Topic: Unreal Engine 4 Can Run on Wii U

[NWR_insanolord]

However, Epic has no intention to bring the engine to the platform.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/news/31117

The Wii U is capable of running Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4, according to company Vice President Marc Rein. He goes on to say, though, that Epic has no plans to port the engine themselves, but that developers would be able to port games using that engine to the system.

He clarifies this statement by saying that "We'll run on mobile phones and on a wide variety of things, so if a customer decides they want to port an Unreal Engine 4 game to Wii U, they could," but emphasizes that "Unreal Engine 3 is a really good fit for that platform."

Epic's senior PR manager Dana Cowley also points out that "beyond the PC, we haven't confirmed any other platforms for Unreal Engine 4."

[the asylum]

disappointing but completely unsurprising

[ThePerm]

not so dissapointing.

1. it confirms it will run on Wii U, so its not impossible
2. it confirms a developer who wants it to run on wii u can port it. Epic doesn't always port engines themselves, but if gearbox wanted to they could. Gearbox is making Aliens for Wii U. Epic may just be too busy to do it, and at the same time Unreal 3 looks plenty good.
3. Maybe Nintendo will port it themselves if they need to.
4. You won't see a huge difference
5. Havok engine looks great on ps3

[Enner]

I don't quite understand why Unreal Engine 3 would be (implicitly) a better fit than the Unreal Engine 4 that is scale able to run on mobile phones. I guess it's a lot of technical things such as readily available tools and middle-ware?

[ThePerm]

Unreal 3 runs on my computer.....at 10 frames per second. Epic doesn't believe in video settings. They are like a restaurant that won't let you make subtractions/additions to your meal.

[Chozo Ghost]

He clarifies this statement by saying that "We'll run on mobile phones and on a wide variety of things, so if a customer decides they want to port an Unreal Engine 4 game to Wii U, they could," but emphasizes that "Unreal Engine 3 is a really good fit for that platform."

I found this paragraph to be a bit depressing. He does confirm that UE4 can be made to work on the Wii U, but he also says it can run on mobile phones and a wide variety of other things. If UE4 can be shoehorned into mobile phones then that means it doesn't really need to be super powerful hardware, which doesn't do much to alleviate the concerns that the Wii U hardware will be underpowered.

It also doesn't help that he emphasizes that UE3 is a better fit for the Wii U. I take that to mean that even though a stripped down UE4 can be shoehorned into the underpowered Wii U, one would be better off going with the old last gen UE3 instead.

Let's face it, if UE4 can be made to run on mobile phones then what can't it run on? It should also be possible to get it to run on the PS360 as well. I guess UE4 compatibility really isn't that significant of a feat.

[ShyGuy]

CATERKILLER

[Caterkiller]

You rang?

I'm not worried about the UE3 being a better fit comment. That's just Epic trying to sell both engines to Nintendo only developers.

And we will get nice UE4 games, you better believe it.

I know the impact of this "announcement" has been lessened in the form of a side comment basically, but UE4 was being designed while Epic was having talks with Nintendo. As they were prepping potential buyers earlier this year, they let all the companies know it was being worked on for the Wii U. Maybe a few bells and whistles of the highest calibre won't be there, but I'm certain they will look comparable to PS420.

If this engine is the most popular this gen, it's a good sign for Nimtendos 3rd party support.

Those who believed me say "I" and those who didn't say "nay."

[MysticGohan]

I

[Ymeegod]

And the WII could have ran UE3 yet how many games did you see?  So don't get to excited until someone finally announces that they are in fact bringing UE4 titles to WII U.

[BlueStorm]

UE4 is pretty far beyond what you are going to be able to buy this November for a couple of hundred dollars.  Think 8-32GB of RAM.  Core i7 CPUs.  Graphics cards themselves that exceed the cost of the WiiU console.

Nintendo will be at least 5 years behind this curve when they launch. 
A very stripped down ue4 version may be possible, but it seems like using a highly modified UE3 would make more sense.

[ShyGuy]

Objection, speculation.

[Caterkiller]

And the WII could have ran UE3 yet how many games did you see?  So don't get to excited until someone finally announces that they are in fact bringing UE4 titles to WII U.

No the quotes from Epic about how that would have worked would send a developer over amazing hurdles. The Wii just was not capable of running the UE3 period. The planets would have needed to align for that to run on Wii. Those comments from years ago are nothing like this one.

Unlike the UE3 this thing was being developed with the Wii U in mind.

[Chozo Ghost]

It sounds more like the Wii U will be able to run UE3.5 as opposed to a full on 4.0.

[TJ Spyke]

It doesn't sound like that at all to me. He just says Unreal Engine 4 will run on Wii U, but that Epic is basically too lazy to do it themselves.

[Chozo Ghost]

I know he confirmed UE4 can run on it. I'm just saying that if a lot of cuts have to be made in order to make it work then in the end it might be more de facto UE3.5 than 4.0.

Keep in mind he also said UE4 can run on mobile phones. Do you really think the version that is able to run on a mobile phone would be anywhere close to the UE4 running on high end PCs?

[Ymeegod]

Actually Caterkiller you're wrong.  Mark Rein stated back in 2007 developers could have squeezed the UE3 into the WII as long as the game didn't use shader model 3.0.  There's a couple of UE3 games that didn't require DX9.0c.

In fact Epic's own UT3 game only required OGL of 1.4(DX9.0) which was compable to the WII :0.

And there was a few cleaver lads that patched Bioshock (an DX9.0c game) to run on OGL 1.4.

[Ian Sane]

I would prefer to hear that they're putting UE4 on the Wii U, not that someone else could, if they want to.  I don't have a lot of faith in situations where one is relying on someone else to take the initiative.  It sounds a lot like Nintendo's model for online gaming on the Cube.  Anyone COULD have done that but hardly anyone did.  Even if someone ports UE4 to the Wii U, would it not be for their own use?  If I went to the trouble to port it, why would I share it?  Might as well keep it to myself to provide a competitive advantage.  Unless Epic requires that anyone that ports it needs to share it.

[Adrock]

This is good news. Rein sounds far more optimistic about scaling UE4 for Wii U than he did regarding anything to with the Wii. Still, I can't see UE3 going away just because UE4 exists. It still pumps out nice looking games and that won't change. I wonder if Wii U can handle the Samaritan demo Epic showed off last year which ran on UE3. That had tons of gee-whiz effects I would probably never notice while playing and actual game.

[Caterkiller]

Actually Caterkiller you're wrong.  Mark Rein stated back in 2007 developers could have squeezed the UE3 into the WII as long as the game didn't use shader model 3.0.  There's a couple of UE3 games that didn't require DX9.0c.

In fact Epic's own UT3 game only required OGL of 1.4(DX9.0) which was compable to the WII :0.

And there was a few cleaver lads that patched Bioshock (an DX9.0c game) to run on OGL 1.4.

My point was that what ever companies did do it, it was so watered down it still looked like any other Gamecube game. It was way too difficult to do anything with the UE3 on the Wii.

The comment from this latest article is light years above the one below from way back.

Rein: It wasn't us, it was Ubisoft! [laughs] You know, actually, commercially, it's probably not worth it to be honest. And I don't mean that as anything against the Wii, but the Wii is an improved evolution of the GameCube - I mean it's hardware compatible with the GameCube! So if you're going to make a game for the Wii you're just going to use whatever tools you used on GameCube, and bring them forward and enhance them a little - that's what the Gamebryo guys are doing - and that's a fact; I just don't see a big market there to bring this big hulking memory intensive engine over to a much smaller system. I mean, I'm sure some of our licensees, just as a commercial exercise, will probably do it. I know one of our licensee who's giving it a shot; it's their own port, in the same way Ubisoft brought Unreal Engine 2 to the Wii - I mean Splinter Cell and Red Steel - Unreal Engine 2, and there's a few others... but it's just, we won't don't do it ourselves. Look, there's so many things we can do and are already doing, to improve our engine, on the platforms we're aiming it at, that going back and working on that [for Wii] just doesn't make sense. Unreal Engine 3 is a better engine today than it was a year ago when Gears of War shipped. So Unreal Tournament 3 for example pushes the PlayStation 3 harder than Gears of War did on Xbox 360. So the engine is getting optimised and we're improving it all the time; there's too much low hanging fruit that we already have on the engine side, and new improvements and things we can do to try and make an engine for the Wii - it wouldn't be smart business for us.

This one is even better. Until we see another comment like this, then we should worry.

"Ummmmm, well, this is kinda a high definition engine. Designed for a certain level of graphics card and certain amount of CPU. You know, I'm sure one of our licensees will squeeze it down into the Wii. The way Ubisoft squeezed Unreal Engine 2 into the PSP," he explained in a little bit more detail exactly why the Wii and Unreal Engine 3 won't become best buddies, "Unreal Engine 3 is designed for a high level shader architecture and the Wii doesn't have that. I mean, you know, it's just not what we've been aiming for, so it's not something we're looking to do or support.'
(laughs) I can’t say, I’m under NDA with Nintendo. But I can tell you that we’re not doing, internally any development right now on the Wii. The Wii I’m sure is going to be a fantastic machine and sell really well but it’s kind of below - it’s not Intel integrated graphics but it’s pretty far bellow the kind of min-bar of Unreal Engine 3. If you built a PC with that spec it wouldn’t really be capable of playing an Unreal Engine 3 games decently. They’re aiming at clearly at different audience that what we are. You know, Unreal Engine 3 can’t run on Xbox 1 or PS2 either - and that’s not to say that some of our licensees wont find a way to shoe-horn it into that platform, we certainly have some licensees that are doing some experiments in that area and it could very well happen. But that’s a really tough job. And one thing that has become public knowledge in the last little while is that Ubisoft’s game Red Steel is using Unreal Engine 2, so there will be Unreal Engine games on the Wii. There will be Unreal Engine games on the Wii and hopefully they’ll be successful and maybe we’ll make a little money from it, but Unreal Engine 3 - that’s a little below our target platform."

Epic not having a game themselves is of course disappointing. But those engines are middle ware for any developer who wants to use it. It's a completely different situation to Nintendo not using online with the Gamecube which would have influenced other developers to to use it as well. Fact is, if an UE4 game by any 3rd party gets made for PS420, there is a chance Wii U could get the game as well. That's the important thing.

[ThePerm]

the point is the big improvement with unreal 3 over unreal 2 was the shader capability. It would be better to just use unreal 2 for wii because taking out the shader capability of unreal 3 basically makes it unreal 2. Same here, Unreal 4 has a crazy dynamic lighting system that I don't even think current pc cards support. So, if you cant support the new lighting system its better to just use unreal 3.

you just can't get mad at Nintendo for releasing a console. They have to their 6 year console lifespan is up. Consoles have to be affordable. 600 dollars means nobody will buy it till the price goes down as in Sony's case.

[MagicCow64]

My read on the UE4 situation is that outside of digital gearhead culture, the most important leap about the new engine in the real-time editing capabilities that are supposed to streamline production. If you could do that while stripping down the dynamic lighting it seems like it would still be worth it to use UE4.

[Enner]

Same here, Unreal 4 has a crazy dynamic lighting system that I don't even think current pc cards support. So, if you cant support the new lighting system its better to just use unreal 3.

If you want to take Epic's word, the Elements demo with the armored guy in the palace with all the snowy mountains and the volcano ran on a single, current graphics card. Granted, the card could cost $400-600, but it seems Unreal 4 is in the now.

[Ian Sane]

Just because UE3 was a common standard this gen doesn't mean UE4 will be have the same impact in the upcoming gen.  Doesn't mean Nintendo all fine though.  What Nintendo needs is to be able to accomodate what the industry wants to do this gen.  Last gen the industry sure as hell didn't want to make motion control games with last gen graphics and that's why the third party support was crap.  Nintendo hoped to get exclusives from the Wii's uniqueness and it didn't work because the industry wanted to do multiplatform development.  Nintendo built on the Gamecube architecture to make the Wii easy to develop for but that didn't mean squat because who the hell was familar with the Gamecube (except Nintendo of course; I doubt THAT impacted their decision at all)?

What Nintendo really needs to do is correctly predict what third parties want to do and then allow for it.  They've been totally getting this wrong since the N64 days.  They'll never get decent third party support until they get this right.

If UE4 is the future then Nintendo needs to do whatever it takes to get it on the Wii U.  If it isn't they need to figure out what is the future and make sure they have it.

[Serbis]

While UE4's engine's trailer looks amazing on its own, it doesn't seem all that hard to pull off lighting effects now. I also think UE3's graphics really were the big leap this passing gen. They were the defining moment this gen and if Wii U can pull off souped up UE3 graphics and still run a game that uses UE4 it's already at an advantage than the precursor systems. I stand by what I have been saying before, everyone is hyping up Sony and Microsoft's next consoles as being huge behemoths that are gonna blow away the PS3, Xbox 360, and the Wii U and make them seem obsolete. However both MS and Sony are in massive debt and a new console from each that uses highly new tech is gonna cost some serious $$ again. The consoles are gonna be comparable and equal to the Wii U in graphics processors and power, if only a slightly bit more powerful (look at Ps2 compared to Xbox, and GC, both of whom came out a whole year later). It's gonna be like the GC, PS2, Xbox era all over again. All it is gonna come down to is who's online, communication, partying, casual, hardcore, etc. infrastructure is going to be the best. Lastly whoever the 3rd Party publishers cling/develop for the most is who'll get the most games this gen.