MONEY MONEY MONEY

 

 

 build your own? MONEY

 

use a middle? LESS MONEY

Would you consider Shin 'en a super rich game developer?  Probably not, but they write all of their own engines.  Bare metal programming does cost at first to acquire talented programmers, but it pays dividends in quality and polish if used properly.  That's not to say there is something wrong with using the development environment tools to make certain processes faster, it certainly helps and can provide a higher standard of quality.

I think it's still not too late, let's hope this will happen after the price cut which will inevitably follow after the release of PS4 and XBOX One.

Don't hold your breath.

wasnt saying it did. I guess my question was whats the advantage of Wii U;s 1GB vs 360's 512mb for development? sub 720p 30 FPS vs native 720p 60 FPS? can the Wii U even achieve that.  take a game like black ops 2 we all know what happened. developers said "FULL HD" everyone was think 1080p Native though that wasnt what hemeant. anyway now that Wii U tools have matured do you think its possible for Wii U to run that game (if developed right) at 1080p 30 FPS? im just curious wondring from what we know Wii U has what can be achieved.

360 didn't have 512 strictly for games.

More RAM, more possible details and better AI. However, your other question I can't answer. Going by what Nintendo said, yes the Wii U is capable of 1080p at 30 FPS. But we obviously haven't seen that yet.

For BLOPS 2 its absolutely conceivable that it could have run at 1080p 60FPS, but the game was never developed that way for consoles, and was hastily ported to Wii U.  Even still it looked better on Wii U than the other consoles, but it could have been even better had they put their best talent behind it and marketed it as the first next gen COD.

Its not just that they werent optimized for eye level mode, but that eye level mode is less than an inch off the ground, there really isnt much practical you can do about the anisotropy at that point.

ainisotropic filtering does wonders at 6 feet, or even for crouching at say 3 feet... but an inch off the texture at that oblique angle? Thats a tough situation.

Agreed, the only way to change that would be to add geometry, blades of grass rather than flat textures, for everything other than basic ground cover the textures are already very well done for both perspectives.  Adding that geometry would obscure the characters, though, and popping it in only for the first person camera would be useless.

Your modern developer employee is no longer required to be highly skilled in C++ programming like they were back in the day, they are required to know how to use the tools and create content using those tools.  Its kind of like a using a web page creator versus knowing how to write compentently in html.  Yes, you can get good results using a web page building program, but you will never be able to optimize your web page as effectively as someone who knows how to do it all in html.  Someone made mention that games are being created in a line assembly fashion, and thats 100% true.  You may have 500+ people working on a game, but they are really just using tools to create content, they arent wiriting much code these days.  The skill of writing code is becoming less and less common in the game industry.  Lets face it, to be a very good C++ programmer your pretty much a math wizzard, and there are only so many people that will be good enough at it to effectively work on modern games at the code level, but when you have accessible tools the level of competence required goes down.  The fact is that society wont procude enough C++ guru's to accomodate 500+ member development teams, but the amount of people in the workforce who can learn and produce content using middleware is far greater.  I am sure there are lots of schools these days that dont even go into great detail on coding in C++, but are instead focusing on using the middleware tools effectively.   

While this is true for most cases, there are still engineers working on games that do plenty of bare metal programming to get more performance out of hardware than is feasible using just stock tools.  They can use the stock shaders and fragments available in an engine or dev environment, or they can write their own.  Most larger publishers seem to be simply all using the same stock shaders and color palettes for game design, though.

What was the point in Nintendo making it so hard for developers to code for then ?

It isn't which is the point I was making.  It's actually very easy to code for, but a little harder to completely optimize (considering its the platform with the most divergent architecture and the most custom logic, and actually incorporates bold new hardware direction) whereas you'll see more out of the other platforms earlier on but it will more than likely stagnate, because more RAM can only take you to a point where you have a beautifully detailed slideshow presentation, it doesn't actually help performance at all.  The GPU performance difference for what we know of the Wii U GPU logic and the PS4's advertised specification aren't spread enough to make a big difference performance wise, especially considering they can both technically do all of the same things, however Nintendo has added custom logic to make certain things more efficient (we can speculate about what it is, but I think this makes sense as is).

They dont. Nintendo simply just doesnt cater to incompetent port teams only capable of working with high level middlware.

Its like some kid who thinks hes a god tier programmer becauase he can make a game with rpg maker, and then saying c++ sucks and is weak when he cant do anything worthwhile.

Nintendo makes hardware first and foremost for THEIR PROGRAMMER, who are among the oldest and most experienced anywhere in the industry. The things other developers are getting hung up on is just common practice to them.

They chose price and performance over convenience in their design, which is why they have things like a sophisticated memory heiarchy, and left time slicing under dev control.

Thats why nintendo can make stuff that looks like this: (sorry about the res, its a miiverse capture)



With the wii u, while port team hacks cant even get their garbage looking ports running well.

Its also why older devs used to making their own engines arent having any trouble with wii u.

Considering that Pikmin 3 started its life as a Wii game (and many of the assets in the game are probably hold overs) this is fantastic.  I've seen people complaining about textures when all they are looking at is the ground cover (grass) texture when in Koppaian eye level mode (gamepad cam), which those textures weren't optimized for.  They were optimized for the overhead perspective, and adding ground cover geometry would only make it harder to manage your army of alien slaves.

Considering that most developers have let themselves become factory production lines I get the feeling they don't really WANT to learn architecture more complex than "let's just keep throwing a bunch of RAM at it!" AAA production has just become such a mess that even the SLIGHTEST deviation throws wrenches in their beloved plans. It's kind of sad

Quite true.  The beauty of the RAM limitations for the PS3 and 360 (it was limited even for 2006) was that it forced them to work harder to actually improve the visuals over time, and they have done a wonderful job with it over the years.  Of course devs are always going to want more RAM.  That will never change.  Whether they are willing to learn to develop for a particular platform in the end comes down to whether they believe that they can make money on that platform.  Wii U can do anything the other consoles can do for the most part, its just a matter of how much effort developers are going to put into extracting that performance.    The good thing is that its actually the PS4 that is the odd man out.  That's the platform where I think developers will get a little lazy with their memory management.  XB1 is architecturally more similar to Wii U, just with a larger main RAM pool, which in the end isn't going to be the limiting factor for any of the consoles.  Dev talk is swirling that XB1 performs more like Wii U as well.

Using anecdotal evidence from developers who have released games on the platforms, we have a system that is really easy to develop for, but a little more difficult to completely optimize.

Developers could be confusing GPU performance with improper use of the edram.  GPU performance cannot be maximized without proper use of the edram, without using it properly the GPU will not be able to run at its maximum potential.  Its up to the developer to make sure they are getting the most bang for their buck with the edram.  From what I can gather, this means that the frame buffers/Z buffer would stay in the edram saving tons of bandwidth.  However, this only leaves about 12-16MB for textures.  So the majority of textures would still need to come from the main memory pool. 

Right, and even though honestly disc streaming along with the main ram bandwidth is enough for most applications (textures aren't as bandwidth hungry as some would think) prioritizing commonly used textures to be housed in EDRAM would be effective, but it depends on the game being developed.

if nobody is using the eDRAM whats the point in having it.

They aren't using the EDRAM 'yet'.  Many of them simply hadn't figured out what they were doing with the system, and Nintendo's tools weren't very good (you could argue even Nintendo didn't really know what they were doing with the system yet) when the current crop of games was released.  Obviously there are a couple that use it lightly, like Shin'en's game and Trine 2.  Just goes to show you that the indie guys were able to get more acquainted with the system in a shorter period of time than big house publishers.  A testament to their engineering prowess.

Since we are the ones buying games, we kind of are an authority. Not alone, but if people group up, they can make a difference (cf. tripping removed in SSBWIIU). Many devs do care about people's opinion. Then intervene AAA publishers that force them to keep silence, and that's why we assume stuff like that.

I understand where you are coming from and I agree.  The problem is that when they've said pubilcly before that all of the next gen versions of games look "the same" but that isn't enough for a minority of people that feel that it needs to be "proved" they aren't going to give a damn.  

This is absolutely true.  A lot of people have wanted to just add up the bandwidth numbers and declare the Wii U as having phenomenal bandwidth, as if its just as good as the memory bandwidth on the PS4, and anyone with some common sense knows that 32MB of super high bandwidth can only do so much for the slow bandwidth of the main memory.  The question is where is the tipping point for hardware.  How powerful does a GPU need to be before its trully being limited by the memory.  With the Wii U, memory management is very important.  What can be done in the edram, and what absolutely needs to be stored there.  You would never want data in the edram that eats up valuable space when it really be stored in the main memory with no issue.  All this is true for the cache on the cpu as well.  So the even if the edram's bandwidth is 256GB/s, the actual memory performance when used corrected may only perform as well as a traditional memory setup that has 35-50 GB/s bandwidth. 

 

Like Shin'en said, everything matches up very well.  The GPU isnt memory bandwidth starved, but at the same time there isnt tons of extra memory bandwidth that does to waste because the GPU isnt powerful enough to process as much data as the memory can supply.  There is a reason that Sony didnt choose this memory setup for the PS4, and that was for ease of programming.  Its obvious that many developers are either not capable, or simply dont have the resources to take advantage of Wii U's unique architecture.  It is funny that even Sony aknowledges that from an outright performance standpoint, the edram with slower main memory can work very well, but its not as easy to program for, and thats why they chose to go with high bandwidth main memory.   

Keep in mind that when they develop their games they should know what assets are coming when, and prepare to manage the EDRAM accordingly.  That's why Shin 'en said that devs need to work to maximize performance, because the potential is there for a very high theoretical bandwidth, but it has to be managed, and devs can't be caught sleeping at the wheel.

We also know that developers aren't being limited to the bandwidth of the main memory pool, either.  Somehow they are getting good bandwidth but haven't really said how much or how they are getting it.

I'm willing for any developer to prove me wrong. Splinter cell blacklist is up 1st... Let's see. Haven't heard Ubi say anything about it yet with just about a month and some days to go.

You aren't an authority in game development, the developers don't have to "prove" anything.  They just make the games for the platforms that the brass tells them to make the games for.  Don't expect any developer of publisher to come out and qualify the ridiculous presumption that for some reason they aren't going to take advantage of better hardware by making a statement about it.  They've talked about the next gen engine they are using, for each individual platform.  The Wii U version of the engine will be more capable than the 360 version of the engine, in all cases. 

It just doesn't matter. I personally expect AC4, blacklist, watchdogs, batman AO, and COD to all run parity with 360 version this year on Wii U. Devs just aren't going to put the time in on Wii U. To try and make more of it. They feel like its a job well done to get Wii U running at parity with 360.

That may have been good and well until someone ported a game in two months that was closer to what the game looked like on the PC, without rewriting the engine to take advantage of the differences in CPU or GPU architecture.  The games will look much better than the 360 version.

Ha ha, guy, esram is way less dense than edram.

32Mb edram is going to have much, much higher bandwidth than 32Mb esram. The wii u's edram bandwidth is well into the triple digits.

You dont use sram for bandwidth, you use it for low latency.

Nice made up numbers for wii u though.

Not only that, but on die vs on MCM is very very different

Yup, it sure does use 32 Mb esram. I dont know whether its 4t or 6t, but regaurdless, as far as latency is concerned its gonna be pretty lickity split. Like blazing fast, running circles around ps4's gddr5. But... Not in bandwidth.

As for how edram gets more bandwidth than what should be superior sram of the same capacity:

Space=power. Denser = more space.

denser=more cells of a smaller capacity vs less cells of a greater capacity, more cells= more busses=higher bandwidth.

Its why ibm uses edram with each cell heavily bussed up to emulate the latency of 6tsram (the room for these would be taken up by all the transistors sram needs!), with the bandwidth of edram for power 7, IBM states it gets over twice the bandwidth with this edram as you can get with the same capacity of sram, while only having slightly worse latency and cycle time than 6t sram.

Sram has fantastic low latency because of the fact it doesnt need to refresh, its static. Gamecube and wii use it, as does wii u (3mb of various sram/psram embedded on the gpu) But bandwidth isnt a strong bullet point in light of (kind of) recent developments in edram technology. Nintendo wouldnt switch from exotic choices like 1
tsram and fcram, to seemingly ordinary edram for nothing. Theyve always demanded perfornance ram, if nothing else.

The biggest problem I see is that a pretty great bandwidth is limited to a pretty slow bandwidth when it needs to access that 1Gb main memory. You cant just add the two bandwidths together like the post i quoted was doing, when that edram (or esram a la xbone) is interfacing with main ram, its doing so at main rams speed.

Yup, it sure does use 32 Mb esram. I dont know whether its 4t or 6t, but regaurdless, as far as latency is concerned its gonna be pretty lickity split. Like blazing fast, running circles around ps4's gddr5. But... Not in bandwidth.

As for how edram gets more bandwidth than what should be superior sram of the same capacity:

Space=power. Denser = more space.

denser=more cells of a smaller capacity vs less cells of a greater capacity, more cells= more busses=higher bandwidth.

Its why ibm uses edram with each cell heavily bussed up to emulate the latency of 6tsram (the room for these would be taken up by all the transistors sram needs!), with the bandwidth of edram for power 7, IBM states it gets over twice the bandwidth with this edram as you can get with the same capacity of sram, while only having slightly worse latency and cycle time than 6t sram.

Sram has fantastic low latency because of the fact it doesnt need to refresh, its static. Gamecube and wii use it, as does wii u (3mb of various sram/psram embedded on the gpu) But bandwidth isnt a strong bullet point in light of (kind of) recent developments in edram technology. Nintendo wouldnt switch from exotic choices like 1
tsram and fcram, to seemingly ordinary edram for nothing. Theyve always demanded perfornance ram, if nothing else.

The biggest problem I see is that a pretty great bandwidth is limited to a pretty slow bandwidth when it needs to access that 1Gb main memory. You cant just add the two bandwidths together like the post i quoted was doing, when that edram (or esram a la xbone) is interfacing with main ram, its doing so at main rams speed.

That's where developing specifically to manage the smaller pool of EDRAM comes in.

A console with NO 3rd party games is probably the stupidest idea I have ever heard of. And this is probably the biggest overreaction I have ever seen to EA not putting games on the Wii U.

Technically the indie games WOULD be third party.  He's referring to not closing them out completely, but making them compete on the exact same footing as indie game developers.  I don't quite see how it would work, but a very interesting idea indeed for what its worth.

The wii u version will be developed closely with the 360 and PS3 because of similar architecture. PS4 and Xbox 720 are radically different hardware based on PC hardware. Thats not to say assets from their versions couldn't be used on wii u though.

 

This is a game that really should be miles better on wii u though because of the gamepad. Its qutie possible the wii u will be the best version in playablity terms but visually I'm expecting it to be close to PS3/360.

The architecture is not all that similar.  The only thing they share is a similar instruction set.  Not the same instruction set, but a similar one.  That's about it.  Wii U is GPU centric, has much more memory than PS360, and has completely modern logic.  Other than it not being x86 instructions, it really isn't all that different architecturally than PS4/XBONE (I could go deeper into how different Power7 is from PPE, but we've done down that road before).  Where it does differ from them greatly also is with the GPU logic, half of which is still a big mystery.  We'll see from watchdogs how far the Nintendo developer tools have come.

Something they should have considered when discontinuing FE on Wii.  That game was going for $70 on ebay a couple years after release because it was gone from retail shelves.  The game could have sold for years but the plug was pulled far to quickly. 

 

Nintendo also needs to figure out a good way to market the Wii U to their 3DS userbase.  There is no reason that Nintendo shouldnt be able to strike a chord with the 30 million 3DS gamers out there.  So when a game like Fire Emblem does better than expected on the 3DS, then that should be an indication that the game might be something that could presuade 3DS gamers to buy a Wii U.  Its insane how well the 3DS is doing while the Wii U is barely staying afloat right now.  Why is nintendo unable to sell a Wii U to those who bought a 3DS?  The market should be theres for the taking. 

Agreed, they need to push the Wii U hard to 3DS owners.  When kids start pestering their parents for the big screen version of mario kart or a potential FE:U, it would go nuts.

I think another good way to get the 3DS users to buy FEU is if they made it a sequel to Awakening. Everyone is already in love with the characters, so having most of them come back in a direct sequel would help them surpass their quota.

Well, we know that many of those characters are going to be on the Wii U with the crossover game.

Keep in mind that console exclusives will continue to sell over the system's lifecycle if it is a good product.  Even if they don't hit 700k instantly, they will eventually meet and surpass that.

Here is mine, pls add me, I just can't seem to visit any towns, and am really looking forward to it

 

541311037284

I'll add you tonight when I get home to my 3DS.  I didn't bring it today.  I'll let it open tonight.

Yeah, I guess.. I just really hate it when people do things like this because they either dislike a certain company or just want clicks. In my opinion there should be harsher penalties for this, this one has really got out of hand as I've seen it on many major news sites.

Similar to the false statements made about Denis Dyack on Kotaku.  Kotaku never saw any consequences, never issued a retraction, but none of the "allegations" were corroborated, none of them were accurate.

It's sad that someone would make something like this up. I hope that Ubisoft or Nintendo clear this up, can you take a guy to court for this? You should be able to, they're construing things that were said by them out of context in a malicious way to tarnish the reputation of a company, sounds pretty illegal to me, .

It would be easy to assert that the statements do not cause financial harm to either company, and that is what they would do.  They would also simply state that it is an opinion piece and that there were no inaccurate quotes within the body of the article, because the writer knew not to quote Guillemot

I think that's a little unfair as you don't know for certain. While it could be BS and just them backing out of their big Wii U "support" statements, It's not entirely certain. I don't know the exact numbers, but I imagine that them scrapping a game (killer freaks from outer space), and then turning into another completely different game ...can definitely effect profits lol. I was just throwing it out there that lack of support from what install base there is for the Wii U, can also hinder sales.

I know for certain that when someone who conducts and writes interviews for a living they know when and when not to contain statements within quotation.  If the author had actually conducted an interview with anyone at Ubisoft it would have been quoted.  Note that the other quotes used from Activision and EA are word for word the exact same quotes used on other outlets.  He didn't conduct any interviews, its an opinion piece that is cleverly masked to look like legitimate news in order to exploit the perception of authoritative commentary to move forward the narrative that the author identifies with.

I honestly think a lot of blame falls on Nintendo gamer's - I know tons of gamers who buy Mario/Zelda and all the other  Nintendo franchises on their Nintendo consoles, but either don't play 3rd party games or buy them on other systems. All the blame? Not at all - but it doesn't help.

There is no blame, ZombiU started and continues to sell well enough to make Ubisoft start prototyping a sequel and enough to ensure that Wii U gets all of Ubusoft's big releases this year.  The article is bunk, the statements are non-sequitur.

Could be a precursor to a SMTxFE announcement via Nintendo Direct.

I think ZombiU Had sales of 450k.

that's just the VGChartz numbers, doesn't include many retailers and doesn't include digital at all.  There was no quote, the author of the article made something up that seemed plausible to him and fit his narrative enough to get clicks.  His editor in chief is happy, the guy brought views to the site, and profit, journalistic integrity be damned.

Says Chris Morris... And suspiciously only Chris Morris, who provides absolutely NO source nor quote, nor context for the words he put into yves's mouth.

at just under half a million sales, Id be surprised if a b project like zombi u didnt break even.

I had to point this out to my news team at Nintendo Enthusiast.  Ubisoft confirmed in May that they were working on a sequel (prototyping anyway) and Yves has said in the past that they were happy with ZombiU adoption.  The fact that the author didn't actually quote anyone at Ubisoft was quite telling.  He probably got the same statement that they've given to every other media outlet, realized it didn't fit the narrative or have any impact whatsoever, so decided to completely make something up that was at least plausible, even though over half a million in sales on a low budget game is very respectable.

Order your games online. I agree tho, for someone who doesn't know anything about region locks or different region games (for example, the mother in your story) it is a little problematic. But the guy at the retailer should direct her to where to get the games. 

I told her she could go onto the eshop, but not all games are available there, and there is only a certain amount of space on SD cards.

We take turns.