Unreal engine 3 on Wii... possible?

[Laa-Yosh]

None better to ask this. One of the reasons why is being said that devs are trying to put UE3 on wii is because of ports, (assuming it is true) how easy/hard would be to port the art assets?

Well, for normal mapped characters you'd probably have to build a simplified lowres version and extract new normal maps, which in turn requires new textures. Perhaps you can simplify your existing nextgen model while preserving texture info, but it's not that easy.
Another issue could be mirroring normal maps but as Doom3 has managed to work around it, wii should be able to do so as well.
Simplified shaders could use the existing textures, maybe skipping a few channels when neccessary. A lot of the stuff in UE3 probably works with look-up table textures but those are for advanced HDR-based shading and lighting which you'd have to remove anyway.

Same goes for most of the objects in the scenery: trees, weapons, crates, and so on.

Levels are a different matter, though, as they also require visibility info, lighting maps and such, so they probably have to be either completely re-done, or heavily edited.

And I'm also not sure about animation, and how you could reduce number of bones per character. You'd probably have to redo all the skeletial rigging setup and write (or bug Epic to write) custom tools to convert animations.

 

[assen]

Levels are a different matter, though, as they also require visibility info, lighting maps and such, so they probably have to be either completely re-done, or heavily edited.

If they could fit Doom3 and Half-life 2 on the Xbox, the levels problem is solveable (maybe not easy or cheap, but solveable).

And I'm also not sure about animation, and how you could reduce number of bones per character. You'd probably have to redo all the skeletial rigging setup and write (or bug Epic to write) custom tools to convert animations.

Animation systems like Granny already include "bone LOD", which is exactly that - dropping of bones and re-rigging the vertices to bones higher in the hierarchy. It happens at runtime, and I suppose it's possible to do an offline version whose output can be checked and fixed by an artist.

 

[Blazkowicz]

Well there can be some options but most of them be a longshot.

If you use UE 3.0 you can(maybe) I guess you would need to optimize this to high latency. Your going to have to just live with the higher latency.I assume a Hollywood running 28fps it will be less of a problem.

1)Compress(into a .dol or a .lzo file) the contents of the RAM. Decompress at execution
2)scale draw distances
3)limit frames per second to 28fps(use of motion blur,repetition etc to smooth over the animation)
4)Take out everything Wii isn't capable of or does poorly
5)Optimise for use of the TEV unit.
6)Optimize the renderer for low polygon models(techniques useful for low polygon models like displacement mapping,normal maps,bump maps,hypernurbs,powernumbs,parallax maps,noise generators etc)
7)Use of memory cards or USB flash cards(512MB,1GB ect) as extra memory(yes I know the latency issue hopefully as 28fps the latency will be less)
8)scale texture color presicion at farther distances

I know there will be latency issues but the end result will be better.

you guy write funny stuff.


as for the awesome UE3 tools : well, aren't the tools good as well on UE 2.x, and what good are content creations tools designed around shaders, normal mapping etc. that you won't get running in a useful manner on a gamecube or wii.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

If they could fit Doom3 and Half-life 2 on the Xbox, the levels problem is solveable
Animation systems like Granny already include "bone LOD", which is exactly that - dropping of bones and re-rigging the vertices to bones higher in the hierarchy.

Yeah, there's always a tool to help you - but neither are a part of UE3, and you do have to put in extra work instead of just automagically converting assets.

 

[sfried]

ok then running UE on Wii is impossible. End of Thread.

I don't think it's impossible. I just think you need to rewrite every shader script with the proper TEV equivalent. In fact, I'm thinking you need to rewrite the whole UE3 code to properly function on the Wii so much that it becomes, as others said, UEthWii.

Self-shadowing, bump mapping and other so-called shaders are not impossiblities on Flipper, let alone Hollywood. You just need to script them properly for TEV. Simple porting won't do. And I think the trick developers use is overlapping and combining these"primitive" commands over one another to create the desired effect.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Self-shadowing, bump mapping and other so-called shaders are not impossiblities on Flipper, let alone Hollywood. You just need to script them properly for TEV.

Why are you so sure about that?

 

[Rolf N]

Why are you so sure about that?

Because there are Gamecube games that leave no doubt?

 

[kyleb]

Well, for normal mapped characters you'd probably have to build a simplified lowres version and extract new normal maps, which in turn requires new textures. Perhaps you can simplify your existing nextgen model while preserving texture info, but it's not that easy.

Actually, with UE3 you build the characters and such with however many millions of tris you like and that gets coverted to lower poly meshes with normal maps for use in game. See the "Distributed Computing Normal Map Generation Tool" section here for some example pics.

 

[Flux]

Actually, with UE3 you build the characters and such with however many millions of tris you like and that gets coverted to lower poly meshes with normal maps for use in game. See the "Distributed Computing Normal Map Generation Tool" section here for some example pics.

So UE3 can run on Wii if you take out all the effects Wii can't do natively and add the TEV equivalent.

So altering the frame rate cause jitters and tearing?

Is there anyway to fix the tearing and jitters?

Can streaming textures,audio,ect from a SD card/HDD help free up RAM for the engine?

What are some other uses that a harddrive(30GB-40GB compressed to .dol executable) would have on Wii?

Can resampling enhance AA for the Wii?

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Actually, with UE3 you build the characters and such with however many millions of tris you like and that gets coverted to lower poly meshes with normal maps for use in game. See the "Distributed Computing Normal Map Generation Tool" section here for some example pics.

I'm sorry but you probably don't understand how normal mapping works.

You have a highres mesh, that can be a scanned point cloud or a zbrush model or anything.
You also model a lowres mesh, about 5-15 thousand triangles, which is UV mapped and compared to the highres model - the difference will be stored in the normal map. This lwores model is what the GPU works with: animates, shades, textures it and so on.
It is very important to build an efficient, clean model to get high quality normal maps and good skeletial deformation and so on. This can not be automated without seriously sacrificing quality. Normal maps can be a real headache to get right...

 

[ATI-liens]

There were a number of games on the Game Cube with bump mapping.

They unreal engine is optimised for high resolutions , this is the only reason Epic said it would be unlikely to see Unreal Engien 3 on the Wii.

Unreal 2.5 (version 3369) was used in Redsteel and it features some elements of UE3 such as self shadowing and the same side light casting effect.

There is a new way of tilt mapping in a Nintendo patent and (to me) it looks like it's been used in Mario Galaxy.

 

[fearsomepirate]

They unreal engine is optimised for high resolutions , this is the only reason Epic said it would be unlikely to see Unreal Engien 3 on the Wii.

No, they didn't. HD gaming is about more than resolutions over 640x480, which the original Unreal engine supported quite nicely. It's about a new generation of effects and graphics techniques that show up well in higher resolutions. Wii doesn't support these.

 

[ector]

Real dot-product normal mapping of animated geometry, which is required to get the U3 (or even Doom3) look, cannot be done efficiently on Gamecube/Wii. There is simply no per-pixel dot product hardware, and no vertex shader that can help with transforming tangent spaces.

"But wii is teh god! it can be done with three passes and cpu transforms!"

Yep, most probably, that's why I put in my little "efficiently" disclaimer above.

 

[Teasy]

Real dot-product normal mapping of animated geometry, which is required to get the U3 (or even Doom3) look, cannot be done efficiently on Gamecube/Wii. There is simply no per-pixel dot product hardware, and no vertex shader that can help with transforming tangent spaces.

"But wii is teh god! it can be done with three passes and cpu transforms!"

Yep, most probably, that's why I put in my little "efficiently" disclaimer above.

Oh so you've actually developed on Wii then?.........

Great could you outline some of the details that we don't already know about the hardware, I'd be especially interested in the extra transistors in Hollywood and what they do add over Flipper.

 

[ATI-liens]

No, they didn't. HD gaming is about more than resolutions over 640x480, which the original Unreal engine supported quite nicely. It's about a new generation of effects and graphics techniques that show up well in higher resolutions. Wii doesn't support these.

You know what! I read that HD thing somewhere but just found out it was a rumour being posed as something real! Yes im wrong about the HD it sounds stupid,,,not sure why i believed it.

I found an interview with an unreal 3 dev and he says:

[utl]http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=146449[/url]

" You know, Unreal Engine 3 can't run on Xbox 1 or PS2 either - and that's not to say that some of our licensees wont find a way to shoe-horn it into that platform, we certainly have some licensees that are doing some experiments in that area and it could very well happen. But that's a really tough job. And one thing that has become public knowledge in the last little while is that Ubisoft's game Red Steel is using Unreal Engine 2, so there will be Unreal Engine games on the Wii. There will be Unreal Engine games on the Wii and hopefully they'll be successful and maybe we'll make a little money from it, but Unreal Engine 3 - that's a little below our target platform."

By Red Steel using Unreal 2 he means 2.5.


There is an unreal game on the Wii "Medal of Honor" the X360 and PS3 versions ae using Unreal 3 it is possible that the Wii version may also use Unreal 3.

There are some games on the X360 that use UE 2.5 like red Steel.

My conclusion is that it is possible but they just don't want to do it because it's hard work and they don't want to downgrade the perfect UE3 engine.

 

[Farid]

Of course it can. They could render at 1920x1080 and downsample.

That would be assuming that they could store these 1920x1080 render targets into the eDRAM, or that they would render directly to the main system RAM, which would be really slow.

 

[Flux]

You know what! I read that HD thing somewhere but just found out it was a rumour being posed as something real! Yes im wrong about the HD it sounds stupid,,,not sure why i believed it.

I found an interview with an unreal 3 dev and he says:

[utl]http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=146449[/url]

" You know, Unreal Engine 3 can't run on Xbox 1 or PS2 either - and that's not to say that some of our licensees wont find a way to shoe-horn it into that platform, we certainly have some licensees that are doing some experiments in that area and it could very well happen. But that's a really tough job. And one thing that has become public knowledge in the last little while is that Ubisoft's game Red Steel is using Unreal Engine 2, so there will be Unreal Engine games on the Wii. There will be Unreal Engine games on the Wii and hopefully they'll be successful and maybe we'll make a little money from it, but Unreal Engine 3 - that's a little below our target platform."

By Red Steel using Unreal 2 he means 2.5.


There is an unreal game on the Wii "Medal of Honor" the X360 and PS3 versions ae using Unreal 3 it is possible that the Wii version may also use Unreal 3.

There are some games on the X360 that use UE 2.5 like red Steel.

My conclusion is that it is possible but they just don't want to do it because it's hard work and they don't want to downgrade the perfect UE3 engine.

So they will release UT 2004 on Wii(please please pretty please!!!)

 

[ATI-liens]

So they will release UT 2004 on Wii(please please pretty please!!!)

It can uses the same engine, but i doubt they will. Epic sound like they don't want to bring any UT games to the Wii.

Medal OF Honor Wii

Look at the para shoot jump scene , you can see the shadow fall on each tile on the roof of the house. nice stuff!

 

[pc999]

So they will release UT 2004 on Wii(please please pretty please!!!)

.

Anyway, for the record, last time they talked about the Wii that arent doing any game for it (althought they said the same for UT3 for 360?).

 

[ATI-liens]

Real dot-product normal mapping of animated geometry, which is required to get the U3 (or even Doom3) look, cannot be done efficiently on Gamecube/Wii. There is simply no per-pixel dot product hardware, and no vertex shader that can help with transforming tangent spaces.

"But wii is teh god! it can be done with three passes and cpu transforms!"

Yep, most probably, that's why I put in my little "efficiently" disclaimer above.

Isn't there better ways to fake normal mapping?