Sam's Geek Cellar

“Indiana Jones and the Lost Expedition” John Stone, 1991

The fabled Indiana Jones and the Lost Expedition concept once proposed for Disneyland’s Adventureland would have created a massive complex on the edge of the park that would house combined show scenes for multiple different attractions. At one point or another, the show building would’ve been home to scenes for the Jungle Cruise, the Disneyland railroad, a runaway ore mine train coaster and for what eventually became the Indiana Jones Adventure attraction. Today’s piece is a look from Imagineer John Stone at one of the multi-level rooms that would feature all four attractions simultaneously. The immense scale of spaces like this would surely have been Imagineering at it’s finest, taking guests directly into Indy’s world of exploration and adventure.

The PC platform is, in different ways, both the easiest and the most challenging platform to target with a port. It’s easy because we already do our development primarily on the PC. Most studios often have some version of the game running on PC to some extent to save time and money - artists, for example, usually only need a tool to simulate the way the game will be rendered on the console and don’t need a full dev or test kit to check it while doing work-in-progress stuff. Because we use PCs so much during development, getting the game to work on a PC isn’t really that difficult. The project is already mostly working for the most part, especially if we’re porting from an Xbox platform to PC.

The difficulty used to come from getting it to work with all of the different hardware profiles and such out there. Once upon a time, the trouble was having to support lots of different kinds of hardware - these video cards have weird behavior, those sound drivers don’t work, and so on. That’s mostly gone away thanks to widespread adoption of DirectX package and the xbox controller driver to standardize inputs and drivers for everybody. There’s still some of that going on, but those cases are usually farther between and caused by strange bugs at the platform level, not at the developer level. Building a game for the PC platform in general is pretty easy just to get it functioning now.

The hard part with PC ports today is getting it to run on min-spec and low-end machines. Today, our development machines tend to be pretty beefy because we need to be able to run debug and less optimized code and tools during the development process. The majority of PC players do not have powerful gaming PCs like that; most of the time more than half of the PC gamers out there are running min-spec machines (especially in large PC markets like Asia). This means that the lion’s share of development cost for a PC port is often things like performance optimization, asset downgrades, and additional options to allow players to turn off certain graphical features for better performance. 

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