Well enough money can make anything happen. But the real issue is the fact that XBox is a closed system. Even if you had the ability to create an XBox CD you couldn't run it on your own XBox without breaking the law. You probably wouldn't get sued for it, but Conitec sure would for making the engine.

It isn't likely that Microsoft is going to open up their console any time soon. This is a “big budget” market, and you need serious money to play in it. You might want to look at their “Live Arcade” option however.

How do you contact Microsoft?

For at least the Xbox and XB-Live. Maybe Xbox 360.

And can I ask you what you are going to talk with Microsoft? Are you perhaps wanting to make a game for XBox or XBox 360? If you are going to I suggest that you save AT LEAST 5 million to get some artist and coders for ya...

5 million dollars!

Ok first off, I have to admit to asking similiar questions about 3DGS porting, and I will admit to being somewhat wet behind the ears about how games dev actually works.

Fortunatly I have had the pleasure of working for the last 2 years with a AAA games developer, learning the craft so to speak. Not that I claim to know it all know, in fact learning that I DONT know it all, was probably the best lesson of all... anywho I digress.

So now I have returned to GS while I wait to see what happens with this developer and so with a new concept title in development the question of porting to console raises its ugly head once more....

To my understanding, Gamestudio has the potential to be ported to another OS like Xbox and PS1,2,3 etc. This potential could only be realised with X ammount of funding... Figure I would expect to be variable depending on the job, with maybe an upper limit of $100k? being realistic...

So my thinking is that it is reasonable to sell any concept developed on GS as a 'any engine portable title' which I believe is true, to a given value of true

So presuming the engine could be ported and funding was available, who would own it? I mean if my publisher hands over a check for $100k to port the engine to the PS3 (for example), would the publisher gain some kind of property rights over its use. I mean as much as I would love to raise that kind of cash and then hand over the ported version to the community, I doubt that my publisher would share in that philosophy.

I ask these questions partly as I like to play devils advocate, but also as I have a vested interest in this subject. The title we are developing is primarily aimed at the console market, and therefore the question of engine port possibility while arrise, and I would like to be armed with more fact than fiction...

Sry for the length of the post, its been a while

Before I comment I must stress again that everything in this thread is hypothetical. I'm just stating what I believe is most likely to happen based on the limited knowledge I have. If we got a serious offer, we (Conitec) would invest the time and energy to get real numbers.

That said, who owns the ported engine after we build it depends on how you negotiate the contract with us. For enough money (and, no, don't ask me how much because I'm in no position to estimate it) you could own all rights to the engine. But you would get a much better deal if you negotiated something less strict. I'm guessing that that price would be less then most console 3D engines, so your publisher could still view it as a bargain.

You should also know that, even if we create a XBox/PS2/PSP/etc. version of the engine we would have an extremely limited market to sell this to. You need to be a licensed developer with Microsoft/Nintendo/Sony to develop for their hardware. We couldn't just “hand it over” to the community. In fact, it is this restriction that keeps us from making the port in the first place.

Thanks Doug. Yes I am aware that anything here is hypothetical, but its nice to air these things and get an idea of the territory.

I don't know much about the licensing from the likes of Sony or other's, I am expecting our publisher to deal with those aspects of the deal, and would presume that the console requirement would include aquiring all licenses, from their respective owners and so on.

Really I am wondering about the feasability of porting to a console, and does this include porting the title. I exect not. Further more hypothetical questions, will the archietecture, language and so on be the same regardless of the destination platform? Or are we talking a ....Xbox version of Gamestudio or a Playstation version, each with its own ....limitations and so forth

It seems to be one of them chinese dragon puzzles....

Hypothetically, we dev a full game that we want to port from PC to Xbox. We have aquired all the developer licenses from Microsoft and have a infinite pot of cash from which to pay conitec to sort it all out.

How would this work.... hypothetically of course after all if I really had an infinite pot of cash, I would be on an island somewhere

Thanks Doug for your reply, and your patience with this topic, Im sure you are tired of repeating yourself over and over again...

If I had an infinite pot of cash I would spend the $700,000 (est.) for the next-gen Unreal engine and hire some programmers to figure it all out (each working for a six figure salary). Too bad those infinite cash pots are so hard to find.

As far as the differences between platforms goes, ideally this should be almost invisible to the developer. Just select “XBox” from the menu and press Publish. Obviously there will be some limits (the XBox only has 64MB of memory for textures, code, etc.) but the scripts and resources should be the same.

The big issue for us, and the reason that this thread is so hypothetical, is that until we get legal access to development resources (manuals, hardware, etc.) we have very few facts to base things on.