Wii U hardware discussion and investigation *rename

[Shifty Geezer]

Zero experience? The entire organization, really?
They are about to launch a modern console with zero experience developing titles for it?
I have a hard time believing that.

Okay, if you're going to trip up on the phrasing, let me retry.

Nintendo's first party developers, the thousands of employees working on coding and creating assets for their console games, have on average virtually no experience with modern hardware beyond whatever they have dabbled with in their spare time; certainly none as part of their past 10 years working on Nintendo projects. Nintendo have RnD departments that look at hardware and software, which provides a starting point for migrating to a new architecture, but the fundamental experience level of the developers is the same as every developer when developing to a new architecture they haven't experienced before.

 

[sebbbi]

They are about to launch a modern console with zero experience developing titles for it?
I have a hard time believing that.

Isn't that always the case? No matter how much time you spend learning new techniques and algorithms, there's nothing comparable to developing a full game. First game for a new platform will always be a learning experience for the team. Nobody can be perfect on their first try.

 

[Blazkowicz]

Wii U is pretty similar to a PC, you have a vanilla multicore CPU and a vanilla GPU. with edram of course but a lot of console have had embedded or special ram before including the gamecube.

of course there are all new APIs and OS, and using a multicore CPU isn't trivial but compared to the era of xbox 360's launch a lot of people have had experience with it either on PC or console, or even phones and tablets lately.

 

[XpiderMX]

No-one has said that. If you want to believe that Nintendo's developers can enter into a new hardware architecture and gain very effective utilisation from it from their very first titles in a way no other developers can, that's your prerogative.

Rare did it, Bizarre Creation did it, why Nintendo no?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Rare did it, Bizarre Creation did it, why Nintendo no?

This is one of the most ludicrous discussions I've yet had on the internet!

Human beings take time to learn stuff, through experience. The more complicated the stuff, the longer it takes to learn. Game development is seriously complicated. It's illogical to think that a studio of developers with little prior experience on a particular set of hardware can make highly efficient use of it with their first title, and that plays out with a very long gaming history of launch titles being much inferior to latter life titles across every platform.

I'm not even sure why anyone wants to challenge that concept. The argument was that even if Wii U is capable of 1080p, the lack of 1080p titles at launch is more in line with first-title standards that don't push the machine. If this is not true, and Nintendo's studios are getting excellent use of their hardware at launch in a way other developers can't, then the reason they are targeting 720p games is because Wii U can't manage anything better and its launch titles are as good as its going to get. That reasoning doesn't fit with the logic of understanding human progress, nor history looking at every other console and how utilisation improves over time, nor what Nintendo have said themselves about utilisation improving over time. You can go looking for whatever outlier examples you want. I'll even quote one of my all-time favourite games, Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance on PS2. That game was amazing for a first title on a new machine, especially one as hard to develop on as PS2. But the rare success of one or two studios (which is pretty debatable anyway) doesn't set the standard by which every other studio can be expected to operate, plus those developers go on to bigger and better things anyhow. Snowblind Studio's latter games improved notably over BGDA, so even their remarkable entry on the PS2 wasn't making best use of the hardware by considerable margin.

If Nintendo's studios had been working on SM2 and 3 hardware the past 10 years, their experience and understanding and knowhow would be much better in dealing with SM4 hardware in Wii U. Without that experience, the new hardware will take time to adapt to. Anyone who thinks all Nintendo's studios will be able to get excellent use from the AMD GPU in Wii U with just a couple of years development either seriously overestimates Nintendo's developers as godlike versus all other studios, or seriously underestimates how complex game development is and how versatile hardware is to be able to make the most from it.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Wii U is pretty similar to a PC, you have a vanilla multicore CPU and a vanilla GPU. with edram of course but a lot of console have had embedded or special ram before including the gamecube.

of course there are all new APIs and OS, and using a multicore CPU isn't trivial but compared to the era of xbox 360's launch a lot of people have had experience with it either on PC or console, or even phones and tablets lately.

Right, but for the last 12 years Nintendo's devs haven't had experience of PC-like architecture while creating GC and Wii games. The ease of PC architecture mean any capable studio can have their engineers pick up a copy of GPU Gems and piece together some good visuals, but there's going to be a lot to learn about creating shaders, art pipelines, generating and handling assets efficiently, etc. You can buy in experience, but that won't get a studio up to speed. Just look at this gen and all the public discussion of how developers had to adapt and how they've refined toolchains and code bases and data formats. At the end of this gen, maybe one or two devs could look at PS360 and think, "you know what, I reckon we could get this game running at 1080p if we structure things this way and that way and shift that workload over there and use the techniques we saw at that devcon," but at launch at the thought process has generally been, "my god, how are we going to get this thing out the door? The framerate sucks. These draw calls are crippling. We can't get anything like the peak triangle setup this hardware's supposed to be able to handle. The artists are constantly on our backs unable to create what they want, and those changes we make for them keep breaking the engine. We may have to drop to subHD just to get something working at a decent framerate." With hardware standardising, that'll no longer be an issue, but there's no sane reason to think Nintendo will be immune to such growing pains over a dramatic hardware transition.

 

[Rootax]

The following is a breakdown of recent additions and losses of personnel for Retro Studios Inc.

2001
(+) Ryan Harris (Nintendo of America) (Production)

2008
(+) Shane Lewis (Nintendo of America) (Production)

Employees Acquired 2008-2012
Chris Torres, Reed Ketcham, Jonathan Delange, Stephen Dupree , Andrew Orlando, Brad Taylor, Robert Kovach, Nathan Nordfelt, Tony Bernardin, Dominic Pallotta, Kyle Ruegg, Timothy Wilson, Sylvia Rowland, Eric Koslowski, Gray Ginther, Crystel Land, Adam Schulman, Aaron Black, Nestor Hernandez, Paul Schwanz,Chris Carroll,Allison Theus,Jessica Spence,Toph Gorham,Mookie Weisbrod,Rhett Baldwin

Employees Dismissed 2008-2012
Jay Epperson, Bryan Walker, Mike Wikan, Kynan Pearson, Mike Miller

Openings: 0 Positions
Total : 79 employees
http://kyoto-report.wikidot.com/retro-studios-personnel-tracker


They may have lost some people, but they were replaced and then some.

A lot more left :

Mark Pacini – Design director (Entire Metroid Prime trilogy).
Todd Keller – Art director (Entire Metroid Prime trilogy).
Jack Mathews – Principle technology engineer (Entire Metroid Prime trilogy)
Karl Deckard – Senior Designer of Metroid Prime 1, 2, and 3.
Jason Behr – Designer of Metroid Prime.
Andy O’ Neil - Technical Lead Engineer and principal engineer on Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 2: Echoes
Marco Thrush – Senior Software Engineer on Metroid Prime 1, 2, and 3.
Steve McCrea – Engineering and Senior Engineering on Metroid Prime 1, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
David “Zoid” Kirsh – Senior engineer on Metroid Prime 1, 2, and 3.
Paul Tozour – Senior engineer for Retro Studios from July 2003 to June 2008.
Alejandro Roura – Environment artist and full-time Animator for Metroid Prime 1, 2, and 3.
Frank Lafaente -Engineering Director on all three Metroid Prime games.
Kai Martin - Software engineer on all three Metroid Prime games.
Chip Sbrogna – One of 4 level designers on Metroid Prime 2: Echoes
Ben Sprout – Artist on Metroid Prime 2 and Metroid Prime 3.
Aaron de Orive – Lead writer/Story consultant for Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.
Cliff Young – World Artist for Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.
Bobby Pavlock – A level designer on Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
Todd Simmons – Audio contractor for Metroid Prime 2 and 3.
Ilya Nazaou – Artist for Metroid Prime 3 who now works for Bethesda
Tom Papadatos – Senior Artist on Metroid Prime 1
...

The list goes on&on...

http://emilyrogersblog.wordpress.co...-studios-rocky-development-for-wii-u-project/

 

[XpiderMX]

This is one of the most ludicrous discussions I've yet had on the internet!

Human beings take time to learn stuff, through experience. The more complicated the stuff, the longer it takes to learn. Game development is seriously complicated. It's illogical to think that a studio of developers with little prior experience on a particular set of hardware can make highly efficient use of it with their first title, and that plays out with a very long gaming history of launch titles being much inferior to latter life titles across every platform.

I'm not even sure why anyone wants to challenge that concept. The argument was that even if Wii U is capable of 1080p, the lack of 1080p titles at launch is more in line with first-title standards that don't push the machine. If this is not true, and Nintendo's studios are getting excellent use of their hardware at launch in a way other developers can't, then the reason they are targeting 720p games is because Wii U can't manage anything better and its launch titles are as good as its going to get. That reasoning doesn't fit with the logic of understanding human progress, nor history looking at every other console and how utilisation improves over time, nor what Nintendo have said themselves about utilisation improving over time. You can go looking for whatever outlier examples you want. I'll even quote one of my all-time favourite games, Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance on PS2. That game was amazing for a first title on a new machine, especially one as hard to develop on as PS2. But the rare success of one or two studios (which is pretty debatable anyway) doesn't set the standard by which every other studio can be expected to operate, plus those developers go on to bigger and better things anyhow. Snowblind Studio's latter games improved notably over BGDA, so even their remarkable entry on the PS2 wasn't making best use of the hardware by considerable margin.

If Nintendo's studios had been working on SM2 and 3 hardware the past 10 years, their experience and understanding and knowhow would be much better in dealing with SM4 hardware in Wii U. Without that experience, the new hardware will take time to adapt to. Anyone who thinks all Nintendo's studios will be able to get excellent use from the AMD GPU in Wii U with just a couple of years development either seriously overestimates Nintendo's developers as godlike versus all other studios, or seriously underestimates how complex game development is and how versatile hardware is to be able to make the most from it.

I'm not talking about 1080p or 720p, I'm talking about their games. They showed some really nice demos last year, with all the shaders and that things, but now, a year later, they has showed games that don't show anything special (graphically).

And I can't believe it from Nintendo, the first party and hardware maker, can't do a better work with their games, and I refer to Rare and Bizarre, they had only 1 year for making their games to work, and the look great (PGR3 and Kameo).

Sorry but all you have said sound like "damage control" to me, if Nintendo is not "prepared" for shaders and HD, then they can contract people.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I'm not talking about 1080p or 720p, I'm talking about their games. They showed some really nice demos last year, with all the shaders and that things, but now, a year later, they has showed games that don't show anything special (graphically).

Sorry but all you have said sound like "damage control" to me, if Nintendo is not "prepared" for shaders and HD, then they can contract people.

Ha ha ha ha ha!

And here was me thinking you were 'siding' with Nintendo. Your post :

"But what about this?

It comes from the same Nintendo developers, and it is great looking, on pair or even better than actual gen. "

was in response to me saying Nintendo are targeting 720p as a reasonable launch target for lack of experience, and leading with a 'but' you were clearly challenging my opinion.

Just goes to show it's nigh impossible to have sensible discussion with people who'll only post one or two lines without clarification or necessary detail. You never described what exactly your opinion was, or what the relevance of that image was, and left me guessing. As your thought processes are clouded with attitudes of 'damage limitation' then there's not much more to be had this debate.

 

[XpiderMX]

Ha ha ha ha ha!

And here was me thinking you were 'siding' with Nintendo. Your post :
was in response to me saying Nintendo are targeting 720p as a reasonable launch target for lack of experience, and leading with a 'but' you were clearly challenging my opinion.

Just goes to show it's nigh impossible to have sensible discussion with people who'll only post one or two lines without clarification or necessary detail. You never described what exactly your opinion was, or what the relevance of that image was, and left me guessing. As your thought processes are clouded with attitudes of 'damage limitation' then there's not much more to be had this debate.

Well, believe it or not, I will buy Wii U, because I want the new generation of games, and because I like the controller. But I am judging what my eyes has seeing, and it don't looks (yet) like a new generation software, because I remember the Gamecube launch titles and they wowed me, but Wii U software (especifically Nintendo games) don't.

I understand that a third party developer don't try to "push" the hardware, but Nintendo IMO must do it.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

We've already established that Wii U isn't "next-gen" regards typical hardware progress. It's this gen+. So games look about this gen at launch, and will look better down the road when the devs learn to make better use of it.

 

[MDX]

A lot more left :

Mark Pacini – Design director (Entire Metroid Prime trilogy).
Todd Keller – Art director (Entire Metroid Prime trilogy).
Jack Mathews – Principle technology engineer (Entire Metroid Prime trilogy)
Karl Deckard – Senior Designer of Metroid Prime 1, 2, and 3.
Jason Behr – Designer of Metroid Prime.
Andy O’ Neil - Technical Lead Engineer and principal engineer on Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 2: Echoes
Marco Thrush – Senior Software Engineer on Metroid Prime 1, 2, and 3.
Steve McCrea – Engineering and Senior Engineering on Metroid Prime 1, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
David “Zoid” Kirsh – Senior engineer on Metroid Prime 1, 2, and 3.
Paul Tozour – Senior engineer for Retro Studios from July 2003 to June 2008.
Alejandro Roura – Environment artist and full-time Animator for Metroid Prime 1, 2, and 3.
Frank Lafaente -Engineering Director on all three Metroid Prime games.
Kai Martin - Software engineer on all three Metroid Prime games.
Chip Sbrogna – One of 4 level designers on Metroid Prime 2: Echoes
Ben Sprout – Artist on Metroid Prime 2 and Metroid Prime 3.
Aaron de Orive – Lead writer/Story consultant for Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.
Cliff Young – World Artist for Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.
Bobby Pavlock – A level designer on Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
Todd Simmons – Audio contractor for Metroid Prime 2 and 3.
Ilya Nazaou – Artist for Metroid Prime 3 who now works for Bethesda
Tom Papadatos – Senior Artist on Metroid Prime 1
...

The list goes on&on...

http://emilyrogersblog.wordpress.co...-studios-rocky-development-for-wii-u-project/

Many of those are prior to 2008, are they not?
If we are looking at when Nintendo internally was preparing for its next console, 2009 to 2012 would make sense.

 

[east of eastside]

Wii U $200??

http://www.zeldainformer.com/news/comments/rumor-wii-u-set-at-200-releasing-november-18th?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Call us Rumor Informer all you want, but according to an inside source who attended the recent GameStop product conference, that’s the details that were clearly discussed. A November 18th launch with the Wii U launching at $200. Nintendo has told us repeatedly we would be surprised by the launch price of the Wii U and certainly $200 counts as a surprise. It’s not really known if GameStop was speculating as a company or basing things on information they were given at the corporate level to prepare their stores for launch.$200 sounds a bit far fetched, but that is what the GameCube launched at, and it immediately makes the console competitive price wise with the current generation. On top of that, it clearly makes them the cheapest of the futuregeneration consoles and thus highly likely to fly off store shelves for a long while. If they wanted to ensure Wii U penetration then this is the best way to do it. At that price I am sure people are worried about specs, but reality is the specs have likely never changed and that is selling the console at a loss. They said they wouldn’t sell for a loss, but times change no? That being said, it may only be the US where it sells so cheaply since we have the “lowest” form of

People who argued with me about $250 price point will be eating crow soon. $199 has a big addressable market size which includes Nintendo's target audience of kids and casuals. Months of tech speculating down the drain as Nintendo opts for an ultra low cost strategy.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

This would explain the lower target for the hardware than the "Nintendo like to go low power" theory.

 

[Rangers]

$200 would be nice but, yeah no. 360 4GB with no 6.2" screen in the controller is 199.

Sticking with $349 prediction. It sounds too high now, but it was my gut feeling in the beginning, and those turn out right a lot.

 

[bgassassin]

$200 would be nice but, yeah no. 360 4GB with no 6.2" screen in the controller is 199.

Sticking with $349 prediction. It sounds too high now, but it was my gut feeling in the beginning, and those turn out right a lot.

When I see you say stuff like this I imagine Barry Horowitz.

But $349 is what I've been expecting as well with $329 being a best case scenario. But based on that leaked survey, maybe the hit $299 after all.

 

[XpiderMX]

We've already established that Wii U isn't "next-gen" regards typical hardware progress. It's this gen+. So games look about this gen at launch, and will look better down the road when the devs learn to make better use of it.

Are you sure? I really think they are putting a really good GPU inside, more ram and a modern CPU.

 

[bgassassin]

Are you sure? I really think they are putting a really good GPU inside, more ram and a modern CPU.

Strictly based on power it's a "tweener".

 

[XpiderMX]

Strictly based on power it's a "tweener".

But a tweener near to PS3 or a tweener near to Xbox 720? I guess near 720.

 

[AlphaWolf]

But a tweener near to PS3 or a tweener near to Xbox 720? I guess near 720.

Look at the size of the box...