Peter Thoman (a.k.a. “Durante”), the man behind the PC Dark Souls mod “DSfix”, has co-founded a studio specializing in PC ports and consulting.
The DSfix mod attempted to fix many issues of the Dark Souls PC port, including frame-rate, textures, and more. Due to the poor reception the PC port had at the time, some deemed the mod “essential” to enjoy the game.
Speaking to Metacouncil’s forums, Thoman announced his new company, PH3. He answered some questions from other users, including how they’d select projects:
“Currently, we are quickly throughput-limited when it comes to projects. And at least as of yet we are not ready to expand significantly, since we’d lose a lot of the advantages we get by being tiny and composed entirely of people who have a good understanding of and lots of experience in high-performance software. So when we have to make choices on which projects to take on we can absolutely still decide based on how much they interest us. Of course, there’s also a capitalist perspective to it — hypothetically, if one project were to pay 3 times as much as another but be a bit less interesting we might still chose it. But so far that certainly hasn’t come up, we are still starting out after all.”
Other answers explain while the company is looking to handle PC ports, they are not focused on licensing titles themselves. The company’s name came about because “(1) it’s short, (2) 3 letter technology companies seem to generally do well, and most importantly (3) we (the co-founders) are 3 people and we all have a PhD”.
Forum posts also confirm the company is working on “stuff”. The studio’s website confirms their work already includes The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II (complete PC port), Rez Infinite (PC/VR QA consulting), and The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel I (performance consulting and PC Port).
Testimonials also sing their praises. Mark MacDonald (VP of Production of Enhance Games) stated “Peter absolutely earns his reputation as THE gold-standard when it comes to PC Gaming — and it’s a nice bonus that he’s also such a pleasure to work with.”
Ken Berry (Executive Vice President of Xseed Games) had very high praise:
“I first reached out to Peter to help with a difficult project due to his sterling reputation as a hobbyist programmer, but I was quickly impressed by his professionalism and responsiveness. On two separate occasions where the originally contracted team had essentially stated it was impossible to increase the performance any further, Peter was able to optimize the titles significantly with barely any support or additional tools. Our confidence in his abilities grew even more once we gave him a full project from start to finish, which he delivered on schedule with quality that exceeded our already high expectations of his work.
I cannot recommend Peter highly enough for anyone wanting the best running PC game possible.”
We will keep you posted on their work and other PC ports.
