Homebrew Is it possible to port Five Nights at Freddy's to DS?

Mr. Elementle

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I would like to start learning to program ds games, but before i got started on a project like this i wanted to ask some more experienced programmers if this would be possible, or if it would be to dificult or unrealistic for the ds's low processing power
 

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The DS is *terrible* at any form of video and there's next to no homebrew codecs that would allow you to easily implement full screen animated segments of the game - take that from someone who's been dabbling in DS homebrew for years now. You could make a very similar game, you could make the game from the ground up and strip all the video away (perhaps replace it with scalable sprites?), but a 1:1 port is impossible unless you have loads of experience and you're capable of coding an extremely lightweigh video codec.
 

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The DS is *terrible* at any form of video and there's next to no homebrew codecs that would allow you to easily implement full screen animated segments of the game - take that from someone who's been dabbling in DS homebrew for years now. You could make a very similar game, you could make the game from the ground up and strip all the video away (perhaps replace it with scalable sprites?), but a 1:1 port is impossible unless you have loads of experience and you're capable of coding an extremely lightweigh video codec.

...Or he could just use the same popular video codecs that the big game publishers use.
 

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...Or he could just use the same popular video codecs that the big game publishers use.
Because those are freely available, grow on trees and are compatible with devKit Pro. No, he can't use MobiClip or anything of the sort and DPG is closed source, so his best bet would be starting from scratch or picking up the old Eponasoft codec source and trying to get it to work on the current devkit (good luck if you're a beginner), either way I say fat chance he'll be successful.
 

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Because those are freely available, grow on trees and are compatible with devKit Pro. No, he can't use MobiClip or anything of the sort and DPG is closed source, so his best bet would be starting from scratch or picking up the old Eponasoft codec source and trying to get it to work on the current devkit (good luck if you're a beginner), either way I say fat chance he'll be successful.

Well that was a big blow to my confidence.

At the very least I'm gonna make it show the fan running, because who doesn't want more of that awesome FNAF desk fan.
 

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MobiClip was the one I was thinking of. It can't be that difficult to reverse-engineer the codecs dumped from a DS ROM. (From a standpoint of someone who knows what they're doing, I'm no programmer or engineer)
 

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Well that was a big blow to my confidence.

At the very least I'm gonna make it show the fan running, because who doesn't want more of that awesome FNAF desk fan.

The fan running could be a static sprite animation, like a GIF, or animated PNG. :)
 

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Well that was a big blow to my confidence.

At the very least I'm gonna make it show the fan running, because who doesn't want more of that awesome FNAF desk fan.
You can easily animate any object up to 64x64 by isolating it as a sprite, you can also animate 128x128 objects by doubling the size of a 64x64 sprite, anything beyond that will require either using textures with frames or animated backgrounds which take loads of space. You can get around this by splicing big objects into several small sprites - think around the limitations and be mindful of RAM/VRAM, you only have 4MB/700-odd KB. It can be done if you cut some segments out, but it won't be easy. ;)
 

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MobiClip was the one I was thinking of. It can't be that difficult to reverse-engineer the codecs dumped from a DS ROM. (From a standpoint of someone who knows what they're doing, I'm no programmer or engineer)
You have to think about the legality of what you're suggesting. That and MobiClip is already spreading it thin - add gameplay on both screens on top of the stream and the DS won't keep up. NightFox had a codec that'd be perfect for this, but he never released the source and I think it's discontinued now.
 

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You have to think about the legality of what you're suggesting. That and MobiClip is already spreading it thin - add gameplay on both screens on top of the stream and the DS won't keep up. NightFox had a codec that'd be perfect for this, but he never released the source and I think it's discontinued now.

I never think of legality, it doesn't mean shit to me, since reverse-engineering is legal where I live. As long as you do it and don't profit from your findings, you're fine. :3
 
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Unless this rip I just got is incomplete (which there is no reason it shouldn't be complete), there are no videos in FNAF... only images and sounds.

Maybe this could be possible after all.
By videos I don't mean a particular format, I mean an animation that takes the whole screen, like the Foxy chase scenes.

While we're on the subject of animation, I'd like to point out that the DS gets all worked up and sweaty processing a small .GIF, let alone a long full screen one - it's generally not great with rasters, that's why people use tiled sprites which are far more lightweigh - the DS was designed to work with those, full Bitmaps are harder to work with.

I'd also like to point out that I don't mean to discourage, rather I'm suggesting picking realistic goals. I do not doubt anyone's skills in programing, I just very much doubt that the DS has enough memory and juice to handle a 1:1 FNAF port without some serious coding gymnastics.
 
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GalaxianPirate

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By videos I don't mean a particular format, I mean an animation that takes the whole screen, like the Foxy chase scenes.

While we're on the subject of animation, I'd like to point out that the DS gets all worked up and sweaty processing a small .GIF, let alone a long full screen one - it's generally not great with rasters, that's why people use tiled sprites which are far more lightweigh - the DS was designed to work with those, full Bitmaps are harder to work with.

I'd also like to point out that I don't mean to discourage, rather I'm suggesting picking realistic goals. I do not doubt anyone's skills in programing, I just very much doubt that the DS has enough memory and juice to handle a 1:1 FNAF port without some serious coding gymnastics.

Out of curiosity, do you think a PSP could handle a 1:1 port? Or maybe with a few features cut out?
 

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Out of curiosity, do you think a PSP could handle a 1:1 port? Or maybe with a few features cut out?
I think it could handle the game relatively well, definitely better than the DS at least, but on the DS you have the advantage of two screens, so you could put the tablet on the bottom one. Everything depends on how flexible you'll be, how you'll adapt and convert the resources and how you'll convert the thing. FNAF isn't a game that has high requirements, it's just awkward on the DS in the sense that there's no models in it whatsoever, everything is based on pre-rendered raster graphics and you can't fit a lot of'em in the DS's RAM and VRAM. If you do manage to adapt all of the graphics to tiled sprites and backgrounds and cut out or re-do the animated sequences, it's doable on both platforms.
 

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