How do you think a PSP version should work?
This is not a petition. The decision to make a PSP version of this or any other game is entirely up to them, I'm simply thinking aloud here how I think a PSP version could work best.
If you want to discuss why a PSP version should or should not be done, please go this thread that DjNDB found.
Graphics
The thing about the PSP is that the screen is relatively low-res for its size. For example if the screen had the density of my cell phone's screen it would be around 800x480 pixels, but it's 480x272. That's not a problem for movies, but since the PSP isn't fast enough to enable antialiasing on even moderately complex scenes you get a lot of flickering for small objects.
However, there's a lot of storage available, so why not prerender the backgrounds? Sure, that sounds like you could only walk through static images, but hear me out:
The PSP has a pretty good h264 (video) decoder. And even considering that you would have to include most routes twice (you can't easily play a video backwards) one route like the pier that's roughly 20 seconds end-to-end plus 10 seconds for the side routes (to jungle, to ship) would end up around 3 MB for EXCELLENT quality. Add a Z buffer at high quality and it may be 5 for but never more.
Of course these scenes would have to be static. Having animated parts would multiply the size of the whole route by the number of frames.
Using realtime animation for certain elements (like actors) would usually look pretty horrible, but since the video decoding would take up far less processing time than rendering the scene, maybe there would be enough time to enable antialiasing on the remaining elements.
Put that all together and you'd get a pretty amazing package that would far exceed the usual standard of PSP games and would probably require less work than trying to make the scenes look good in realtime.
Sound
Well, no big surprises here. Midi would work out nicely.
Controls
For a PSP release the controls would definitely have to be adjusted. Hot spot selection would have to make a return.
The Rest
One thing you have to keep in mind on mobile platforms is that users often play for only a very short time. So add a summary of the current tasks to the pause screen, so that when a user returns, he gets a short reminder what he was doing before he left.
Also, autosave is crucial. Users zap in and out of games far more often on a mobile device than they do on a PC. So do a quick autosave when the user exits and when he returns, don't bother loading the menu. Just return straight to the pause screen with the aforementioned reminder.
Any other thoughts?
If you want to discuss why a PSP version should or should not be done, please go this thread that DjNDB found.
Graphics
The thing about the PSP is that the screen is relatively low-res for its size. For example if the screen had the density of my cell phone's screen it would be around 800x480 pixels, but it's 480x272. That's not a problem for movies, but since the PSP isn't fast enough to enable antialiasing on even moderately complex scenes you get a lot of flickering for small objects.
However, there's a lot of storage available, so why not prerender the backgrounds? Sure, that sounds like you could only walk through static images, but hear me out:
The PSP has a pretty good h264 (video) decoder. And even considering that you would have to include most routes twice (you can't easily play a video backwards) one route like the pier that's roughly 20 seconds end-to-end plus 10 seconds for the side routes (to jungle, to ship) would end up around 3 MB for EXCELLENT quality. Add a Z buffer at high quality and it may be 5 for but never more.
Of course these scenes would have to be static. Having animated parts would multiply the size of the whole route by the number of frames.
Using realtime animation for certain elements (like actors) would usually look pretty horrible, but since the video decoding would take up far less processing time than rendering the scene, maybe there would be enough time to enable antialiasing on the remaining elements.
Put that all together and you'd get a pretty amazing package that would far exceed the usual standard of PSP games and would probably require less work than trying to make the scenes look good in realtime.
Sound
Well, no big surprises here. Midi would work out nicely.
Controls
For a PSP release the controls would definitely have to be adjusted. Hot spot selection would have to make a return.
The Rest
One thing you have to keep in mind on mobile platforms is that users often play for only a very short time. So add a summary of the current tasks to the pause screen, so that when a user returns, he gets a short reminder what he was doing before he left.
Also, autosave is crucial. Users zap in and out of games far more often on a mobile device than they do on a PC. So do a quick autosave when the user exits and when he returns, don't bother loading the menu. Just return straight to the pause screen with the aforementioned reminder.
Any other thoughts?
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Comments
LuigiHann, as much as I would like to take credit for it, it's not really a new idea, just one I think may be worth considering. That kind of thing has been done ever since CDs appeared. Final Fantasy 7 comes to mind, or Rebel Assault.
PSP can be coded to playback whatever audio type as long as the engine allows it, to be really honest, if the PC episodes stay around 200MB, then it seems perfectly possible to fit a whole season onto a Single UMD without compressing the audio even more or switching the music to MIDI based, it could still use the PC style of the higher captured OGG files.
And yes it does seem sad that even a PSP has a major storage advantage over the Wii.
PSP is just a little less powerful than PS2, and Wii is just barely more powerful than an Xbox, so the graphics from the Wii version would be roughly equal quality (considering how compressed they were to fit in 40mb in the first place) to what PSP could handle, given the smaller screen resolution and all.
Both would work. I was just mentioning MIDI since it's a good deal smaller while offering good quality. But in the end you'd probably use whatever is easier to implement, which would probably be AAC.
But once again, with a bit of tweaking it can play any format, ScummVM on the PSP is in a small way proof of that, barly using more CPU power to decode MP3, OGG and FLAC. That and the console itself by default has the codecs for WMA, MP3, AAC and PCM playback.
You think so? I am a little bit afraid that the imprecision of this setup, combined with relatively small objects could make this an issue.
Maybe it could be combined: The cursor moving mouse-style, but snapping to the closest hotspot if you let it rest for half a second.
Or the controls could be rewritten entirely:
Analog nub: Move. Focus on closest hotspot when movement ends.
L/R: Cycle hotspots, closest to farthest.
X: Action
O: Back
/\: Inventory
Start: Pause
Select: Menu
Atrac3... completely forgot about it ever since I gave up my Minidisc player
I think that would work pretty well in addition to the controls I mentioned, good idea.
That could work too but I wasn't very fond of that style of object selection in W&G on the 360, I much preferred the way the cursor was handled in S&M on 360, but maybe they could put in both control schemes?
There could be rails that the player follows from hotspot to hotspot. So if you press left below the clothline, he will automatically walk up to the fire. Then if you press x, a cursor appears at the current player position, which you can move until you release the button. The player will then interact with whatever the cursor is pointing at.
Actually, now that I think about it, that could work without the rails. Just make the player walk with the analog nub and switch to cursor mode as long as he presses X.
They'd then have to worry about publishing them to UMDs and such, whereas XBOX and Wii they can be just downloaded. And even if you did download it to PSP, (which would mean using a 1gb memory stick at least) how would you keep it from being pirated?
So...don't hold your breath I think. I happen to have one and I love it btw...before any of you accuse me of fanboyism.
Kolgax, I answered your post in the other thread.
Considering that when PSP Go launches, most (if not all) PSP games will be available as digital downloads on PSN, what you said here isn't true at all.
The only way that I think it'd ever work would be for some VERY enterprising people to get together and make a team to create a TelltaleVM.
But like you said before, there's no good hardware reason it can't work - all the capabilites are there hardware wise...
My apologies then...erm what is PSP Go? It it like the Wii Store?
It's a new PSP model with 16GB of internal flash memory and no UMD drive and a sliding screen.
More information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSP_Go
Yes I still have an original DS too.
What difference does it make which PSP version you have? The PSN is available on all. I've got a third generation PSP and around 70% of my games come from the PSN.
I would think if Telltale said all of that was worth it and decided to do it, they might in fact choose the PSP Go route partially because of that.
Who knows...maybe not though.
As far as how it would actually work, most of the capabilities are there - it would be pretty much like an XBox Live version. They've made all the controls console friendly already.
Still one other issue, and it is probably a small one all things considered - Textures and effects. It doesn't seem like they are going too heavy on this stuff anyways but it might be necessary to scale them down a bit and do a little more work for PSP. Telltale games as far as I've noticed are not too GPU hungry, so this might not even be so much of an issue. I wouldn't imagine PSP as having much worse graphical capabilities than the Wii which doesn't seem to outperform the Gamecube by that much. I'm too lazy to do the actual research on this but PSP might actually be better in this department.
So I don't think there are any technical hurdles at least to doing it. (Other than the PS2/PSP being notorious for giving developers headaches.)
The TTT isn't really meant to be efficient, and that would mean that at the very least it would need a lot of optimization, but a total rewrite from scratch just as likely.
I'm not saying that a PSP port is likely or a good investment for TTG, I just wanted to discuss if a port was to be done, how it could be made well.
D-Pad = Move Guybrush
Analog stick = Move Cursor
X = Default Action
O = Default Skip/Cancel
/\ = Inventory
L = Show Interactive Objects (forgot the name of it, but F4 on PC)
R = Sprint
* For the sake of full disclosure I work for Canonical (of Ubuntu fame) but I am a heavy Linux user and developer for quite long time before that.