penguin]

I've been playing around with the homebrew ps2dev community, which is all about writing apps for the Playstation 2 platform in "native mode" (i.e., not the ps2-linux port).  You've gotta jump through some hoops to get there, since it's a closed architecture, but it's possible.

From what I've learned about the PS2 (and from my experience with the FS2 code), it would be next to impossible to port fs2_open as it is.  In fact, I think daveb made some comment to that effect a year or so ago.  It would probably need to be almost a complete rewrite, although I noticed that there have been some rumblings about that recently.

I guess my question is: does this sound interesting to anyone?  (Not just folks who'd like to see it, but any developers who might want to get on board).  

Or would a space sim as complex as FS2 lose too much in translation to a console?

A word of warning to any developers: the PS2 is weird.  Not exactly your father's von Neumann architecture.

Anyhow, just thought I'd throw this out for your perusal.

[Lightspeed]

FS2 + PS2 = teh bitter end :shakes head:

[Flipside]

Well, diversity will delay the end in my opinion, but there you go

I'm not a coder, and in theory, it would be a good idea, but I think you would find it would not just be coding that would be the problem, it would be implementation of all the keys etc, I had the thought of Pressing Up+Top Left to select nearest Escort ship etc

[mikhael]

I'd be interested to see it done, but I couldn't work on it.

[Lightspeed]

Originally posted by Flipside
Well, diversity will delay the end in my opinion, but there you go

not at the cost of potential coders

it's not worth the work, really

We should first spread it around decent computers

[Flipside]

hehehehe Well, this is true And yes, I'm not sure whether it would be possible to implement even the 'standard' FS2 keys, and there would be no level design, no mod support, basically it would be the standard campaign, or a custom written one, either way, you are correct, it would be a massive amount of work, it would be great if it could be done, but I wouldn't want to take it on

[penguin]

Well, it obviously wouldn't be a shrinkwrapped game you'd get at EB -- Sony has seen to this w/ their US$10000 per developer licenses (yes, that's the correct number of zeros).  It would have to be for folks who have the ability to download and run games over the network adapter (or USB port via Naplink)

And if it's connected to the net, there's no reason why mods, etc. couldn't be available, there are precedents for that too.

But the barrier for entry is pretty high -- someone would really want to play this in order for it to them to be able to load it.  That's the good news/bad news side of console game development -- the shrinkwrapped stuff is easy (no worrying about the right driver version, right video card, sufficient memory, etc.); it's essentially targetted at the lowest common denominator.  But it's not at the point where Joe Gamer can just download a game from the net and start playing it.

And the UI would suffer dramatically -- only 12 buttons plus two analog thumbsticks is a much leaner input device than FS was designed to use, so something would have to give.  The obvious choices would be messaging and/or ETS, but this would require a lot of changes to the game engine to make certain ship/weapon combos playable.  And removing either if these would affect the playability of all the missions as they're designed now...

Bottom line: it would require almost a complete rewrite.  Not that this is a Bad Thing  but it sure would be a lot of work.

For now, it's purely idle speculation.  I was just wondering what the reaction would be.