Playscript and PS4 Mono runtime Port

[Joshua Taylor]

Hey all,

My team is currently working on an AS3 + Starling based game that will be released on the usual platforms, e.g. iOS, Android, Web, Steam, etc. We have those platforms more or less under control (though we're always looking for better solutions / workflows). Recently, we've reached an agreement with Sony to release the game on the PS4 and PS Vita. We're currently evaluating various options that would allow us to port to both platforms. 

Very recently, we stumbled upon Playscript and are excited by the possibility this may be a viable solution. Xamarin is currently porting the Mono runtime to the PS4. Assuming the PS4 port is completed in a time frame suitable for our launch, how much work would it be to get Playscript compatible with the Mono runtime PS4 port? Any information about what it would take or roughly how difficult it might be would be greatly helpful in our evaluation!

Thanks so much,

Josh

[Kevin Newman]

I'm no authority, but if I understand correctly, Playscript is mostly compiler work (with a few core changes that look to be working their way upstream). Playscript compiles AS3/PlayScirpt code to IL (along with it's runtime libraries like Stage3D) and those would run on top of the Mono VM where ever it's ported. It seems aside from some platform porting in the support libs/apis it would really just be a matter of compiling and running.

Kevin N.

[Ben Cooley]

Hi Joshua,

There is no reason I can think of why PlayScript would not run on the PS4.  It runs pretty much stock on iOS and Android.

You would need to specialize any platform specific code in the runtime libraries to accomodate whatever platform specific API's there are on PS4 (a search for PLATFORM_MONODROID and PLATFORM_MONOTOUCH is sufficient to identify these).  These are mostly simple switches to access the sound api's of the platform, some differences in openGL implementations per platform, and access to bitmap api's, user input, etc.

Ben

[Dominique Louis]

The Xamarin port of the Mono Runtime for PS4 appears to be complete.

At the very least the game TowerFall:Ascension, which is powered by MonoGame (XNA for non Windows Platforms) and was released this week (and getting amazing reviews), is built using the Xamarin compiler for PS4.

I hope this helps.

D.