Messages

1

Nintendo Gaming / Re: Can the Wii U Multitask? (in theory)

« on: January 20, 2014, 07:43:57 AM »

At an OS level it would not be possible at this stage, there is too many applications and games that would have to updated to adapt to the new functionality and they would have to because it changes the entire flow of the system.

No current software can have its resources siphoned away without complications.

That said there is no reason why Netflix couldn't just add a browser to their app, at least then the functionality can exist in a similar fashion.

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Nintendo Gaming / Re: Is it me or is the Wii U boring as hell (Console Design)

« on: January 12, 2014, 07:29:55 PM »

It could be worse, it could look like the original Xbox...

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TalkBack / Re: 3DS System Update Brings Save Data Backup and New Camera Features

« on: June 19, 2013, 12:23:17 AM »

Trust me you don't want this update yet. It doesn't crash occasionally, its practically guaranteed to crash within a few minutes of being opened, ends up force resetting the entire system.


I can totally see why they would not want to release is in NA just yet.

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Nintendo Gaming / Re: Just a reminder, WiiConnect24 shuts down June 27th.

« on: June 18, 2013, 01:08:57 AM »

I can't say that I used all these functions all that much but it will be a sad day to see them all switched off. Might fire them up just a few times over the next few days to give them all one last round and a farewell for the awesomeness they were.

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Nintendo Gaming / Re: Is the Wii U underpowered?

« on: June 14, 2013, 01:30:09 AM »

Sony originally locked the full speed of the PSP CPU at 266 MHz before unlocking the full 333 MHz like two years after release with a firmware update. I don't think Sony ever officially explained why they locked the CPU, but most speculated it was due to battery life concerns.

There was also a rumor (I don't remember if it was confirmed) that Nintendo did something similar with 3DS and unlocked a second CPU for 25% more processing. I'd imagine battery life being a concern here as well. I believe this rumor also mentioned something about Nintendo figuring out a way of handling stereoscopic 3D which would reduce the strain on the CPU for more processing power (of course, not using 3D entirely would help out even more).

It was most likely both where due to battery life as any titles that used these functions had limitations. On PSP Wifi/Networking had to be switched off. On 3DS the StreetPass/SpotPass Functionality is lost. Just trade offs for better speed over functionality. 

If this additional core thing is true, the battery life explanation doesn't really work here. I guess the dev kit reasoning works. Even so, I doubt it would open up Wii U to Super Saiyan levels of power like people are making it seem.

I don't even think it exists simply because we haven't found anything additional on the wafers. Almost everything is accounted for internally thank to those great die shots from Chipworks, unless there is a hidden processor on the GPU (other than Starlet) then it doesn't exist. And if there is something on the GPU it must be very small and have little impact on performance.[/font]

By the way, the GamePad is a gimmick. That's not inherently bad. People just often read it that way. I love the GamePad though only games that can use it well should use it at all. Just because something is there doesn't mean it has to be forced into every game.

Gimmick is an over used word that tries to make the idea seam cheaper or less important than it really is. Like you said, it's an awesome feature but it's not a requirement.

The PS1 was technically weaker, but the N64 had the retarded cartridges that developers had to work with and made certain things difficult. Hell, certain games are still hard to emulate with today's technology because of how weird it was made.

Just talk to a developer on the N64 about the "joys" of microcoding the graphics side of N64. Step back and watch them fume with rage.

That's not true, 1/2 the WII U memory is for OS, not sure about it's cores but I'm guessing one core Is reserved for the OS/gamepad.

As far as we know the Gamepad video is encoded with dedicated hardware on the GPU, a task such as that is too slow on a CPU. That said we could still lose a core to the OS, I haven't really spoken to many developers in detail on how the Wii U works and I'm sure they wouldn't' tell me anyway.

6

Nintendo Gaming / Re: Is the Wii U underpowered?

« on: June 13, 2013, 01:10:19 AM »

I am not the Final Fantasy loyalist that I used to be in the past. The series has lost its teeth and I do not see future games being profitable enough for SE to avoid major financial difficulties.

Personally I think we will be seeing a few high profile failures before some more sane games start to come along. Higher end hardware doesn't require a higher budget, it's just the choice most publishers/developers go down to stay competitive.


If the competition is scared enough by the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars then we shall see a much more reasonable set of titles coming out for all platforms. Publishers are still out trying to find the limits of what they can grab at.[size=78%] [/size]

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Nintendo Gaming / Re: Is the Wii U underpowered?

« on: June 13, 2013, 01:00:46 AM »

The next generation is expensive its a simple as that. Most developers can't survive now with a game selling less than a million copies simply because they lose so much cash on them. Budgets are set to double at least for these high end machines, sales expectations are going to be higher than ever.

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Nintendo Gaming / Re: Is the Wii U underpowered?

« on: June 13, 2013, 12:22:06 AM »

Yes it is behind but it's not staggeringly behind like we had last generation. It will never match what the others can do but it at least the technology decisions that have been made allow for the maximum results from a chepa machine.

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Nintendo Gaming / Re: Is the Wii U underpowered?

« on: June 13, 2013, 12:05:34 AM »

Funny how the only people talking about "secret cores" in this thread are the ones who believe the Wii U is "immensely" underpowered to the PS4/Xbone. Even though the data coming out is starting to show us that gap is nowhere near as huge as those people think it is.

Funnily enough that's just it Wii U isn't that far behind especially compared with the gap between Wii and the X360/Ps3. CPU wise it's only roughly 5-7 times slower than X1/Ps4 and GPU wise it's somewhere between (based of estimates here) 2.5/5 times slower than X1 and 3.5/7 times slower than PS4. Mind you running most of these games at 720p 30fps is going to close the apparent gap a lot more than you would expect.

Compared with the Wii to X360/Ps3 where the CPU gap was about 20-30 times as much and 20-25 times on the GPU side combined with diminishing returns in visuals and we are still set to see some great stuff form the platform. Just look at Monolith's new "X" title to see what I mean.

10

Nintendo Gaming / Re: Is the Wii U underpowered?

« on: June 12, 2013, 11:49:40 PM »

The problem with Power PC is less of being hard to develop for and more the other three platforms are so similar (X86 across the board) is it possible for developers to take time out for a Wii U version.

PowerPC isn't a difficult architecture to work with (one of the easiest really), that said there are some minor issues that have to be overcome when porting from x86 to the PPC ISA. For the most part however developers don't really see the underlying hardware anymore, most code is so abstracted from the chips so much that it doesn't even factor in to how the code is developed.

I know of some developers on PS4 have ported their Cell SPE code directly onto the x86 CPU without any major issues but thats because it was C based code to begin with.

Wii U's issue is that if a game is being built for the bigger machines, scaling back the games to the lower platforms in terms of CPU grunt and memory (which is a much bigger issue) is a costly and time involving effort. Most developers would rather focus on a single project with set high targets rather than having a limbo bar to crawl under while trying to keep the other guys happy.

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General Gaming / Re: Ouya

« on: March 06, 2013, 12:21:48 AM »

Seriously? Adding controller support to an Android app or game would take minutes. Literally minutes. Maybe an hour to account for menus. Hardly a waste of time or "resources." You're not re-inventing the wheel, you're literally looking at the controller's API if you've never used it before, and adding a few lines of code here and there.

It's only about 20 lines of code required to change the variables to come from the touch screen to them being received from the controller input.


Just switch the Extension from the touch screen to the Ouya input one then add about 3 lines of code per button/direction to map into the code and then you are done.


It takes about 20-30 minutes to do and that includes the time to stuff up and fix the syntax of the code.

I know a few people working on Ouya titles right now and it was literally a few hours until they had their entire projects up and running on the platform exactly where they left off on other platforms.

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Nintendo Gaming / Re: "Wii U Can Handle Crysis 3 (And Almost Did), Says Crytek Head" -Kotaku

« on: March 06, 2013, 12:12:44 AM »

I think  Crisys is an overrated series made famous due to the amazing graphics of the first one six years ago

Personally I loved the first one, it at least gave a great sense of freedom in the play style. It wasn't the most balance game ever but it had some real charm to it. Then they made No 2 and 3 and it kind of just died.

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Nintendo Gaming / Re: Call of Duty: Black Ops II

« on: February 03, 2013, 12:10:38 AM »

Just glad that Activision are supporting the Wii version post launch.

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General Gaming / Re: Xbox720 - that's 2 full revolutions - not till 2014? ~Rumor/Speculation Thread~

« on: February 02, 2013, 08:37:53 PM »

What i am really afraid of when both MS and Sony present their new consoles with subsidized programs (like get your xbox for 30 bucks, and then pay us 30$ every month for two years), and Nintendo won't do it.

Knowing MS they would only do that in the US then ignore the rest of the world market, they usually ignore anything on that nature that isn't on their home territory.


I don't see Sony doing the subsidy program either, just isn't how they play the game, if they do it would be purely in response to how well it works for MS. Just because such a program could exist doesn't mean it will work most people aren't stupid and won't fall for the cheap setup costs and ignore the total overall price.

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General Gaming / Re: PS4 (Orbis) Rumor/Speculation

« on: February 02, 2013, 08:16:29 PM »

i believe the wii u architecture is designed to be able to use a part of the gpu to supplement the cpu(i'll dig up the source)
but how close can we expect to be to these alleged specs. could the wii u become the ps2 this gen

and sony, this is not how you end a 6 year loss here

8GB for Orbis could totally just be the dev kit numbers, Sony does like to double even quadruple the RAM in those things. The PS2 dev kit had 128MB RAM but only ended up with 32MB. 8GB would be cool but I feel like Sony aren't willing to become a money sponge again this generation.


As for the Wii U using the GPU for CPU tasks, it can be done but it's nothing really worth while looking into on a machine the power of Wii U. Best you can manage to get out of such a setup is maybe some assisted physics work or data de-compression work but even then it wouldn't be a huge leap over what it can do today plus there is the fact that you do end up taking a lot of power away from the graphics side of the system to achieve this. GPGPU stuff is starting to show some really col things but even then only the most modern GPU's are really getting the major benefits out of it.

16

TalkBack / Re: Madden 25 Not Coming to Wii U?

« on: February 02, 2013, 07:44:26 PM »

Yeah until Wii U can sell 4 million copies of this EA will just act like it doesn't exist. I sucks but that's just the way they roll.


I'm sure they will still make it, it just won't be advertised.

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Nintendo Gaming / Re: Wii U in Review (News & Rumor Consolidation)

« on: February 02, 2013, 06:23:50 AM »

True I suppose it is scalable, I should look into what advantages it would have over UE3 on even the mobile platforms. But these days it's getting harder to know where Epic's reason ends and the sales pitch begins.


They are eager to sell the next version of their engine regardless of the eventual impact on the industry. Epic has said the next generations shouldn't be too bad for developers in that budgets will only double but that's already far to high for what the industry is willing/able to absorb.


I want to believe them but do question their motives, I'm not going to create a false dichotomy here and make them all good or evil but some clarity would be nice.


Nintendo probably can't do the port directly but they could at the very least make an investment in Epic to produce it. A better way to get Epic to do that would be that have more 3rd party developers show an interest in the platform, that could force their hand if necessary.

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Nintendo Gaming / Re: Wii U in Review (News & Rumor Consolidation)

« on: February 02, 2013, 03:56:57 AM »

Thats exactly my point, UE4 does a light tracing system where all the rooms lighting is calculated based on the surfaces of materials and how it cascades around the room. The technology is amazing but in action it doesn't look much better than what we have today, unless the game has a rapid day night system it won't be very noticeable in action and even the then the effect can be pre-baked in to the visuals very easily for use on current consoles.


Today CD Projekt Red showed off their new graphics engine for their future games (http://i.imgur.com/WnZXu3V.jpg) personally I'm not seeing the huge jumps any more. I have seen some great pre-rendered stuff or absolutely over the top tech demos that look impressive but they are totally pointless if developers can't afford to build entire games to those levels of detail.

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Nintendo Gaming / Re: An Upgraded Wii Mode for the Wii U

« on: February 02, 2013, 03:47:28 AM »

Purely from a technology point of view I would doubt it could be done. Wii games unfortunately assume almost total control of the hardware with little OS between the software, this causes the issue that even the slightest changes to the hardware timing could cause issues with software playback and that unfortunately necessary to make the Gamepad playback a possibility.


Current Virtual console is much easier in to add these features because the entire system is being emulated in software thus allowing additional features to be slipped into the pipeline. Because Gamecube/Wii would be running in native hardware it would require a virtualisation technology to handle the switch between the base software and the OS and then things can become very messy to run. Its a shame because it would be awesome but it's just not a viable option.

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Nintendo Gaming / Re: Wii U in Review (News & Rumor Consolidation)

« on: February 02, 2013, 03:34:29 AM »

But.. but... Wii U is too weak.. for UE4!

I know you are joking, but not true. The president of Epic Games said last June that Wii U was powerful enough to run Unreal Engine 4, but they themselves would not do it (so third parties would have to do it themselves if they want to release a game running Unreal Engine 4 on Wii U).

Just because it is possible doesn't mean it is a good idea, the technology that UE4 is packing is a very heavy handed bit of kit. It could be run and have all the effects required but the performance would be a huge drag on the system.


It's probably better to stick to the current more hardened technology than jump to the latest and greatest. Any way personally the jump to UE4 isn't that great from everything I've seen, the technology is great but the overall effect is a little underwhelming.

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Podcast Discussion / Re: Episode 323: Bad Moon on the Rise

« on: February 02, 2013, 03:26:54 AM »

While you guys are complaining about the size of the Wii U OS do realise that most of that 5GB size is merely reserved space for future possible updates to expand into. The sluggishness of the system however is probably more down to a rushed release for the software, at least it works at the moment.