Hawken dev reveals the complications of console ports

One of the quieter announcements from E3 2016 was the upcoming release of Hawken for Xbox One and PS4 – and the developers have shared more details on the work involved.

In a forum post, as reported by Kotaku, the studio published a “high-level timeline” of everything it has been working for over the past year, with work on the console port starting in June 2015 – shortly after the firm was acquired by APB publisher Reloaded Games.

It’s an interesting insight into the complications developers face when bringing their titles from PC to console. Major hurdles included the initial code merge for the PS4 port, a lengthy process that involved merging 26,000 files.

The biggest challenge was creating the first raw PlayStation builds “since it had to set things up to work with the upcoming Xbox One merge”.

The UI also proved to be troublesome. Around November 2015, the studio found that ActionScript 2 was struggling to handle everything they needed from the UI and so began work on a complete rebuild in December. However, this was then dropped in January, when a key new hire found a way to salvage the previous UI.

Other hurdles mentioned include upgrading to DirectX 11, merging three different rendering pipelines, service updates, certification checks on Xbox One, and general bug fixing.

Check out the full post for more details. Hawken is heading to PS4 and Xbox One this summer.