[Serious] [Port] Feasibility of a Ps Vita port.

[Onion_Urine]

Now, I believe this topic has been mentioned before on this discussion board about a PS Vita port of this game. Since that post a number of years ago, there have been major strides in the PS Vita homebrew community. We have overclocking, 3d acceleration, openGL, and a number of opensource projects ported to the vita and to name some:

ioquake3 (OpenArena, Q3:Arena, Quake 3 Rally, and soon Urban Terror).
eduke32 (Duke Nukem, Blood, Shadow Warrior, etc).
Xash3d (Half life and Counter Strike 1.6).
libretro (retroarch).

The capalities we have are 500/494Mhz on the cpu, 333Mhz on the GPU SGX543MP4+ (Modified iPad 3 GPU), and 512Mb of Ram. We have vitaGL (GXM to openGL 2.1 translation layer) as well, plus the vitasdk (homebrew sdk) is pretty flashed out too. We also have a vita emulator (Vita3k) making it possible to develop homebrew without owning the console itself. Since September of 2018, "Minecraft" has discontinued support on the PS Vita; meaning it will no longer recieve content updates or bugfixes.

Advantages of a port over "minecraft LCE":
Infinite Worlds,
Multiplayer greater than 8 players,
Mod Support,
Cross play,
Worlds transferrable between platforms.

I am not asking for a port, I just want to bring attention to this incase somebody with the technical know how could do this. Thank you.

[Yvanhoe]

I think this is highly dependent on the existence of an irrlicht port. Irrlicht is the game engine used by Minetest.

[LMD]

> Irrlicht is the game engine used by Minetest.
* graphics engine : http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/

> 500/494Mhz CPU
Minetest runs on a single thread, so that's pretty weak...

> 333Mhz GPU
Also weak, although it might be enough for low viewranges.

> 512Mb of Ram
Likely not enough, especially with some heavy mods.

[Krock]

You'll get low framerates for sure, and also be limited to lightweight servers (without mobs or ambience).
From these 512 MiB RAM only around 350 MiB will be usable due to the OS alone.
The port probably won't be written by the core developers, thus a contributor would have to provide patches in order to get it running (if it not already does). After all Minetest is cross-platform so supporting another OS isn't a big deal.

[Gael de Sailly]

After all Minetest is cross-platform so supporting another OS isn't a big deal.

I don't think it's that easy to expand portability further. Writing the port will be trivial in comparison to the various issues that will arise when players from all devices will coexist. Accommodating desktop and Android versions is already a headache and a source of many issues, especially for servers that have to deal with players from both devices.

Also I fear that porting to a highly commercial game console will open the door to dubious adware forks like what we know for Android.

Finally, these kinds of consoles are quickly deprecated as new ones pop up regularly, it won't have any long-term interest to port Minetest to a specific one.

EDIT: typos

[benrob0329]

these kinds of consoles are quickly deprecated as new ones pop up regularly

The point of a homebrew community is to keep the console around longer, like the Wii homebrew community does.