Cross Code is an excellent game. I knew that it used web tech and I was constantly amazed by how performant it was on the Nintendo Switch hardware. I would guess that this engine deserves some credit there!
Imho, that's fantastic! I love to see devs being able to adapt the engine for their particular game. Likewise, high_impact shouldn't be seen as a “feature-complete” game engine, but rather as a convenient starting point.
You can't polish a turd. There would've been no point in modifying the engine a bunch if you hadn't given them a useful base to work with.
phoboslab was downplaying their own efforts by saying that the Cross Code team customised the Impact engine a bunch. My point was that no amount of customisation can turn a bad engine into a good one (you can't polish a turd), so phoboslab definitely deserves credit for building the base engine for Cross Code.
At a risk of being off-topic and not contributing much to this particular conversation (as I doubt it's relevant to the point you're making), I'd like to note that I often actually find it preferable to "polish a turd" than to start from scratch. It's just much easier for my mind to start putting something that already exists into shape than to stop staring at a blank screen, and in turn it can save me a lot of time even if what I end up with is basically a ship of Theseus. Something something ADHD, I guess.
However, I'm perfectly aware this approach makes little sense anywhere you have to fight to justify the need to get rid of stuff that already "works" to your higher-ups ;)
Of course you can. Not really sure why this still is tossed about. You just get a shiny turd with a lot less stink. I've made a career of taking people's turds and turning them into things they can now monetize (think old shitty video tape content prepped to be monetized with streaming).
You didn't polish a turd, you found something that could be valuable to someone and found a way to make it into a polished product, which is great.
But "You can't polish a turd" implies it's actually a turd and there's nothing valuable to be found or the necessary quality thresholds can't be met.
You absolutely can. Mythbusters proved it.
For the anecdote, everyone wanted a Switch version, but considering the technical limitation, the team replied with "Sorry but CrossCode will be coming to Switch when Hedgehags learn to fly." [1] When they finally got to do it [2], it came with an extra quest called "A switch in attitude", featuring, you guessed it, flying hedgehags.
[1] https://www.radicalfishgames.com/?p=6581 [2] https://www.radicalfishgames.com/?p=6668
So, if I understand correctly, this is roughly what he did:
1. Wrote a transpiler to convert the subset of Javascript used by CrossCode into a dialect of Haxe.
2. Selectively modified his version of Haxe in small ways to more closely match the semantics of Javascript, to make writing the transpiler easier.
3. Selectively re-wrote complicated parts of the Javascript code into Haxe directly, so that his transpiler didn't have to handle them.
4. Transpiled <canvas> and other browser API calls into calls to his own pre-existing Kha framework for Haxe, which provided similar APIs.
5. Compiled the Haxe output into C++.
6. Compiled the C++ to native code.
Damn.
I for example basically ignore the shield for the vast majority of the game, only doing some very basic usage for some bosses, but perfect counters could very well be your favorite thing.
Even Rust is going to be heroic levels until console vendors decide it is an acceptable language to be made available on their devkits.
As long as you have a good C ffi (which Rust has), shouldn't it be quite easy?
Or is the Switch more similar to Android/iPhone where you cannot (could not?) run native code directly but have to use a platform specific language like Java or Objective C?
Maybe if the console SDK toolchain is Clang based it would also work to go via LLVM bitcode instead of C/C++ though.