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darkknightkryta on 12 August 2012
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Hisiru said:
darkknightkryta said:

Alright let's talk about some misconceptions you have.  First: Porting code from one system to another is a pain in the ass.  I know from experience.  Epic hasn't made Unreal 4 for the Wii-U, you'd have to take the code from PC which is using Direct X, or from the PS4 using Open GL.  More problems you'll come into will be system libraries that won't work on the WIi-U, hardware differences, cutting back effects, etc, months of that alone for a single version of the engine.  Updated engine will take just as long and be as much as a headache.  I personally take the Unreal 4 claims that Mark Rein made as the same with Unreal 3 and the Wii.  He mentions how someone may be able to squeeze Unreal 3 to the Wii the same way Ubisoft squeezed Unreal 2 into the PSP.  Too lazy to look for true, but I'm sure they were probably the only ones able to do that since they've molded Unreal 2 quite extensively on the PS2/PS3/360.  Hell Bioshock, Splinter Cell, all running Unreal 2.  Second: As far as any modern GPU made from 2009-2010 running Unreal 4 to the specs that they've shown, I'm going to say no.  I have a modern card in my tower, mid range GTX 560 Ti, Arkham City near max settings with medium physics makes the game have slowdowns and that's Unreal 3.  For comparison purposes Epic had their Sammartarian demo running on 3 GTX 580s.  Will games run on any run of the mill 09 card?  Of course, with medium settings, might as well play the game on PS3/360 at that point.  Which re-iterates back to Unreal 4 and Wii-U, most likely has to be trimmed down to get it running well, especially if the Wii-U's ram is at a pultry 1.5 gigs, which you've mentioned.  And Unreal 4 is very new tech, a dev will have to spare a lot of resources to put into porting the engine over just for the Wii-U and if Epic makes updates, those updates have to ported over as well by the dev, if at all possible.  That's just not cost effective.

"More problems you'll come into will be system libraries that won't work on the WIi-U, hardware differences, cutting back effects, etc, months of that alone for a single version of the engine.  "

"Updated engine will take just as long and be as much as a headache. "

 I am sorry if I am being rude, but now youre just making hasty assumptions, aren't you?

No I'm not

"I personally take the Unreal 4 claims that Mark Rein made as the same with Unreal 3 and the Wii."

 No, he never said devs would be able to port UE3 games for the Wii. Now he said "you can port UE4 games for the WiiU if you want".  it's a totally different situation.

Oh yes he did: "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," - http://www.joystiq.com/2007/03/08/mark-rein-says-no-unreal-engine-3-for-wii/

"Second: As far as any modern GPU made from 2009-2010 running Unreal 4 to the specs that they've shown, I'm going to say no.  I have a modern card in my tower, mid range GTX 560 Ti, Arkham City near max settings with medium physics makes the game have slowdowns and that's Unreal 3." 

Now youre using your bad performance in order to say its not possible to run the game. They could simply tone down the game just to run on your hardware, which means your hardware is capable of running the engine, maybe it's not the graphics you want, but the game/engine is running just fine.
Arkham City runs great, my GTX 560 Ti has a bit of trouble at high settings, tesselation and gpu based physics set to medium.  Which is also running on Unreal 3, what do you think Unreal 4 at higher settings are going to do?  Games running on current mid range cards are going to have to downgrade textures, lighting, effects, physics etc to run at smooth framerates.
"For comparison purposes Epic had their Sammartarian demo running on 3 GTX 580s.  Will games run on any run of the mill 09 card?  Of course, with medium settings, might as well play the game on PS3/360 at that point. "

Same as above.
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"Which re-iterates back to Unreal 4 and Wii-U, most likely has to be trimmed down to get it running well"
Again, the engine is very scalable, and we still need to see the final specs (which can't be worse then what we already have). 
Yes scalable, which means things have to go to make it run well on lower specs.

"And Unreal 4 is very new tech, a dev will have to spare a lot of resources to put into porting the engine over just for the Wii-U and if Epic makes updates, those updates have to ported over as well by the dev, if at all possible.  That's just not cost effective."
I completely disagree with you. Ubisoft already said it costs something around 1~2M to port HD games for the WiiU and it just needs to sell 150~200k (at $30) in order to give a good profit, it's easy money and it's worth the effort for sure.
There's a difference between porting Unreal 2/3 games to the Wii-U as Epic has already ported Unreal 3 over and Ubisoft has hacked the Unreal 2 more times than I can count.

Now let's take a look at his words again:
"but Unreal Engine 4 is going to be supremely scalable. 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."
You see? He never said developers will need to port the engine (as you are trying to imply), he only said devs will be able to port games, and that it's a very scalable engine.
However I am not veeery worried about it because the so called "next gen game" Star Wars 1313 is running on Unreal Engine 3 and Watch Dogs is running on Ubisoft's new engine.
Again you can't port a game anywhere without the underlying technology with it, it does not work like that.  If a game is made with Unreal 4 and they want it on the Wii U they either re-write the game to run on Unreal 3 or port Unreal 4 over.  It's like saying a 360 game can have a raw port over to the PS3 despite the PS3 not having Direct X.