Unreal engine 3 on Wii... possible?

[The_legend_of_drtre]

A few months ago Mark Rein was interviewed and asked if URE3 would ever work on Wii. He said he believed that Wii lacked the horsepower to run the engine properly but that he believed a few licencees of the engine would "shoe horn" it into the Wii.

Now Ign is reporting that their Insider are telling them that Gearbox was trying to get a scaled down version of it running on Wii.

Do you think it will work? If so, how do you think it will turn out?

I know that the engine is scalable but if they would need to scale it down so much wouldn't they just go with unreal engine 2 instead?

Why waste time if it's not going to work?

Maybe Wii is a little more powerful than most people are giving it credit for?

Muhahahahahahaha!!!!!

Discuss.

kthxbye.

 

[Cheezdoodles]

Running the just the engine isnt going to help the Wii much, the GPU doesnt support shaders does it?

 

["Nerve-Damage"]

Running the just the engine isnt going to help the Wii much, the GPU doesnt support shaders does it?

The Wii does support shaders (but limited). FYI the link deals with Gamecube...but as you know the Wii is a souped up Gamecube (post 45 & 48)

 

[pc999]

The Wii does support shaders (but limited). FYI the link deals with Gamecube...but as you know the Wii is a souped up Gamecube (post 45 & 48)

There are several kinds of shaders, and if it does indeed suport some short of pixel shaders (much more limited than what UE3 ask for the PC), it does not suport vertex shaders at all.

Still BIA will be soon out, we may have more info then.

 

[fearsomepirate]

An awful lot of effects can be stripped out of an engine to make it run on hardware it wasn't targeted at, y'know. Doom 3, Far Cry, Call of Duty 2, and Half-Life 2 would all run on a Geforce 4 MX. Not that they looked the same, but they ran.

 

[Pigman BABY!!!]

UE3 without Shaders or very simple Shaders could be possible.
That makes it about UE2.

 

[The_legend_of_drtre]

From my understanding shaders can be programmed for the Gc and Wii via software. The Gc was actually better suited for shaders than the original xbox because it could run 8 textures in a single pass opposed to the xbox's 6. The difference is the xbox's was better adapted and easier for direct x compatible shaders and the GC's tev is nothing like that. The GC is able to have programmable shaders but they must be constructed by hand to so speak.

 

[Cheezdoodles]

From my understanding shaders can be programmed for the Gc and Wii via software.

In theory, you can program shaders for any closed box environment

 

[V3]

I think it can do per pixel lighting the same way Geforce 2 does it, through combiner. It doesn't have shaders engine like Geforce 3 and onwards.

So the better question is, does it have enough horsepower to do Doom 3 like engine, ie all surfaces have per pixel lighting and shadows are unified ?

 

[Zeross]

I think it can do per pixel lighting the same way Geforce 2 does it, through combiner. It doesn't have shaders engine like Geforce 3 and onwards.

The so called "shader engine" of GF3 is just an extension of register combiners that added support for more pass through combiners and a few "exotic" texture adressing modes to be able to do a limited form of dependant texture reads. Dependant texture reads are more flexible on the Flipper but its combiners are less powerful than GF3's.

 

[Simon82]

A few months ago Mark Rein was interviewed and asked if URE3 would ever work on Wii. He said he believed that Wii lacked the horsepower to run the engine properly but that he believed a few licencees of the engine would "shoe horn" it into the Wii.

Now Ign is reporting that their Insider are telling them that Gearbox was trying to get a scaled down version of it running on Wii.

Do you think it will work? If so, how do you think it will turn out?

I know that the engine is scalable but if they would need to scale it down so much wouldn't they just go with unreal engine 2 instead?

Why waste time if it's not going to work?

Maybe Wii is a little more powerful than most people are giving it credit for?

Muhahahahahahaha!!!!!

Discuss.

kthxbye.

Well.. if it's a scaled version it's not the real Unreal engine 3. It's like run Doom3 on the Voodoo2 board like lot of nerd.. ehmm.. fan make.
I think that the Wii has lot of potential that could be used to make games that surely will appear in better way than Zelda or other first title look like.
But telling that it run UE3 is only marketing.

 

[_phil_]

Of course WII can run UE3.You just won't load as much polygons/shaders/hirez textures as for a Nextgen title.UE3 has still a lot of inheritance from unreal 1/2 .I really don't see the point.

 

[Arwin]

I'm guessing the point would be to be able to develop a game with the presumably excellent Unreal Engine 3 IDE and then be able to downscale it to a Wii. UE2 as has been said before is probably sufficient for Wii, but I could imagine that the toolset (scripting, previewing, whatever) of UE3 is just much better.

 

[assen]

The value of the UE3 is not just in its renderer, but also (some would say mostly) in its toolset. So even if you heavily downgrade the renderer, if you use the UE3 toolchain to author your game, you'd be better off than if using UE2.

 

[sfried]

Do you think it's possible to reprogram all of the engine's vertex Shaders to TEV equivalents? It will require a whole bunch of reprograming, but it looks like most effects are feasable...

 

[Zeross]

Do you think it's possible to reprogram all of the engine's vertex Shaders to TEV equivalents? It will require a whole bunch of reprograming, but it looks like most effects are feasable...

TEV is a color combiner it can'tdo anything for vertex, vertex shaders must be done on the CPU in this case. If you mean "can the TEV be used to reproduce all of UE3 pixel shaders" then the answer is also no because it is way too primitive.

 

[V3]

TEV is a color combiner it can'tdo anything for vertex, vertex shaders must be done on the CPU in this case. If you mean "can the TEV be used to reproduce all of UE3 pixel shaders" then the answer is also no because it is way too primitive.

Does it have enough horsepower to do Doom 3 ?

 

[The_legend_of_drtre]

Maybe it won't be as hard as we think... Check this out:


http://wii.ign.com/articles/757/757706p1.html

Shaders on wii oh my...

 

[Iron Tiger]

Maybe it won't be as hard as we think... Check this out:


http://wii.ign.com/articles/757/757706p1.html

Shaders on wii oh my...

It's a cross-platform developed game and those screenshots are 1280x720. They're either from the PS3 or 360 version.

 

[The_legend_of_drtre]

It's a cross-platform developed game and those screenshots are 1280x720. They're either from the PS3 or 360 version.

"The Xbox 360 version will feature support for two-player cooperative gameplay over Xbox Live. On the Wii version, players will be able to take full advantage of gesture-based controls in different action sequences.

We've included two screenshots in our media section. Warner Bros. claims these are from the Wii version of the game."