The deal is this. Right now, Wii developers are under utilizing the platform. The best games are coming out of Nintendo themselves. This is only because Nintendo gives a damn about how well their games are. Twilight Princess looks great but was designed for Gamecube. Wii is more powerful than Gamecube. Not by leaps like the competitive hardware, but only a little extra memory, processing speed, and disk space go a long way.
I keep using Mario galaxy as an example. Right now programmers and developers have an obsession; Shaders. Shaders are kind of a cross between texture mapping and lighting. The idea behind a shader is that when drawing polygons you fill that polygon with colors. In the old fashioned days we would just fill it with a texture map and then apply some sort of real time gouraud shading to it. This is fine and dandy, but to some extent theres some waste of power. With shaders you basically create a gradient. Linear, non linear. Doesnt matter. By doing this you can simulate surfaces like wood, water, whatever. Newer processors have the ability to dish out shaders like they were no problem.
http://www.tetrametrics.com/theperm/Renders/fish4.jpgtheres an example of me using shaders, those scales are generated by shaders, so there was actually no need to add a texture map to the character. Not to mention the foggish watery backround is also generated by shaders. Also, the tooths switch between yellow and white.
The Wii doesnt have built in Shaders, or what it does have is really limited and primitive. However, as the lead people in factor 5 will tell you. Anything that can be done on one system could probably be done on another, with same effect, if done in a different way.
The Wii has been compared to the xbox in power, however the Wii has something the xbox doesnt have and thats more ram. The gamecube was very much caught up in power compared to the original xbox. The gamecube could do more textures in a cycle then the xbox could, but the gamecube had crappy 1.5gb disks and less ram. So while it was capable of doing better than the xbox, it only did as well if not a little better because ram and storage limitations. The Wii beats the xbox in this category, so theoretically or more or less proven by Mario Galaxy(or what iv seen of it so far), if put to the task it can have great texturing.
Anyways back to shaders. Shaders do a lot of things, but really as i said above they are sort of a cross between lighting a texturing. If built in they provide a graphical boost. however, if you could produce the same effect with real time lighting and textures gthan you would get the same effect.
Also normal mapping. normal mapping is a hack. Its a fake simulation of real time crazy real lighting. However, if you can process real time lighting and self shadowing in real time than you don't need to normal map.
I think the Wii is capable of blowign us away, but I think PC developers think to conventionally. My brother is a pc gamer and he is trying to tell me that my system can't handle half life 2. I have a 2.3 ghz dual core computer, with a geforce 6100 with 2gb of ram. He thinks because the card is integrated into the motherboard it will be slower. which doesn't make sense to me. Without an agp or pci bridge in the way then my gpu talks directly to the cpu and the ram, thus it should actually be FASTER. He thinks too conventionally. I looked up the recommended specs, and i have a slightly better video card and a better processor. He just doesn't know how to optimize things. I'm not a hardware guy, i dont try to put hardware together(i just dont want to be the one resposible for breaking expensive stuff), but i do know how it works and what its capable of.
Topic: Unreal Engine 3 in Development for Wii (Read 6983 times)
