Game Informer Sheds Some More Light on the Wii – Or Does It?

While skulking around some gaming forums, I stumbled upon DUDE2000’s post at the Nintendo N-Sider forum. It says that an article in the upcoming issue of Game Informer Magazine talks about the Nintendo Wii‘s development environment, focusing on what makes the system appealing to developers and what puts them off. It also contains enough “newly-revealed secrets” of the Wii to make you wish life has a fast-forward button. The days are just not moving fast enough.

I’m no developer, so naturally, I didn’t spend much time reading on the pros and cons of the Wii’s development landscape, though if anyone asks about one advantage of the Wii, I could say that the Wii’s chipsets are inexpensive but extremely powerful. On the not-so-positive side of the development coin, the Wii posts a challenge to programmers because of the Wii-mote. The development cycle may equal that of the PS3 and even that of the Xbox 360 because of the time needed to effectively program the Wii-mote. You can read more about that if you wish but I think you’d be more interested about the juicier details of the article. I’d have to remind you that these did not come from Nintendo, so it’s best not to take it as gospel truth. (I WISH many of these would be true though!)

• Wii will include a built-in decent resolution camera that can be used to add your face to character models and add innovation to games. These snapshots can be tweaked as well. It is still being decided whether to allow camera to record and stream video. Mention made to have this feature be a strong feature in online play.
• A wireless headset will be made available at launch.
• SD cards will range from 2GB to 7GB and will be priced “within reason”.
• A new router technology is still in development and not yet available to developers. In the final product Nintendo hopes to be able to make every Wii a sort of “WiFi hotspot” with each user connecting to that user and so on. They also want to be able to allow different users to share things and are thinking about setting up a pseudoP2P network through Connect24, where users can share content and “other things”. This means that even if you have a dialup connection or no internet, you can still connect to Wii Connect24.
• The Wii will indeed have a PPU included in final hardware. It will have only 32MB though, which will still take a considerable amount of pressure off of other chips.
• A still-in-development simple dev tool will be made available to users through the Connect24 network. It will allow users to create a simple game in 2D or simple 3D and share it with the world. This will hopefully be available on the network by launch.
• The last big secret is the “graphics solution”. It revolves around a whole lot of nonvolatile RAM (opting out of HDD support, RAM is much faster than a HDD). And a development interface that centers on a AI-controlled command-line interface. This additional tech only included in final dev kits, while most developers donÂ’t have access to final dev kits.

Via Nintendo N-Sider

While skulking around some gaming forums, I stumbled upon DUDE2000’s post at the Nintendo N-Sider forum. It says that an article in the upcoming issue of Game Informer Magazine talks about the Nintendo Wii‘s development environment, focusing on what makes the system appealing to developers and what puts them off. It also contains enough “newly-revealed secrets” of the Wii to make you wish life has a fast-forward button. The days are just not moving fast enough.

I’m no developer, so naturally, I didn’t spend much time reading on the pros and cons of the Wii’s development landscape, though if anyone asks about one advantage of the Wii, I could say that the Wii’s chipsets are inexpensive but extremely powerful. On the not-so-positive side of the development coin, the Wii posts a challenge to programmers because of the Wii-mote. The development cycle may equal that of the PS3 and even that of the Xbox 360 because of the time needed to effectively program the Wii-mote. You can read more about that if you wish but I think you’d be more interested about the juicier details of the article. I’d have to remind you that these did not come from Nintendo, so it’s best not to take it as gospel truth. (I WISH many of these would be true though!)

• Wii will include a built-in decent resolution camera that can be used to add your face to character models and add innovation to games. These snapshots can be tweaked as well. It is still being decided whether to allow camera to record and stream video. Mention made to have this feature be a strong feature in online play.
• A wireless headset will be made available at launch.
• SD cards will range from 2GB to 7GB and will be priced “within reason”.
• A new router technology is still in development and not yet available to developers. In the final product Nintendo hopes to be able to make every Wii a sort of “WiFi hotspot” with each user connecting to that user and so on. They also want to be able to allow different users to share things and are thinking about setting up a pseudoP2P network through Connect24, where users can share content and “other things”. This means that even if you have a dialup connection or no internet, you can still connect to Wii Connect24.
• The Wii will indeed have a PPU included in final hardware. It will have only 32MB though, which will still take a considerable amount of pressure off of other chips.
• A still-in-development simple dev tool will be made available to users through the Connect24 network. It will allow users to create a simple game in 2D or simple 3D and share it with the world. This will hopefully be available on the network by launch.
• The last big secret is the “graphics solution”. It revolves around a whole lot of nonvolatile RAM (opting out of HDD support, RAM is much faster than a HDD). And a development interface that centers on a AI-controlled command-line interface. This additional tech only included in final dev kits, while most developers donÂ’t have access to final dev kits.

Via Nintendo N-Sider