A Summary of the Huge Wii Thread

Well, except for the Dreamcast (where they backed up Sega.net), no console that's used gamespy has had particularly compelling online.

Still, if Gamespy works as an alternative to friend codes for 3rd party games (just do things PC style), that may not be so bad if it's used since friend codes are a horrible idea.

 

what other consoles have gamespy really been involved with? i know they had a deal with nintendo for gamecube, but i'm not really sure you can blame that console's online abortion on gamespy. it was more of nintendo's choice. and IIRC there were some PS2 games that used gamespy, but that was also a developer's choice, and not something sony was pushing, was it?

i don't think any console has actualy taken advantage of the things gamespy could offer. just using it for matchmaking if anything.

 

It's not Gamespy's fault, that's for sure, but it does show a serious lack of commitment from the company itself.
It was excusable as plan B on the Dreamcast, especially given how Gamespy was pretty much the only option for PC online gaming at the time. (ah, shortly after the days of quakespy)
But Gamespy has been a major option on Gamecube, PS2, and the DS, and on all of them online never really took off beyond a few token efforts. (ok, not one game on the cube even used gamespy, but nintendo offered it as an option, pretty much the only option they did offer) I believe Sony had some sort of deal with them as well on the Ps2.

Anyhow, the existence of gamespy on the console and the continued use of friend's codes tells that the Wii's online isn't even going to be close to Xbox Live, if it even makes it past its first year.

 

Given the state of Wii online play, and the corresponding huge success of the console, I think it is crystal clear just how important the quality of the online gaming experience is to the sales of a console.

 

Yeah okay, Nintendo is still going to make a lot of money, but how does this benefit you or me?

 

Higher sales of online console games = more online games from Nintendo?

 

nm didnt read correctly.

 

Damn, no talk for 3 whole days? D:

 

The talk should have ended after the first page. After all it's "A Summary of the Huge Wii Thread" but now it looks like "Another Huge Wii Thread" - can we change the Title? ;P

 

What do you guys think of this pic?

http://www.ngcfrance.com/images/news/wii/harvest_moon/scr_019.jpg

 

Just read some update on Halo3 development.
Bungie states they are doing the following:

Sounds cool, I look forward to see what kind of 'atmosphere' this will create for the game.

But that got me to thinking, is what Bungie doing something that only this new Generation consoles can do and if so, based on what we know about the Wii, can we see this type of effect on future Wii titles? Any thoughts?

An older article from ATI:

http://ati.de/developer/dx9/ATI-LightScattering.pdf

 

F5 included some nice light scattering in RSII.

 

I've said many times from insider info it's not the CXE nor a gekko shrink. They used a better 750 cpu, beefed the cache, and my recollection as to why it's 729mhz and not the max of the chip was because of heat issues not that they couldn't push the chip.

 

Exactly it's based on the 750CL which can go up to 900mhz. If you look at the pdf file for it that I have posted all over the internet lol... it says that the suggested speed for the chip is 700 mhz. Nintendo went with 729mhz..even though it could have went up to 900mhz. It was about balance.

The 750 CL is a new chip. It's a low cost high performance chip.

It's not a GC CPU die shrink.

 

It's still a 750... Walks like a 750, talks like a 750, so it's a 750. Meaning it's performance characteristics are pretty much the same as Gekko +clock&cache.

 

Not really. A 750FX for example is about 30% - 40% faster than a 750CX at the same clockspeed as far as I remember, due to optimizations and a bigger L2-cache. That was years ago. The GX-series has further optimizations, and the new CL-series (Broadway?) is even more optimized...

 

Thanks for the heads up, I guess that answers my question.
Did a little reading and I had no idea how good this game looked!
And running on 60fps.

I really wish these guys would take a stab at the Wii to see what they can squeeze out of it

 

The die is about the size of my pinkie finger nail. It is based on an arch that is like 8 yrs old or so. And it is clocked at a whoppin' 730 MHz. It undoubtedly is a very cheap, very refined, and very low power CPU. But with regards to performance, let's not get too excited here. Heh.

Factor 5 makes tech demos, basically. Great proofs of concept. I own all of their Cube and N64 games. They are very pretty but man are they really actually pretty bad games. I don't think I've finished any of them.

IMO their best game may be Indiana Jones. They just ported the title over and made it look awesome for what N64 could do. But LucasArts actually made the game.

I'd rather see what Amusement Vision could do, personally. With a racer. Or Capcom. Or Acclaim (too bad they're gone, XGIII rocked).

 

That's not the point. The x86-arch is old as hell as well. My point is that it's BS to assume that a modern 730MHz PPC would only be 50% faster than Gekko. A 750 CL is quite a bit faster than a G4 at the same clockspeed for most operations (except for VMX, but Broadway has a SIMD-unit and custom matrix functions). I think that Broadway is at least twice as powerful as Gekko - still not much, but much better than many people seem to expect...

 

If you want to compare a 386 to a Core 2 Duo, say, (they are compatible) I think you perhaps are missing a few details. Like die size/density, say.

Die size is rather telling. Gekko was already a beefed up CPU due to the added SIMD functions (rather basic from what I've read). If Hollywood was truly a serious improvement, it would be bigger than it is methinks. Instead it fits rather well with what you'd get with a 180 nm to 90 nm shrink. This has been discussed several times in the Wii GPU thread. I'm sure it has some tweaks but nothing major.