Miyamotoo said:
potato_hamster said:
Miyamotoo said:
potato_hamster said:
Soundwave said:
I guess another way of doing it is what if Nintendo made a different console for different regional tastes?
I'm going say Nintendo chooses to be a little bold and uses AMD's 14nm FinFET process which is supposed to be firing on all cylinders by next year. So lets assume 70 GFLOPS/watt.
NX Pocket Handheld - 350 GFLOP. 960x540 4.88-inch LCD screen. $199.99. Standard Nintendo option, good for kids, people who want a DS/3DS successor. 3GB RAM. Cheap screen but does the job.
NX Mobile Console (Japan) - 600 GFLOP (on battery); 900 GFLOP (plugged in). New Console Concept. Has a 1280x720 7-inch LCD screen. Can stream wirelessly to the TV via HDMI receiver (sold separately). Form factor may look like a Wii U controller or maybe a Surface tablet (kickstand display, play with controller). Not designed for pockets, but easy enough to take in a bag or carry from room to room. 6GB RAM. - $299.99 MSRP
NX Home Console (US/EU Markets) - 2TFLOP console (@28 watts), 1TB internal HDD, your standard Nintendo console. Games run at the full 1080P resolution for TV. 8GB RAM. About the size of the OG Wii (no disc drive). $299.99 MSRP.
All three versions could be sold in all markets of course, just the focus in the US would be the home console, in Japan the mobile console is the console made for Japanese tastes, and you have the standard Nintendo portable option for the typical kid market, budget parent, and the gamer who values portability/pocket-ability.
The only thing is I don't think the NX Pocket would be able to run all games (though at 350GFLOPS for only 540p render is pretty beastly still), but it would be able to run most third party games with scaled down effects and probably all Nintendo games at the lowered resolution, plus virtual console games and perhaps Android app ports. Ideal for getting kids with budget strict parents into the NX ecosystem and playing Splatoon 2/Mario Maker 2.0/Dragon Quest XI, then later on they can start bugging mom/dad for one of the console versions.
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More of this complete and utter nonsense. Games don't just "scale" like you think they do. It's not like PC games where you can just make the game run decently in on a variety of hardware specs and just keep driving up the minimum requirements until the game runs okay. That is not how it works. The specs don't change. Video games cannot "just scale" on consoles. It never has and it never will.
But let's just assume it does.
Game engines still have to be optimized for each hardware spec, or mode. Every single one of them. Games have to be tested for each hardware spe, individually. Instead of each developer requiring one dev kit, they now need three. Now instead of taking an hour to make a simple adjustment and test it on PS4/XB1/Wii U, they need to test it on PS4/XB1/NXA/NXB/NXC/NXD Wonderful! Awesome. Now the developers need to spend even more time testing things before their code is submitted. Did I mention this process can happen hundreds of times per day? Or at least it did. You just took 1/2 hour to test to make sure your code didn't break the build and turned it into an hour-1.5 hour process. Never mind the added cost and time needed to test the game.
Do you ever want to see a third party game on a Nintendo console ever again? Because the cost of developing for all those different skus and modes drives development cost through the roof, and I do mean astronomically high.
This will never happen, unless you want the NX to fail harder than the Virtual Boy.
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Actualy we already have one intesting example, Monster Hunter Ultimate 4 that works on New 3DS but also on 3DS too, difference are better textures (and probably better FPS) on New 3DS.
We already have games that are developed for 5 different platforms, PS3, Xbox 360, PS4, Xbox One and PC, and we have some games that are developed for 8 totally different platforms (like Lego Jurassic World), all above mentioned plus Wii U, 3DS and Vita.
Very important thing about NX (and probably all future Nintendo hardware) is that it will have same architecture, so that means same development kits, same assets, same way of developing and programing, litarly devolpers will devolp in same time game for NX handheld and home console very easy and fast, incomparably easier than when they devolped games for PS3, Xbox 360, PS4, Xbox One and PC.
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Congrats on the Monster Hunter example. I take it you've also never made a video game before? They did a similar thing with PSP models. Guess what? developers had to pretty much treat both of those settings as two different platforms, and as a result, most developers didn't really bother with the added performance boost. It jiust wasn't worth the hassle. There's also texture differences between multi-platform PS4 and Xbox One games, and it requires making platform specific coding and testing on each platform to do such a thing. This is literally an example of the additional cost I am talking about. They didn't just make it work for 3DS or New 3DS and assume it worked on the other spec. They had to test it for each spec. Unfortunately I'm not sure if the "new 3DS" requires a brand new dev kit, or a firmware update for the same kit, but if its the former you can imagine the extra cost involved. Either way, you're talking about the same inputs and the same outputs, Both are handhelds with one only marginally faster than the other. That's completely different than a home console and a handheld console, both of which having different inputs (stylus for handheld, two extra shoulder buttons for home), both outputting at two completely different resolutions, both made to be viewed at completely different distances. They would literally need to be treated as two entirely separate platforms. The same code more or less runs on both platforms? So what? You have practically the same code running on PS4 and X1. The game code is not the problem. Its the engine that's the problem.
Yes, we do have games that are currently developed for 8 different platforms. It's not very common because its very very expensive to do. It happens very rarely because puting in any one change to the code would literally take a couple of hours of verification by a single developer (assuming they have one team working on all platforms) or they have multiple teams taking care of multiple platforms (which really drives up costs, the most expensive part of making video games is paying the people who do the work). Now you want to add more platforms to this, and drive up the costs even further. Again this is what I'm talking about. Just because some developers are willing to put out a game on 8 different platforms doesn't mean that the average publisher which is releasing games on 2-3 is willing to make the plunge to start developing on the equivalent of 5-6. That would literally double the cost of a lot of game development areas.
As for your last paragraph, that's literally fanboy level thinking. You simply do not know any better. A multispec platform doesn't have the same architecture, it has similar architecture. Take two processors, one is literally half the specs of the other in every way but "the same architecture" as the other. Do you think that the "half processor" can process the same command at half the rate? The answer is not necessarily. It may be the case for 95% of the commands you give it, but the half processor might take 2-3 times as one would expect to process the other 5% of commands. It depends on if that processor running at half the specs introduces bottlenecks not seen in the "full processor" because it has half the resources available to compute it. If that turns out to be the case, guess what? You need to develop a processor-specifc work around. These are the type of things I have literally lost sleep over trying to fix in some sweaty office at 3 in the morning hours before a deadline. Therse are real problems in the console video game world.
There is no reason to think that developing for these hypothetical NX specs would be any easier than developing for PS4 and X1. None at all. Both the PS4 and X1, have practically the same architecture as well. In fact the differences between the PS4 and X1 in terms of architecture would be a pretty similar comparison between the supposed different specs of the NX, except with the NX you'd have diffferent inputs and outputs per spec, which would make it more complicated to develop for a multispec NX. Again, best case scenario it would be like developing for PS4 and X1. Also about those developer kits. Do you think these things are made of hopes and dreams? Making a dev kit that can handle the different inputs, display at the different outputs, and "scale" down to different modes that replicate the actual hardware exactly isn't exactly a small feat, and it would be incredibly expensive to make.
I will keep stating and re-stating this. It is not that simple. At all. Everyone that thinks this is feasible glosses over major, major roadblocks as if they are arbitrary. They aren't, I assure you.
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All Nintendo talk about unifying hardware and software teams, same architecture, same OS, same platform, they even mentiond example of iOS and Android, is beacuse there will be no need like before to develop game separate for handheld and separate for home console, they will develop one game in same time for both consoles.
If Nintendo will benefit from that, there is no reason why 3rd party couldn't too.
Nintendo reorganized its R&D divisions and integrated the handheld device and home console development teams into one division under Mr. Takeda. Previously, our handheld video game devices and home video game consoles had to be developed separately as the technological requirements of each system, whether it was battery-powered or connected to a power supply, differed greatly, leading to completely different architectures and, hence, divergent methods of software development. However, because of vast technological advances, it became possible to achieve a fair degree of architectural integration..
For example, currently it requires a huge amount of effort to port Wii software to Nintendo 3DS because not only their resolutions but also the methods of software development are entirely different. The same thing happens when we try to port Nintendo 3DS software to Wii U. If the transition of software from platform to platform can be made simpler, this will help solve the problem of game shortages in the launch periods of new platforms. Also, as technological advances took place at such a dramatic rate, and we were forced to choose the best technologies for video games under cost restrictions, each time we developed a new platform, we always ended up developing a system that was completely different from its predecessor. The only exception was when we went from Nintendo GameCube to Wii. Though the controller changed completely, the actual computer and graphics chips were developed very smoothly as they were very similar to those of Nintendo GameCube, but all the other systems required ground-up effort. However, I think that we no longer need this kind of effort under the current circumstances. In this perspective, while we are only going to be able to start this with the next system, it will become important for us to accurately take advantage of what we have done with the Wii U architecture. It of course does not mean that we are going to use exactly the same architecture as Wii U, but we are going to create a system that can absorb the Wii U architecture adequately. When this happens, home consoles and handheld devices will no longer be completely different, and they will become like brothers in a family of systems.
Still, I am not sure if the form factor (the size and configuration of the hardware) will be integrated. In contrast, the number of form factors might increase. Currently, we can only provide two form factors because if we had three or four different architectures, we would face serious shortages of software on every platform. To cite a specific case, Apple is able to release smart devices with various form factors one after another because there is one way of programming adopted by all platforms. Apple has a common platform called iOS. Another example is Android. Though there are various models, Android does not face software shortages because there is one common way of programming on the Android platform that works with various models. The point is, Nintendo platforms should be like those two examples. Whether we will ultimately need just one device will be determined by what consumers demand in the future, and that is not something we know at the moment. However, we are hoping to change and correct the situation in which we develop games for different platforms individually and sometimes disappoint consumers with game shortages as we attempt to move from one platform to another, and we believe that we will be able to deliver tangible results in the future.
What we are aiming at is to integrate the architecture to form a common basis for software development so that we can make software assets more transferrable, and operating systems and their build-in applications more portable, regardless of form factor or performance of each platform. They will also work to avoid software lineup shortages or software development delays which tend to happen just after the launch of new hardware.
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