And a new hub for Nintendo developers opens.
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/news/41325/nx-development-kits-being-distributed
Although Nintendo will not be talking about the NX platform until next year, sources indicate devkits are in the wild.
A report in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required; reproduction) has announced that the dev kits for the NX have been distributed to key partners. The article claims that the NX devices would use "industry-leading chips" for their processors, and that a mobile (handheld) and a TV console are both in development.
At the same time, Nintendo announced a new development support website at developer.nintendo.com to support existing and new platforms.
Oh and this is more or less a confirmation about the two platforms, one OS thing, isn't it?
Soren, Nintendo provided documentation and good support to third parties with Wii U.
Nintendo had provided an integration of their development tools into Visual Studio - the de facto standard for development - but it didn't work, not even close. So time was spent trying to get this fixed up, while reporting the issue to the platform holder. Eventually we received a solution from Nintendo via another third-party company who had also been working on this issue for a while.
Another curious thing to note at this point was that over the course of six months we received multiple different development kits in a variety of colours, none of which revealed why they were different from the previous one. We knew that there were some hardware bugs that were being fixed, but the release notes rarely stated what had changed - we just had to take the new ones and get them working with our code again, consuming valuable development time.
Now that the game was up and running on the console we could start developing features that would use the new controllers and make our game stand out on the platform. But soon after starting this we ran into some issues that the (minimal) documentation didn't cover, so we asked questions of our local Nintendo support team. They didn't know the answers so they said they would check with the developers in Japan and we waited for a reply. And we waited. And we waited.
After about a week of chasing we heard back from the support team that they had received an answer from Japan, which they emailed to us. The reply was in the form of a few sentences of very broken English that didn't really answer the question that we had asked in the first place. So we went back to them asking for clarification, which took another week or so to come back. After the second delay we asked why it was taking to long for replies to come back from Japan, were they very busy? The local support team said no, it's just that any questions had to be sent off for translation into Japanese, then sent to the developers, who replied and then the replies were translated back to English and sent back to us. With timezone differences and the delay in translating, this usually took a week !
The system is not coming out in 2016...
The system is not coming out in 2016...
I still cannot see it coming out in 2016. There is only a single analyst in the article who is "increasingly of the idea" that it "might launch" in 2016. The importance of the article is that dev kits are out already, and there is much more weight behind the idea of a hybrid console/handheld according to WSJ sources. Also...industry leading chips? That's pretty cool.
