osed125 said:
That may be true, but I remember Iwata said at some point that Nintendo wants the third party back on board on their consoles, he even said they would invest money in other to make so. If that's the case then I would assume that Nintendo made the Wii U as easy as possible for developers to work. I don't know much about game developing (so sorry if what I'm about to say doesn't make sense) but I imagine that the dev kit for the Wii U is somewhat similar to the DS (with more functions and power of course) which developers are already familiar with. |
I can't say.
What I can say is that Microsoft learned its lesson over decades of development tools and APIs, and eventually it released .Net. The simple argument in the development world against .Net was that it was Microsoft's answer to Java, which in part it was. However, it was also a shift in the responsibility of developers from having to learn disparate APIs, to simply having to learn .Net. You don't have to learn one API for one aspect of the system, or another to do something else. You just make a call to a system property or method. Need to capture the input from the user, you don't need to communicate with a specific device. Just make a single call waiting for the input and regardless of whether it comes from a controller, the IR remote, a wheel, or Kinect it gets captured. The developer doesn't need to care what device the user uses, just whether or not A or B gets pressed.
If Nintendo is making easier to take what learned and code that is developed on one platform and port it to another, cool. Making development easier for developers is what console makers need to do. Too much money is lost in trying to learn new platforms.
I'm not a true developer, but I have done development and one of the most frustrating experience for me was having to learn an API so I could do what I wanted to do. That was frustrating and difficult enough with it being fairly well documented. In the case of console platforms, I can imagine that development can be excruciating when there is no or inadequate documentation on the libraries.
This isn't necessarily directed at you, but to those who think developers are lazy.
People who think developers are lazy are idiots. Developers are not the lazy ones, it's the technical writers and sample code developers with the console manufactures that are the lazy ones.
Try to learn a language without every having heard it, having seen used in context, and only seeing a list of words in that language. Then tell me if you're lazy (or not) because after two years you sound like an idiot rather than someone fluent in the language. That's what it's like for developers developing on a new platform when the APIs aren't documented and there is no sample code to reference.
