A Summary of the Huge Wii Thread

Yeah, I don't see the bumps reflective any of the scenery off of it. It looks more like some specular is shining than a faint reflection of its surroundings. Who knows, the footage is at an angle.

 

Im impressed with Mario Galaxy, the good thing is the whole galaxy layout allows the Wii to concentrate on close detail more then far detail.

Sonic and Mario makes good use of the Wii's power. I think other devs need step their game up.

Nice shader effects. Is this really done on a non shader pipeline gpu. Or is it due to help from the apparent physical processor?

 

What are the negatives associated with using a GC engine for Wii titles, assuming Hollywood is 8 pixel pipeline GPU, has better pixel formats?

I've been wondering about the use of GC engines, when it comes to the fact they were built around a hardware that is 3x a lesser hardware. Polygon performance, memory bandwidth, physics, a.i, how much of these aspects can be changed?

How much time would a dev need to update code and rework textures to take advantage of increased memory and bandwidth?

One more question, How of the available memory would consist of code and textures?

 

If it works the same way as GC, the difference ought to be no different to developing for PC with a better GPU - you just up the resources you use. eg. You submit a poly-mesh to GC and ask it to texture it with 2 textures say, and it's finished in so many cycles. Doing the same on wii, it'll be finished in perhaps a 3rd the time, so you could submit a poly mesh with 3x the number of vertices and 6 textures. Unless the engine was extremely optimized to considerably degree, which AFAIK most weren't and went through Nintendo's API, it should be easy to adapt/scale engines. And this has been tooted as a benefit to Nintendo's hardware choice - making things easy for developers.

 

It sort explains the reasons why most launch titles, looked like standard GC games. You scale up to hardware you don't have. Red Steel provides more proof of this, early levels of the game look like your average GC game. Later levels texture wise are like night and day, animation even seem to have gotten smoother. With one level putting Hollywood pixel fill rate to good use. One thing that stands out as a negative for Red Steel is its lack of any dynamic lights.

SSX Blur also makes good use of the insane pixel fillrate to quote Julian Eggebrecht, but there's obvious evidence of it being a port. The character models polygon count seem to be very low.

Thanks for the explanation.

 

Nintendo is coming out with it's own middlware :




"Many people have bemoaned the fact that many Wii games barely look above GameCube quality since the system launched. However, now it seems there is a reason behind this. Nintendo's own Takeshi Shimada, speaking at the Game Developers' Conference, has discussed the hand-writing and speech recognition tools used in the Nintendo DS programme 'Brain Training'. He is responsible for overseeing three different teams that work solely on new development tools and software libraries that can be used both for Nintendo itself and any Third Party companies.

In addition to the Brain Training software, he brushed over the topic of Wii development tools, stating that updated versions are currently in-progress. Specifically mentioned was 'Nintendoware', a tool made by HAL Labs and Nintendo, that emulates the Wii on a high-end PC so artists can quickly see an accurate preview of special effects without having to load everything onto an actual Wii kit. He also stated that the team is currently working on an easy-to-incorporate fur-shading middleware (think either Starfox Adventures or the Xbox version of Conker's Bad Fur Day), as well as predictive motion sensing, whereby a game can predict what your next movement is likely to be to create smoother Wii controller movements in-game.
Finally, it was also noted that Nintendo of Japan is looking towards a programme that can convert text into speech on the Wii. "

Great news

 

Geez Nintendo, next gen sneak up on you or something? This stuff really should have started on the gamecube and been ready in time for launch, not halfway through this gen.

 

Half way? It's only been out 4 months lol... anyway here is the link in case you guys think I made this up.




http://www.cubed3.com/news/7019/1/Takeshi_...ks_Wii_Upgrades

They will most likely use this new fur shading technique for the New Donkey Kong.

I think nintendo is tired of crappy looking 3rd party games to be honest. I mean the system is still pretty powerful and it not getting utilized much at all.

 

Well, they say they're still working on it, which implies that they're not finished. Even if they get this stuff out to devs by summer, assuming a 2 year game dev cycle, that's just about halfway through the generation before we get games that don't look like ass.

 

Well it's true, they should have already had these out, but according to the story it will actually speed of developement quite dramatically. It might not take 2 years for Wii game developement.
Hell Sonic and the Secret rings was made in 1 year and Sonic 360 was made in two years. Which one came out better?

 

Why? Why the extra emphasis on fur-shading? Unless they have tons of hairy characters, I don't see how having more fur-shading would help a game like Kirby. I guess Wolf Link could have used some of that fur-shading. I guess it might work for grass as well.

 

For fur! I thought with all that text, it was a full middleware engine. But it's not. Not even a graphics engine which, if you are bemoaning the visual shortcomings of 3rd party titles, would be the smartest move.

And as for the Wii emulation on PC, they'd better hope that doesn't get leaked

 

It's probably something that's easy to do, as well as something that's already known how to do. Maybe Nintendo owns the Starfox Adventures codebase?

 

I don't think it's a full-blown emulator, probably just a tool that allows developers to compile code on and for PC and see what they'd see on Wii. Would be more flexible, anyway, as it could be used for Softimage|XSI custom viewports and such...

 

It's not just for fur, read the entire article.

They are talking about two different middleware engines. One called "nintendoware" which helps devs see what special effects the wii is capable of on a PC dev station and another one that makes fur shading easy.

Hopefully they will just incorporate the fur shading engine into Nintendoware.

 

They're not two 'engines'. One is a development tool The other is a...shader implementation, I guess. Both are a long way from an optimized Wii-specific graphics engine which drives all aspects of the rendering, and which it would appear Wii is much in need of.

 

Maybe it's further along and has alot more to it than we think.

 

Perhaps. But nothing in the article suggests as much, so that'd be based on a pure guess than any evidence. All the evidence, what little there is, says we have a fur shader and a tool so that devs can check graphics on PC instead of having to use the Wii to test. Without that tool they could still check their graphics; just not as conveniently. And they also don't have online implemented yet. Dunno why online is such a hot deabte with XB360 and PS3 but totally overlooked on Wii? Overall Nintendo seem well behind the curve.

Though this is going off topic.