-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
Eurogamer Source: Nintendo's Wii U toolchain is "fighting us every step of the way"
- Thread starter Nirolak
- Start date
Fourth Storm
Member
Didn't Ideaman say that some devs had severely crippled their Wii U games before making certain optimizations? From how the "Anonymous Coward" post reads, it seems like he (she?) is telling the truth but perhaps sucks at writing Wii U code. Not that it's an easy task...
Yeah, I can see that. But people here are even taking the "accessing the hard drive on the Xbox360 was faster than the RAM on the WiiU" assessment seriously. And Not even I suck that much at writing code.
andthebeatgoeson
Junior Member
Seems like a loaded question. The answer to that lies in the answer to this: is there a cut off where 3rd parties will no longer support the U, only considering the competition? I get the impression that the source believes it. That makes me question the article and the source.
MadeInBeats
Banned
Interesting. If the OS is in the state it is, makes sense other software will need work too. Saying that, you'd think they'd be bending over backwards to get developer tools up to scratch.
Throws another cat amongst the 'dodgy ports' discussion loft house.
Throws another cat amongst the 'dodgy ports' discussion loft house.
This makes me chuckle.
Sho_Nuff82
Member
Was quote 2 posted before anandtech's teardown? If so, Damn.
Well, there is only one appropriate way to respond to that statement:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGwjp07oO8U&t=0m4s
The questions were written by the author of the story, not the source.
Barack Lesnar
Banned
This seriously sounds like another language. If he's not a dev he's a really, really good fake.
Barack Lesnar
Banned
Anoynmous devs were right about the weak CPU, and probably a bunch of other things.
If you take every comment posted here at face value, it means one thing (and to me one thing only): coding for Wii U is a whole lot different than coding for the other machines and it helps to have been coding on Wii before to get the full potential of the console.
Small developers might be better at adapting to this (or might be using unity) than the big studios because they are more flexible in their approach. Big studios will have their standard procedures in place to stay organized which makes it harder for them to adapt.
This is surely not the best news in itself but to me it seems that the early launch ports mostly not being that drastically behind their console counterparts points to that not being such a big problem in the long run. I guess the early sales of WiiU games will be the decisive factor...
Small developers might be better at adapting to this (or might be using unity) than the big studios because they are more flexible in their approach. Big studios will have their standard procedures in place to stay organized which makes it harder for them to adapt.
This is surely not the best news in itself but to me it seems that the early launch ports mostly not being that drastically behind their console counterparts points to that not being such a big problem in the long run. I guess the early sales of WiiU games will be the decisive factor...
He might not be John Carmack but he seems to know what he's talking about. I'd blame bad tools and unfamiliarity with the hardware as the reason for the worse than expected memory performance on the tests they were running. It will take time for them to optimize their code for the system.
Overall the reception from developers about the Wii U has been either been lukewarm or entirely negative. Well apart from a few indie devs who are used to working on weaker hardware platforms.
Maybe i'm just thinking about Nintendo and Sony then. Didnt really follow the 360 developments much.
There's nothing out of this world in what he's saying, when I was 18/19 I would've understood that when I was studying a related subject. Now I just kinda understand it
Developers aren't magical creatures that know everything and are always right.
MadeInBeats
Banned
Please. Have day off will you, Son, it's embarrassing now.
Considering the first 2 looked and played like hot garbage I'm not sure they can save anything outside of money by stopping game development.
It is my day off. Nothing embarrassing apart from your own denial with regards to the Wii U the hardware. You are leaning on false hopes.
I hope you're laughing because it's so dumb. There is no way (at all) that any main memory is faster than a chip's cache. Likewise, there is no way (at all) that accessing a hard drive is faster than accessing main memory.
Are we sure that Espresso does not have vector processors (SIMD)? I'm not sure if devs were expecting the addition of vector processors on the Wii U, but at any rate it's best to do such math on the GPU anyway (mostly graphics and physics operations). Now whether or not developers actually do that is another thing. They don't intentionally on the PS3 because the CELL is good at it and the GPU is weak. I don't really see this as being a big deal.
MadeInBeats
Banned
Yeah mate, thanks for your wise words, I'll just file'em in the bin - the bin I sometimes take a dump in when I'm feelin' exotic.
H_Prestige
Banned
Aren't 360 and Vita really easy to develop for? Seems like Nintendo doesn't have much of an excuse here.
edible_candle
Member
Yes, I also fully expect High Voltage to blow Nintendo and all other third party developers out of the water. What with their high budgets and amazing art direction that doesn't involve throwing as many shiny things on stuff as possible and all.
Yeah, the toolchain probably is shit. I've noticed some complaints digging. Most of it can be attributed to its weirdness, but some of it might be very real.
It's even more interesting once you realize that Trine 2 is the only multiplatform game available on Wii U that uses deferred shading - a technology commonly considered too bandwidth heavy for multiplatform development on last generation systems (PS3/ 360). And Wii U is supposedly gimped in the bandwidth department. Or is it?
That's interesting, considering one of the Frozenbyte dudes wrote on GAF that the Wii U version was, in fact, more advanced than the PS3 or 360 versions. A bit closer to the PC version. And Frozenbyte also went on record and stated that Goblin Menace probably wouldn't run well on PS3 and 360 without some downsizing, which he said was one of the reasons it's a Wii U at this point.
It's even more interesting once you realize that Trine 2 is the only multiplatform game available on Wii U that uses deferred shading - a technology commonly considered too bandwidth heavy for multiplatform development on last generation systems (PS3/ 360). And Wii U is supposedly gimped in the bandwidth department. Or is it?
BLACK AMERICAN PSYCHO
Junior Member
LOLOLLOLOLOLOL 10/10