Berry was impressed, and approached Thoman again when RPG Trails of Cold Steel was due for PC release. There wasn’t really a business case for “reimplementing half the game” as Thoman puts it, but he resolved the stuttering issue he’d been invited to fix while improving the rendering quality. The game was Little King’s Story, but Thoman soon realised that the technical idiosyncrasies of the Wii original made it difficult to port well.
PH3’s job is then to determine a base level of quality for a port and discuss potential additional features that may or may not interest the publisher, before supplying a final quote. “But you can have ports that require a whole team working for up to a year, if it’s, say, a custom engine made for a large-scale game with different platform-specific dependencies.” “For example, a port to PC from a modern console on an established engine? That’s really one guy working for a month or so – it’s really not expensive,” he says.
Thoman and his colleagues spend a while investigating the source code of a game for a general overview of the work involved – which can vary greatly. So when the game launched, it was merely a matter of making a few final tweaks before the mod could be released. Thoman continued his studies, but worked solidly over evenings and weekends for the following fortnight. So why would anyone do that?” But when the rumour was confirmed, he set to work. It’s very simple for a 3D game on PC to render at an arbitrary resolution. “I was just looking at it from a purely engineering perspective. “Back then I didn’t have that much experience with companies and whatever constraints they might have with a project,” he says. When rumours emerged that the PC version would be locked at a resolution of 1024x720, the same as the Xbox 360 version, he laughed them off. A PhD student, he’d been eagerly awaiting the PC release of Dark Souls so he could play co-op with his friends who didn’t own consoles. Thoman was already a keen modder when he made DSfix.
If you want more like it every month, delivered straight to your doorstop or your inbox, why not subscribe to Edge here. This feature first appeared in Edge Magazine.
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