SpinesN Posted February 9, 2007 Posted February 9, 2007 I see epic developing a wii specific engine actually. The unreal 3 engine is designed for high end computers and those that will come out in the next 4-5 years. The ps3 and xbox306 happen to be in that category while the wii is simply not. I imagine that trying to strip down the unreal 3 engine to run on the wii (smoothly and with enough features to draw developer interests) would be a more complex feat than creating a new engine altogether. Epic will see the console numbers jumping and the unreal 2 engine may or may not hold developer interests on the wii. If it doesn't then epic will most likely roll out a wii specific build.
DCK Posted February 9, 2007 Posted February 9, 2007 Most of Nintendo's developers aren't particularly skilled in making FPSes, and its position as biggest publisher won't make them run to do it, I guess. UE3.0 would be a far better option; I think bribing Epic into making it would cost less money even. I see epic developing a wii specific engine actually. The unreal 3 engine is designed for high end computers and those that will come out in the next 4-5 years. The ps3 and xbox306 happen to be in that category while the wii is simply not. I imagine that trying to strip down the unreal 3 engine to run on the wii (smoothly and with enough features to draw developer interests) would be a more complex feat than creating a new engine altogether. Epic will see the console numbers jumping and the unreal 2 engine may or may not hold developer interests on the wii. If it doesn't then epic will most likely roll out a wii specific build.It'd be a good option, but the most positive point of an UE3.0 port is that it makes porting easier. I imagine if Epic scrap the humongous resolutions of the screen and textures out, and limit the shader effects to what's doable on Wii (which I hope is still quite much) and a lot of what makes UE3 heavy is removed. Of course, it's easy talking, but the reason why we need UE3 is not graphics per se, but portability.
SpinesN Posted February 10, 2007 Posted February 10, 2007 Most of Nintendo's developers aren't particularly skilled in making FPSes, and its position as biggest publisher won't make them run to do it, I guess. UE3.0 would be a far better option; I think bribing Epic into making it would cost less money even.It'd be a good option, but the most positive point of an UE3.0 port is that it makes porting easier. I imagine if Epic scrap the humongous resolutions of the screen and textures out, and limit the shader effects to what's doable on Wii (which I hope is still quite much) and a lot of what makes UE3 heavy is removed. Of course, it's easy talking, but the reason why we need UE3 is not graphics per se, but portability. The unreal engine doesn't have to be used for FPS you know :p Splinter cell is unreal based. Yes a UE 3 on the wii would be nice for ports but it simply would not work well with the limited GPU ram on the wii. Textures and res can be scaled back in any engine but the U3 engine is largely based on static meshes and shaders. Both of which are RAM intensive. Removing what makes the U3 engine big would leave a less desirable package than the unreal 2 engine in it's current state. Now if they were to make a wii centric unreal engine there is no reason it couldn't be (mostly) compatible with the U3 engine while simply rendering the world and running the AI/physics/events in a more wii friendly way. IMO this would be a better path to getting unreal 3 games on the wii while lossing as little from the games as possible. That said anyway you look at it we won't be getting the same games unless they are designed for the wii and built on to make 360/ps3 games.
DCK Posted February 10, 2007 Posted February 10, 2007 Yeah, that'd work excellently, but that's probably the approach they would take if they were to 'port' UE3 to Wii, right? It's probably a better option to rebuild an engine that is as compatible as possible. I'm also hoping that Valve will port the Source engine to the Wii. It's already proved to work on the Xbox and the engine is rather flexible, so it lends itself very well for systems with varying capabilities. If done well, it could create some beautiful graphics for the Wii. I imagine HL2 would work so well on it.
SpinesN Posted February 11, 2007 Posted February 11, 2007 Heh if you call that a port we have different meanings of the word "port" :p As for the source engine that got on the xbox real quick because the xbox had an x86 architecture (same as computers that run windows). Yes the engine is very scalable, however minimal code change was needed due to the architecture. Now if there is a 360 source game out now then yes it will probably be easy to get a wii source engine. We shall see what happens won't we?
DCK Posted February 11, 2007 Posted February 11, 2007 Yeah, it wouldn't'be a port strictly speaking, but bleh... Anyway what I was trying to say is that Source already worked on machines weaker than Wii. Don't you expect the lack of DirectX to be the biggest problem, as opposed to CPU architecture?
SpinesN Posted February 12, 2007 Posted February 12, 2007 Hadn't actually thought about that but no. Since DirectX is just a render path, I would think less code would need to be changed for a change in render path as opposed to a change in cpu architecture (all other things being equal).
Recommended Posts