What are the main tasks and obstacles when porting a PC game to consoles, or vice versa?
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It used to be more involved than it is now. Previously you would have to convert everything to work with an entirely different type of processor. Now, every console just uses off the shelf PC parts so it’s just a bit of work to make the software run on the consoles OS. No more mucking about with hardware incompatibilities.
First of all; controls. Aka keyboard and mouse VS gamepad etc.
Second of all; game engine. Particularly; is it cross platform? DirectX, Vulkan.. aka languages used.
Third of all; performance. Consoles are often not the most powerful machines of all. So can it still run your code?
Consoles have standard hardware configurations. PCs are built with a large variety of hardware combinations. It can be difficult to account for every variation of video card, motherboard, processor. Doing this poorly will lead to an unoptimized game that runs slow and/or has bugs and crashes with the hardware.
In addition, however less complicated, are the controls. Button mapping a controller is different than button mapping a keyboard and mouse. It’s not always a smooth transition. Doing this poorly will lead to frustration as players are unable to map the keys on a PC the way they’d like, or the buttons just simply don’t work.
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