As someone who’s currently working in the game development industry I think I can explain this better than most.
Black Mesa (as we all know) is developed by independent game developers. This means that the devs of Black Mesa are limited to begin with.
In order to bring a game to console - the game now only has to function correctly (in terms of software), it also has to function in a very specific way in order for Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo to give you permission to release a game for their system. Guidelines have to be followed EXACTLY, to a tee, for the game to get that companies “seal of approval” so to speak (especially Nintendo… they’re the worst when it comes to their guidelines). You have to have development consoles in order to meet these guidelines. Even if you get these consoles (which requires, not only paying thousands of dollars for the dev consoles themselves, but a monthly licensing fee to keep your developer status with that company.
Game’s require EXTENSIVE testing. And then more testing. And then MORE TESTING! And then finally when you’ve reached the point that you believe you’ve caught everything that doesn’t follow the console owner’s guidelines… it still requires more testing.
These guidelines that have to followed seem trivial, but they have to be followed. For instance, if software you’re developing reports error to the user on it’s own (like it normally would on a PC or Mac)… that’s a violation. The CONSOLE OS has to report the errors to the user. That, in itself, is difficult to meet - because that means the software is not allowed to crash the system. It has to raising an exception - successfully make a crash report, and close. Then that report, is used by the console OS to let the player know that an error occurred.
Even if the devs had development consoles, and even if they could pay the monthly licensing fees - it takes hundreds… even thousands of man hours to purposely try and crash every part of the game to make sure that errors don’t cause the OS itself to crash. Even if it doesn’t crash the OS. The application can’t just terminate. It had to go into it’s own sort of ‘kernel panic’ (so to speak) so it can create a crash dump that can be submitted to Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony - then report the type of error to the console OS, then force quit on it’s own.
The rest of the development guidelines are (for some reason) very confidential to each company (likely because the guidelines themselves, could in theory, release a way to circumvent the OS copy protection). So I legally can’t go into it deeper than what I just explained.
Anyways - the above is just ONE guideline (explained in a very generic way as to not release any confidential information) that can take hundreds of man hours to complete. The only possible way to reach these goals, is to have hundreds of people testing different guidelines, in every part of the game. And even then - it takes months to complete.
Anyways, I hope I at least gave you a picture as to why the game is likely never to come to consoles.
), and some of it sounds like you’re making it sound like a less accomplishable feat than it actually is. Some of what you brought up makes it seem as if every nook and cranny would need extensive testing to be sure nothing stops the OS, but this would be me of a general way of the engine, not just “mesh here crashes OS.”
