Since the PC version of BeamNG has been going very well (from the looks of it, at least) I've been considering the posibility of a console port of the game to the XBox 360 and PS3 consoles. This has been talked about with Rigs of Rods before, but it was said that it would take far too much time (and probably money, though that was never mentioned). There are many reasons, however, why this would be a lot easier for consoles. The first of these is the fact that BeamNG is going to cost money. The reason this would make my idea more likely is that it would mean things like any software needed to make the port and maybe even an expanded dev team. This would make the process much faster than the process of, say, porting RoR. The second reason is that BeamNG seems to have caught the eye of some other game developers. If they like it enough and see that it has enough potential, they might want to help with a console port development, which would certainly speed up the process, but it would also depend on if you guys developing this would want to work with any other game dev. The third and final reason is that CryEngine 3 appears to be much easier to make work on a console then something like RoR's engine (Ogre, if I'm not mistaken) would be. My evidence for this is that CryEngine 3 has already been used on console games, like Crysis 2. So there you have it, my reasons why BeamNG might be possible on a console. Tell me what you think, if devs specifically tell me if you think it could work or not.
http://www.beamng.com/faq.php?faq=beamng#faq_consoles Please look at the FAQ's before posting. Trust me, I'd love it if they made this game for PS3 and Xbox360, but some games are too complex.
Goddammit, though I'd looked everywhere.... Oh wells, it's still a neat idea but I guess you're right, way too complex. I was looking mainly at the posibilities of development rather than if the console could actually handle it. That was part II.
Well, we can always wait for the PS4 and Xbox720. Those should be able to support BeamNG. At that point, BeamNG could become one of the most revolutionary pieces of console gaming.
Yep, then I well almost certainly buy it. As it is, I'm gonna try the pre-alpha, but even if it turns out my comp can handle it (highly unlikely) I probably won't be buying official release.
My processor and RAM are no prob, I have an AMD Athlon II X4 645 @ 3.2GHz and 6GB of RAM. The problem is my graphics card, it's an integrated ATi 4200 that struggles with TDU 2 on the lowest settings. I would lag like Hell on BeamNG I'm fairly certain.
I think an xbox 360 would run beamng at 15fps at 1024x768 at best. I have a pentium d from the same year as the xbox came out and playing RoR at 800x600 pegs it. pos right? I'm going to put a core 2 duo or quad in it some time. RoR doesn't stress my crap gpu much. oc 8400gs 512mb and according to gpu-z it is at about 40% load most of the time, it also says it's taking up about 300mb of memory on the card.
That's good, I really want to be able to play this game at a good framerate like I do with RoR. - - - Updated - - - I can see why an XBox 360 wouldn't handle it that well, most of the games for it are optimized specially for it. I can also imagine that, based on the processing power required by this game, an XBox 360 would overheat fairly quickly when playing this, much like any mobile device playing RoR would (that's been discussed on the RoR Forums). A mobile version of this game would be pretty cool, but much like RoR, it's waaaaaaaaaaaaay further out of reach then any console port, being that it'd probably be harder to code, any mobile device processor would NOT be able to handle the physics calculation, and the device would run out of battery within 2 minutes and it'd overheat before that. Pretty much, BeamNG on mobile devices= or . Still a neat idea, though.
I would assume an Xbox 360 could run BeamNG. It has a triple core 3.2GHz processor which can run two threads on each core. The GPU is very similar to an ATi X1900 and the Xbox has 512MB of ram which the GPU uses as well. I'm pretty positive this would be enough to simulate one vehicle in the game.
Exactly, enough to simulate one vehicle ingame. If you're very lucky it might do 2. That's so incredibly not worth porting it over that I would call it flat out stupid. It would cost a lot of time and therefor money to finance the whole thing and I doubt the devs would ever get their money back with, I'm assuming, only a few people who would prefer to play this on a console rather than a PC. Unless they can get the full development costs back that they "spend" porting it over and some profit, it wouldn't really be a smart thing to do...
When this game is out (full game) the next PlayStation and Xbox could be around and I'm sure they would have a chance of playing this pretty nicely. We will have to wait and see what hardware is inside the next set of consoles. In the meantime I'm eager to play this on my PC but a next gen console version would be awesome.
The devs said the game should be out in less than a year (hooray! ). We didn't hear about the PS3 until ~2 years before it was released. Based on that, and the fact that we haven't heard any news about next-gen consoles, I'd guess that it'll be another 5 years before the next wave of consoles. Hopefully by then, BeamNG could make another even better game for consoles.
That was part of my original thought, it's already being recognized by IGN and such. This game is gaining popularity pretty quickly.
Not true, you develop for xbox using XNA. Anyone can do it, and i believe its free until you actually release on the store.
dev kits exist for c++ access, and we would need that to get the performance. And no, no port in the near future ahead due to the limited time and money that this would cost.
Ah, well that's a bummer. Although i think most of your target demographic is on PC anyways, so probably not a huge loss here. Although the Trials franchise sold remarkably well after transferring to xbox... Might be worth looking into once you have a solid release on PC and start getting some income from the project.