Port this to the Nintendo DS please!

[jerryku]

Heck, port all of your games to the Nintendo DS, Introversion!

Your games are great, but I think some people are hesistant to buy the games because they're usually used to extremely high-powered graphics when they're at home. But these kinds of games would be PERFECT for a handheld like the Nintendo DS, and I think DS owners would buy DEFCON like hotcakes. (Yum!)

The DS has a lot of PC-like qualities, and I think DEFCON and Uplink would work well on it.
For example, the DS has a touch-screen that behaves very much like a mouse when you use the DS stylus. It has a wireless networking ability which makes it easy to play multiplayer games with others. The graphics power is on par with a Nintendo 64, which should be good enough for Uplink and a DEFCON game (perhaps with some changes). Also, DEFCON isn't that big of a game, and that's great for the DS, because the biggest game I've seen on the DS is Bleach DS.. which weighs in at about 100 megs.

One cool possibility of a DEFCON game on the DS would be to have the top-screen function as a more zoomed out worldwide map, while the bottom screen behaves like the current game's screen does. This way, you can get a pretty decent summary of what's going on across the world on the top screen, while focusing on action on the bottom one.

[Coltzero]

plz sirs pleassseeee port, please please pleaseeeee, comeon! pleassee sirs.. oh port it plzzzzzz.

another one of the same posts. for crist sake, learn to read the forums

[GeneticFreak]

Well I think it's a great idea but the wrong tree to bark at. Try barking at the mod forum.
I would rather have Introversion fix the bugs and annoying tidbits on the netcode/sync/server browser first. The community can make mods out of it.

[Soldant]

Um... no.

That'd be a lot of work, going from PC to DS, probably time that IV aren't interested in spending at the moment. Everybody wants it ported to the this and the that, but I highly doubt it'll happen since IV are yet to release linux binaries and they'll be focusing on the Mac OS port as well.

Simple fact - DEFCON was announced for, was released for, and will likely remain for the PC, Mac and Linux.

[Rosti]

My problem here is the desire to see previous games lifted to intense new heights, balanced against my new found love of <the next next next game>. Since IV have yet to disappoint me, I'd let them get on with it. Quickly, though...

[Amadeus]

Well launch 3 fighters and 4 bombers and the Ds will just get to 1fps.
Np :p

[LordSturm]

Provided your rendering the game with the exact same graphics library and at something like 640x400 even..

Remember the DS screen is small, less rendering is required, and i think it could handle 50+ fighters in flight.

[NeoThermic]

Heck, port all of your games to the Nintendo DS, Introversion!

Your games are great, but I think some people are hesistant to buy the games because they're usually used to extremely high-powered graphics when they're at home. But these kinds of games would be PERFECT for a handheld like the Nintendo DS, and I think DS owners would buy DEFCON like hotcakes. (Yum!)

The DS has a lot of PC-like qualities, and I think DEFCON and Uplink would work well on it.
For example, the DS has a touch-screen that behaves very much like a mouse when you use the DS stylus. It has a wireless networking ability which makes it easy to play multiplayer games with others. The graphics power is on par with a Nintendo 64, which should be good enough for Uplink and a DEFCON game (perhaps with some changes). Also, DEFCON isn't that big of a game, and that's great for the DS, because the biggest game I've seen on the DS is Bleach DS.. which weighs in at about 100 megs.

One cool possibility of a DEFCON game on the DS would be to have the top-screen function as a more zoomed out worldwide map, while the bottom screen behaves like the current game's screen does. This way, you can get a pretty decent summary of what's going on across the world on the top screen, while focusing on action on the bottom one.

No, no, no, no!

Bleh, someone add my following reply to the FAQ. This is about the 5th time this has come up for Defcon alone.
As I've explained in this post, the technical specifications of the DS are so horridly bad that it would be impossible to port Defcon to the DS.

I also explain in this post here that the technical limitations added to the DS past its bad hardware mean that a DS version becomes even more impossible without a total re-write of Defcon.

The whole topic, not just those two posts, should be read to further drive home the point that even if a DS port were possible, it would be horribly impractical due to the way the DS is done.

NeoThermic

[Leonaken]

Defcon's graphics may not be 3D, but it's got a whole lotta 2D going on, more than the DS (the terrific platform that it is) could handle in a straight port. If Defcon is rewritten for the DS, it's mostly feasible, but that's not going to happen. Not by IV at least.

Introversion is, however, dabbing their hands into the Xbox 360 pool. More on that if they ever break through the tremendous red tape that is Xbox Live Arcade.

[dawa]

Even if they wanted to... would Nintendo allow a game with a tagline "Everybody dies" and "The worlds first Genocide 'em up!" ? Dont they seriously monitor every single game to make sure its not too evil? Or did they quit doing that?

[Nutter]

Even if they wanted to... would Nintendo allow a game with a tagline "Everybody dies" and "The worlds first Genocide 'em up!" ? Dont they seriously monitor every single game to make sure its not too evil? Or did they quit doing that?

they did allow resident evil to be ported to it, so it shoudn't be impossible

[jerryku]

Eh? The DS is no slouch, folks. Anyone who's seen Metroid Prime on the DS knows this, and I doubt even IV sees Metroid Prime as inferior in graphics to DEFCON.

Making DEFCON for the DS would be a far more profitable adventure than making DEFCON for Linux or Mac. No doubt about this at all. Money is good, folks. [/list][/code]

[Spectere]

Even if they wanted to... would Nintendo allow a game with a tagline "Everybody dies" and "The worlds first Genocide 'em up!" ? Dont they seriously monitor every single game to make sure its not too evil? Or did they quit doing that?

If they were still strict about censoring games, I don't think we'd have gotten Resi Evil for the GameCube, or be looking forward to Red Steel for the Wii...

And bear in mind that there were a decent number of FPSs released even during the N64's time (with red blood, might I add), so they've been easing up on that for a while.

[NeoThermic]

Eh? The DS is no slouch, folks. Anyone who's seen Metroid Prime on the DS knows this, and I doubt even IV sees Metroid Prime as inferior in graphics to DEFCON.

Please understand what I'm saying. The DS just lacks the ability to do what Defcon requires. For example the AI that Defcon uses would swamp the 66MHz CPU that the DS has. The 4000 triangle limit would mean that you couldn't draw the country borders or coastlines, and lets not forget that Defcon uses more in RAM than the DS could ever provide.

I did actually do my "homework" when it came to finding out what the DS could do after someone suggested it for Darwinia (which is also impossible to port without making *serious* changes). The long and short was the DS lacks any decent power to run anything modern, less anything ported from the PC platform.

Making DEFCON for the DS would be a far more profitable adventure than making DEFCON for Linux or Mac. No doubt about this at all. Money is good, folks.

No, no it wouldn't. Lets not forget that to get any game onto the DS requires royalties, development costs, and other hidden costs. So to get Defcon on to the DS might require an initial outlay of £20,000. Thats 2,000 copies of Defcon. So already IV would have to sell 2,000 copies to break even. Where as porting to linux or mac isn't going to cost much in terms of wages, certinally not £20,000, so IV will break even on less sales. I'll also point out that only 93% of people here use Windows, so if we take 7% of the Windows sales as the approximate amount that IV could sell on other platforms, it just proves that IV can break even with little effort porting to the Linux and Mac platforms.

NeoThermic

[klassobanieras]

Hello!

I've done a bit of NDS programming, and a basic client-only port would be quite feasible I think (albeit a huge amount of work). Addressing the objections I've seen:

"It's too CPU intensive"
A DS port would have to be client-only, which means it couldn't host games (not even single-player-vs-CPU). I'm guessing that AI is simulated entirely on the server, which means the client would only need to worry about managing its units, and doing some client-side prediction.

"The graphics are too intensive"
Actually, the DS could probably do a decent job of it. Note that the CPU, the 2D core and the 3D core all run in parallel, and if you make good use of them all you get quite a lot of oomph. Off the top of my head, you could:
- Draw the world-map as a zoomable tilemap
- Draw cities and emplacements directly into the world-map's tilemap (using the CPU)
- Load-share sprites between the 2D and 3D cores
- Combine fleets into a single sprite
- Draw trails, ranges, orders and nuke-hits on the 3D core
- Use the CPU to draw any overflow into a background layer

Problems would be:
- Lack of resolution; even at 1440x900 I sometimes struggle to see what's going on
- Very high maximum number of visible units means you'd have to fall back to bare-bones rendering under high loads
- Some of the overlays (notably radar coverage) would have to be simplified/uglified

"Nintendo would never approve it"
No, probably not. And an internet-only NDS title makes no commercial sense anyway. But these aren't technical objections.

"The UI would suck"
It would be hard to get right. The stylus only has a single 'button', and can't do mouse-over. Chat would be extremely cumbersome, necessitating VOIP. But the basic set of actions you perform are simple enough that you could build a usable UI.

Anyway, I personally think it'd be a bad idea - something like Uplink would work 100x better on the NDS. But it's technically doable.