Interesting article on Bit-Tech about porting:
Once the basic code is written, it goes through an automated process of recompiling, which is often created in-house by a developer as a part of its tools pipeline, in order to make it run on other processor architectures. In this case, compiling refers to the process of transforming high-level source code into low-level code that can be understood by the processor. After that, there’s usually a bit of tweaking in machine code (the native language of the processor architecture) or assembly code (a low-level, symbolic representation of numeric machine code), but this apparently occurs less frequently now.
“It’s all done in C++,” explains Visceral’s Colin ‘Bozz’ Boswell, technical director on Dead Space, adding that “we do write a very small amount of assembly code. Very occasionally, we’ll go in and do spot optimisations on functions that are used a hell of a lot in the game, but we try not to do that because the compilers are pretty good at optimising now, and sometimes you can actually make matters worse by doing [it yourself]”.
Games can be dismissed easily, so I enjoy articles that talk about the nature of development. So much goes on behind the scenes (like in any great endeavour) that it’s often a disservice to try and summarise or judge.
