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Unreal 3 Engine to Skip the Wii
Posted by
Zonk
on Mon Feb 05, 2007 06:06 PM
from the it's-okay-wii-you-can-still-be-mario's-friend dept.
from the it's-okay-wii-you-can-still-be-mario's-friend dept.
Mark Rein, speaking with Chris Kohler and Game|Life, has stated that Epic's next-gen Unreal engine will never make it to the Wii. Touting the virtues of high-definition gaming, the 360, and the PS3, Rein said that their engine is simply not designed for Nintendo's hardware. He also quickly mentioned the upcoming deal between Epic and Square Enix: "It's definitely a challenge to convince Japanese developers to work with a third-party technology like ours. But Square Enix, they're the granddaddy. I'm hoping that'll be pulling the stopper out of the drain, and we'll gradually crack that nut. We've been looking to hire somebody in Japan, to be our representative there. " Update: 02/06 04:19 GMT by Z : Accidentally misattributed the interview to CVG when it was a Game|Life piece. Fixed. Also, Chris made sure to point out that a partner of Epic's is trying to get UE3 onto the Wii, so ... maybe someday?
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What will wii do (Score:5, Insightful)
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Its the same hardware, after all.
(seriously not joking, the differences are so small it wouldnt even be worth calling it a major refresh. I guess thats the real reason they canned the "revolution" codename.)
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With the Wii you get to produce an Unreal 2 Engine game with some graphical enhancements over a Gamecube game but costs don't explode; in contrast to make a PS3/XBox 360 game your budget will probably explode to being 3-4 times what a PS2/XBox game cost. Now, what I hope happens is that the Wii demonstrates that
Re:What will wii do (Score:5, Insightful)
These games are capable of much more power, and with more power, you do not simply not "downscale" as much. Next-gen games feature more assets (more particle emitter assets, more model assets) nevermind that producing environments for next gen games is far more time consuming due to the increased scale.
More power also means you can do far more in code, so typically, you have larger teams of developers in order to produce more complicated AI systems, more complicated physics engines, more complicated shaders, etc.
Also, since the assets 'weigh more' on disk, your tools and technology infrastructure to support explodes. More disk space, more powerful hardware to work on, more files to support (because of more assets being created.)
Game budgets ARE far higher on next gen games, for all the reasons listed
And how do I know this? I'm a game developer, at a company that produces both current (ok, well now last) gen and next (okay with now current) gen games, for the xbox, ps, and nintendo families.
So really, he doesn't have a reality distortion field. Its a reality
"Textures and models are typically downscaled for consoles anyway."
Textures and models are typically "baked" (and LoD models set) relatively early in a single-generation production process, in order to ensure that artists are working on exactly what appears in the game. If you downscaled every time you made a build (ie, proceduraly,) you'd never know exactly what you'd end up with. Your comment regarding two ports at the same time, is of course correct. Especially so if you're producing a next and current gen version of the same game, which is why you just won't see it done very often. (Legends was one such example.) But your comment about budgets being generation specific are completely contrary to what the industry is experiencing and trying to grapple with.
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Re:What will wii do (Score:4, Insightful)
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It is precisely what is not independant of the technology. If a company releases a game for the 360 or ps3 and it features the same asset counts, texture resolutions, code base, etc of a current gen game, a publisher will wonder why the hell you arn't releasing it on the PS2 which has such a massive install base that PS2 exclusive games will continue getting made for another 4 or 5 years, most likely. (Certainly, I can promise you of titles that are
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That's right, because a revolution is when something more than doubles in size. For example, in the French revolution, France was just a few square kilometers in size, but it became the major country it is today thanks to the revolution.
Seriously, since when has "The same, just more of it" (as with the Wii's major rivals) been revolutionary? When has a radical reconfiguration of what you have to make things possible that weren't before not been revolutionary?
Mexed Mitaphors (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, better jump under that bandwagon before the train leaves the station!
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Hasn't this been known for awhile? (Score:5, Interesting)
I swear I saw an interview saying that Red-Steel was an Unreal 2 Engine game and it was unlikely the Wii could support an Unreal 3 Engine game
The fact is that the Unreal 3 Engine was designed with a reasonably powerful GPU (probably in the Geforce 6800 range) and a reasonably powerful CPU (AMD X2 3800+ as a guess) in mind and the Wii simply isn't in the same league. The Wii should be able to handle the Doom 3, Unreal 2 and (maybe) the Source engine which are all solid game engines which should be good for several years.
Re:Hasn't this been known for awhile? (Score:4, Interesting)
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One of the related links reads (Score:5, Funny)
That sounds like a painful medical problem.
High def gaming? (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, that's right... None of them... Yet they all managed to support running at a lower resolution too. This is a huge load of marketing bullshit.
Besides, they'll change their mind and compile it for the Wii (and the PS2) as soon as not doing it costs them a licensing agreement. (Unless Microsoft or Sony is paying them actual cash to be High-Def only?)
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Re:High def gaming? (Score:4, Informative)
The problem here is that UE3 was designed for a system with a modern graphics processor and fairly high end CPU. The Wii and PS2 have neither of these things, so UE3 simply won't run on them. Obviously, stuff like the previous Unreal Engine (used by Red Steel) runs fine on the Wii, so it's not as if the Wii can't run games. It just can't run UE3.
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Misreadind trends (Score:3, Insightful)
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who cares... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:who cares... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Commander Keen: pixel-wise fluid scrolling unseen before on EGA IBM-PCs
Doom: No need to mention. People were blown away by the full-screen (pseudo) 3D graphics. I knew someone who bought a Pentium60 more or less just to play the game for its graphics.
C&C: new frontiers for FMV cutscenes and the best use of the 320x200*8bit vga resolution seen in any strategy-game
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As for stair dismount, that was hosted on my county school systems file servers courtesy of me for a while. Along with Q2, tribes, tribes2, and Truck dismount.
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Of course, those are better as PC games, so I still may agree with you for consoles
Not News (Score:5, Funny)
I mean, far be it from me to drone on about hardware limitations, but the Wii wasn't even made for that kind of software. It's all about gameplay, man, the gameplay! When will you people learn that the ability to wave a stick around offers endless gameplay possibilities?!? You can pretend it's a sword or a bat or a racket or a longer stick or some bat/sword hybrid. A bword, if you will. The Wiimote responds to your every movement, duh. It then translates that movement into a general "the Wiimote is moving" signal which then triggers one of three generic sword-swinging animations. How can you not see the potential?
Seriously, though: there may be a shortage of horsepower for the Wii, but thankfully the world will never run out of people to say "Man that game would be soooo awesome using the Wiimote".
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Sword-chucks! [nuklearpower.com]
Just saying...
Who Cares (Score:4, Insightful)
So no uncanny valley for Wii? (Score:5, Funny)
Nintendo must be sweating bullets.
different gaming platform, different games (Score:3, Insightful)
Shaders (Score:3, Informative)
The UE3 engine is heavily built around pixel shaders. Everything it does is based around shader support.
The Wii is not capable of doing pixel shaders. The hardware can't do it. Period.
Take away the shader support, and UE3 becomes no different than UE2. Note that UE2 does, in fact, support the Wii platform.
This is a hardware issue, it has pretty much nothing to do with Epic.
Epic in Japan... a lack of professionalism (Score:3, Interesting)
After that, Jay Wilbur decided to add a few words. Or rather, to be American. Now, don't get me wrong, I generally approve of being direct and selling your selling points, rather than mentioning that, yeah, our product isn't going to butter your toast every morning... BUT... when dealing with a Japanese audience, upfront honesty is the best way to go. Sweeney also had the "I'm roughly Japanese-sized" thing going for him. When rotund Wilbur stepped up to the plate, he set a bad tone by telling the rather humble but proud crowd of Japanese developers that "You need this engine". I heard one guy whisper to his friend, "Where does this guy think games started? Huh? *WE* __NEED__ them? Pfft." (in Japanese, so that's paraphrasing, of course)
What started as a good, solid discussion into the benefits of buying A game engine, ANY game engine, was quickly derailed into a product pitch for THEIR game engine. The thing is, Japanese companies, despite what modernizations have happened here, are still rather loyal when it comes to their big huge purchases. They'd rather go with someone they know, and I'm fairly certain that if Wilbur had just said nothing, or said much less than he did, and used much less arrogance and self-pimping in his speech, that the Japanese crowd would have gone home thinking, "You know, there's a company that's honest about their product, and that's willing to come all the way out here to persuade us that game engines are worth buying. We should seriously think about buying theirs". Instead, a lot of people left the room shaking their heads, muttering things about "Typical Americans. All talk. All about them. (etc)"
The thing about dealing with a foreign country is to go in and appreciate their background, their culture, and their style of work. To go in and trample all over their acheivements in an attempt to hock your wares just doesn't cut it.
OOPS (Score:3, Funny)
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2) The Unreal Engine is designed for hardware with shaders. The Wii hardware doesn't have full-fledged shaders like the PS3 and 360 have. Even if Unreal 3 would run on the Wii, there would be no point. Without shaders, you couldn't do any of the fancy lighting and texture effects that Unreal 3 is designed to enable.
Ultimately, it's just Epic admitting that the Wii isn't designed for the kind of games that will use Unreal 3. And that's OK, Nintendo h
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
2) The Wii doesn't have vertex shaders -- unless you write your own. Are you going to call CPU skinning a 'hardware vertex shader' ??
So it's not ridiculous to claim the Wii has no shaders. I agree with the gp "the Wii doesn't have full-fledged shaders" At best, it has 1/2 a pixel shader.
Or do we need to take this to the 'rvl.graphics' group?
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Re:No Wii? (Score:5, Insightful)
And really, is this a loss for Epic or Nintendo? If a killer game comes out using unreal 2 I think I'd still buy it.
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Huh? Nintendo came out said (and proved through actions) that the Wii was not about graphics, but gameplay. Why should it be a surprise that Epic took that to heart and decided not to invest in getting it's latest engine to run on underpowered hardware?
And really, is this a loss for Epic or Nintendo? If a killer game comes out using unreal 2 I think I'd still buy it.
I think you're missing the very obvious point: if Epic doesn't port the Unreal 3 engine to Wii, then that's Y games that won't be appearing on the Wii.
Here's how it works:
1). Publisher creates game for Xbox360 using Unreal 3 engine
2). Publisher realizes he can rework the control scheme, turn down the model polygon count and texture resolution, and recompile the code for the Wii engine at marginal extra development cost. The profit and revenue generated from hitting an extra market (of 10+ million consoles
Re:No Wii? (Score:4, Informative)
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But red steel as an example of good game play? Give me a break. I own the title, and the controls outright suck. The FPS controls on a minigame in monkey ball are more responsive than red steel. From what I hear, far cry is a massive improvement, and of course we can expect metroid to be better still... but the controls in red steel are, to use the vernacular, teh suck.
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Re:No Wii? (Score:5, Informative)
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People who have never actually tried the system, and are just talking out their ass, tend to assume the Wii has nothing but motion sensing, but it's not so.
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Personally, I hope they use the Unreal engine for a new Bushido Blade...
Re:No big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
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My point is simply that graphics are part of the whole package. Think back to some of the great games Nintendo put out on the N64. Would Mario 64 have been quite as immersive if it had looked like the blocky, pixelated games on the PSX? No! Mario 64 had the whole package,
Re:No big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, I can't continue with that. But seriously, just because it doesn't have the "leading edge in graphics" doesn't mean it has no graphics, or is going to get along with stick figures. Its more powerful than the Gamecube, and the cube had some pretty nice looking games last generation, at least on par with the Xbox and PS2, and in many cases (personal opinion, of course), exceeded them. And yes, yes, the Wii is all about gameplay and not graphics, BUT getting to at least the bar set by the last gen is hard enough - the bar is only going to get higher. Line up a late gen PS1 game next to a late gen PS2 game (or N64 to GameCube). Its a pretty big difference. How do you get to that bar and possibly surpass it while still having lots of resources to focus on the gameplay? By having someone else do the work of course! That's where engines like Unreal come in - they do all the fancy shading techniques so you don't have to. You have extra costs in the terms of artists, but in your average shop the realities of the situation are artists and art techs are cheap, graphics engineers are not. Its a shame they're losing Unreal, which is a great engine. I don't know if Unreal2 is on the Wii, but it seems likely given the similarities to the GameCube.
To sum up: gameplay for graphics was a trade-off made by Nintendo to reduce costs for the system. Its not quite the same for gamedevs - you don't magically get a game thats more fun by firing all your graphics engineers and hiring 2x more designers. You still make models, textures, build sets, etc. Its at least as much work as it was last-gen. BUT those tasks can be done in parallel, and having the code partly done for you gets them completed faster.
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