Wii U Ports?

[Tachikoma]

Viper1 said:

Tachikoma said:

You seem to have latched on to a few buzzwords and lost sight of reality, let me chip in my $0.02.
While I've not worked within the industry on UE4 personally (yet), I have spent a great deal of time working on UE3 and PhyreEngine titles, so let me make things a little clearer for you.

Each engine is designed with target platforms in mind, UE3 could target PC, 360, PS3, Wii (with some modification) and Mobiles, UE4 targets PC, PS4, Durango and Mobile, each have their respective engines and driver support within the engine, just because the engine can scale, doesn't mean it automatically scales to any platform you'd like without a lot of legwork, just because "it can scale all the way to mobile" doesn't instantly mean it can scale to wiiu, 3ds or vita, it scales to mobile because the legwork for that has been done, it scales to the other consoles for the same reasons, anyone approaching UE4 with mind to place it on a platform not included on it's target list is in for a great deal of work not only adapting the engine to support the hardware of the target console, but customizing the output of resources, managing the memory handling and of course writing their own API to handle graphics on the new platform, this has not been done for WiiU and UE4, and unless Nintendo themselves go to great lengths to port it then distribute their work to third parties (little tip, that wont ever happen), you're at best going to get one company that does it but wont share with others, because why would they share their work they paid their devs to create, so some other company can benefit for free?

And yet again, no company is going to spend the money porting UE4 to target WiiU when the changes needed to make the engine run result in a game that could just as easilly have been made on UE3 and perform just as well.

With the way third party sales are performing on the WiiU, third party devs are going to opt for the cheapest solution, which, unfortunately for you it seems, is to adapt whatever UE4 title they want to bring to WiiU to run on UE3, but yet again, i digress, You seem to not grasp that developers don't make games for the sake of the game or the gamer, they make it for money, and they're not going to pump hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, into porting over a game that they know may not even break 200k in sales.

UE4 *COULD* be ported, but that's just the same for any engine, with enough sacrifices and comprimises, any engine could run on any modern platform, just because it *COULD* however, does not mean it *WILL* or that it's economically viable to do so.

UE3 is better suited to this generations hardware, PS3, 360 and yes, the WiiU, because it was build with the technologies these consoles uses in mind, as such it's the obvious choice for unreal engine powered games on PS3, 360 and, yup, you guessed it, WiiU.

But let me throw another spanner in your works - While unreal engine does indeed scale well, with automated processes for reducing poly count, texture resolution and so on, some areas it doesn't baby you through are shaders, and modern games use these extensively - so even if the ported version of a game were moved over, every single shader would need to be looked at, modified or removed to suit the different hardware, and without your chosen platform being one of the few UE4 is actually built to target, you would be doing this manually.

Finally, someone atleast trying to come in from a rational angle.

Yes, I'm aware of all that goes into porting a game engine and that custom engine ports and not shared.  I've noted several times already that Ubisoft and otehrs ported UE2.5 to Wii, have I not?

What we've seen in other posts is simply that the Wii U cannot handle the engine.  Period.  That is the argument made by several here.    Other say it can but would be so gimped it wouldn't even be UE4 anymore (suggesting a gimped UE4 is just UE3).

I actually agree with you more than you think.  However, I believe the ROI would be valid for many developers that do intend to develop more than 1 game to the Wii U.  Specifically, the enhancements to the development pipeline (if you've not yet worked with it, you're going to love it) make it worth looking into for most developers (again, assuming they plan to make more than 1 game for Wii U over the course of the generation).

As for in-engine scalaing, UE4 does do this much, much better than UE3 did.  I'm not suggesting it's just a flip of aswitch, but it's not impossible either.  And more to the point of it is that any game that is developed for it would run just fine.  Iit would either be scaled to run well, if a port, or would simply be developed as it is.

Right now, the issue is more "do we even want to bother with a wiiu version?" more than "should we use UE3 or UE4", so the point is a moot one, and much of the goodness in the jump from 3.0 to 4.0 (even from 3.5 to 4.0) would be lost in the translation, compute within shaders, advanced lighting calculations and physics as well as animation routines and kismet scripting would be cut back a great deal to run with a modcrum of stability on the WiiU, while the end result would look a shade better than a UE3 version, the differences would not negate the costs involved, and with the UE3 WiiU framework already in place, unless we experienced a significant shift in buyer preference in Nintendo hardware from first to third party, no developer is going to actively seek the release of a title using UE4 on WiiU, and lets face it - when was the last time you saw a Nintendo console with 3rd party sales even half that of 1st party?

Nintendo released the WiiU at the worst possible time, with little to no 3rd party backing after the initial release as most major third party studios are making the transition from this generation to the next, where the WiiU is considered old-hat before it's even established itself.

The studio i'm currently working at is working on a cross platform (PS4/Durango/PC) title right now, and initially, it was going to come to the WiiU too, but when the studio received it's devkit and spent time going over the intricacies of the development environment, and the recent sales reports for third party software, it quite sensibly decided against it.

Where the WiiU will be once support for PS3 and 360 deminishes is a console surviving from first party and the occasional small studio 3rd party release for 3rd party studios without the manpower or green to fund development of a next gen title.

Sorry but that's just the cold hard truth.