Other video with quite some information about assetto corsa.
For those that don't understand a word of Italian...
A user from support forum made a resumed translation form things said in the conference about assetto and the difficulties they've encountered with the consoles.
http://www.assettocorsa.net/forum/i...-about-the-console-development-process.44474/
For those that don't can enter this section of the assetto support forum i let the text below:
"Codemotion" conference (March 22-25th), Italian audio.
A couple of weeks ago, two Kunos' developers (Alessandro Piva and Fabrizio Brugnaro) revealed a few interesting things about the console porting and development challenges.
Key points (no full transcript, sorry) were:
1) First (working) console version was already running in December 2014. It was a very basic port: no audio, no GUI, low framerate: 10/15 FPS even with just four cars around the track.
2) Main performance challenge was related to consoles' CPUs. Much less power compared to PC, due to lower clock speeds and mobile architecture. -50% performance compared to same-clock desktop CPUs.
3) Console hardware: 6 CPU cores available: 3 used for the physics, 2 for the graphics and 1 for sound. Multi-threading was essential to bump the performance.
4) Assets' differences:
Some assets (models, textures, sounds etc.) needed to be converted or pre-processed for console builds due to different formats (DDS textures on PC, GNF on PS4, for example).
Sony and Microsoft offer devs their SDKs, with built-in tools and assets to improve optimization from this POV. Kunos created an automatic conversion process. No extra work for 3D artists and possibility to "clean" and regenerate assets if found glitched during the conversion process.
5) Software:
Assetto Corsa on consoles uses three middlewares: Scaleform for GUI, FMOD for audio, Yebis for post-processing. Middlewares can be useful (many features available) and problematic at the same times (high number of bugs that require some time before being fixed by software companies). This further complicates the whole development process.
6) TRC (Technical Requirements Checklist) by Sony and Microsoft.
There's a ton of stuff that Kunos needs to take care of because of Sony's and Microsoft's functional and technical rules (pretty much for everything).
All of them need to be in place and working as intended or you're back to the drawing board.
Kunos needed someone to deal with this time-consuming and complex submission process.
7) GUI porting:
On PC, the UI was meant to be used with a mouse and not ready for a console port.
Many UI things needed to be completely rebuilt and/or adapted where possible. Took lots of time and efforts.
The save systems are also much different between PC (very simple) and consoles (replay, setups, ghost treated differently compared to PC).
8) QA tests:
On PC, there's a small group of expert players/enthusiasts who performs specific gameplay tests. On consoles, the long list of TRC required an external QA team, which didn't really focus on gameplay aspects. Some bugs and glitches were not spotted due to this reason.
All in all, I think there's lots of behind-the-scenes work going on that we, console players, are unaware of, especially on the TRC sides. Anyway, I hope some of you may find those things interesting. Thanks for reading.
