With Marvel vs. Capcom 2 being the most recent port released, Capcom's Christian Svensson takes the time to talk about the process of porting and how it's not quite as easy as it might seem, conceptually.

Everything is relative... porting in general is as much art as science, depending upon what you're porting from and porting to.

Using SFIV as an example, we've moved from code that had two systems with fixed/known components. On a 360/PS3, we know what GPUs they have. We know exactly how much RAM they have. We know exactly what OS limitations and capabilities are. They don't change from my house, to your house, to your cousin's house.

Porting to a PC in an optimized fashion, has a slew of complexity. We have no idea what OS version your running (XP? Vista? Win 7? With service packs?). What GPU you have. What CPU you have. What motherboard you have. How much RAM you have... hell, we don't even know what driver versions you're likely to have running. So we need to optimize the game to run on countless permutations and setups which is a hell of a lot of work. And on top of that, we added features to take advantage of the fact that some people have PCs that are more powerful than 360s and PS3s. So we added parameters for new rendering shaders (ink, etc.) support for higher resolutions, higher forms of MSAA, AA, self-shadowing, higher quality shadows, etc.

PC users like to tweak things and use a wide array of input devices, so we had to allow for key binding as well as supporting our "preferred controllers" such as SFIV sticks and pads out of the box. For PS3/360, we don't even have to think about those issues.

McClubbin via capcom-unity.com »