Epic Games's Vice President Mark Rein had een interview met Stomped over de UnrealTournement conversies naar Dreamcast en Playstation2.

Blijkbaar nog steeds een hot topic, dus hier een stuk uit het interview:Stomped: When if was first announced that Epic would be creating a port of Unreal Tournament to the Playstation 2, it was termed an "experiment" to see if it could be done. When did it become a full-fledged release and why was that decision made?

Rein: The first announcement we made relating to PS2 is that we were an authorized Tool and Middleware Licensee for PS2. That meant the Unreal Engine was being ported to PS2 and because Unreal Tournament was our most recent Unreal Engine title it was the natural testbed to illustrate the succe of our porting exercise. There's no point saying you have an engine that supports a platform unle you can demonstrate a real, honest-to-goodne , retail quality, potential hit game running on it. So we set out to do that as a proof of concept for our engine.

At the time we had no publishing relationship for Unreal Tournament on PS2 - GT Interactive couldn't afford to pick up the console publishing options for Unreal, Unreal2 and UT when they came due so we were free to make a publishing deal with whomever we wanted for those rights. Eventually, after discu ions and negotiations with many parties, Infogrames (which also had coincidentally purchased a majority stake in GT Interactive) picked up those rights and approached Sony for the right to release UT on PS2. Once all the various hurdles were jumped for UT to be a game on PS2 it became a real game project.

Stomped: In general has it been easier or harder to covert UT to run on PS2 than you first thought and why?

Rein: I don't think we had an delusions that learning to program for a completely new system would be simple so I think it pretty much went as we had expected. Ultimately we're really pleased with the PS2 project. Not only has it been fruitful on the console side but the whole engine (on all supported platforms) and the whole company (Epic) is now much smarter about memory usage, controller i ues, loading off CD/DVD, etc. In e ence we've spent a lot of time learning what it means to be a console developer. The Unreal Engine is a much better engine because of the experience of supporting PS2 with our unified code base and we're well now equipped to offer licensees real-world advice relating to console development. Like shipping a hit game, this is the kind experience that is invaluable in a isting our licensees to try to do the same. To the best of my knowledge we're the only cro -platform 3D game engine vendor who is also shipping a product on PS2 this fall, which means we're the ones who can give you answers from a position of experience in this area.

"Unified code base" means that the Unreal Engine is one single source code from which both PC and PS2 (and eventually Xbox) versions of games are built around - this is HUGE productivity and support advantage for people who want to use our engine to develop cro -platform games. No other 3D game engine that I'm aware of can make this claim. It's actually quite interesting to see the PS2 version of the game (which has console-style menus and heads-up-display) running on PCs as well. Het wordt maar eens tijd voor een ander onderwerp of mi chien eens de uiteindelijke release van beide console-versies zodat het gi en eens kan worden beproeft.