It all sounds fantastic :D

Nintendo doing Ubi Soft a nice favor here by letting Rayman be the playable game at their demo stations over Mario.

EA provides details about Wii U’s online architecture

EA was discussing how ‘Origins’ would function on Nintendo’s upcoming console when they– perhaps unintentionally– let slip a few details regarding what people can expect from Wii U’s online offering:

- You need an Origin account to play EA’s titles online
- You have to transfer some information to EA in order to use Origin
- Information includes Mii information, email address, Nintendo Network ID, friend list, country, language, and date of birth
- You do not have to transfer any financial or credit card information

The thing to note here is that “Nintendo Network ID” has taken the place of “Gamertag” and “online ID”, which were the phrases used in the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 descriptions of ‘Origins’ respectively. Additionally, “Mii Information” seems like a bit of a silly thing to need… but who knows!? We’ll see if anyone retracts or changes their statements now that a deal is being made about it.

http://nintendoeverything.com/102699/ea-provides-details-about-wii-us-online-architecture/

Two Tribes comes across Wii U hardware feature to reduce texture memory usage

On Twitter, Two Tribes told its followers that it “discovered a new hardware feature of the Wii U that shaves off 100 megabytes of texture memory”. The technique will be used in Toki Tori 2.

The studio later spoke about the advantages of the new feature. Two Tribes says “it means we spend less time loading and have more memory available when the game is running.”

http://nintendoeverything.com/102690/two-tribes-comes-across-wii-u-hardware-feature-to-reduce-texture-memory-usage/

^Thanks for those news! Both are very interesting, indeed.

I hope that that "Nintendo Network ID" has nothing to do with friend codes (although I don't care as I don't play online multiplayer).

And about that hardware feature that Two Tribes has found... maybe Viper1 can tell us more? Anyway, having a feature that "frees" those 100MB (or 1/10th of the total RAM) is not a bad thing, not at all.

This is the first I've heard of that "feature" as well.  That's a whole lot of freed up RAM.

I can only imagine they've got texture streaming working.  It's the only thing I can think of that would be "feature" like and could free up that much texture RAM.

^ I think that was what Michael Ancel (Rayman) was talking about how they had big textures and then compressed them. Maybe Ubisoft already knew about this.

But wouldn't that be a software feature rather than a hardware one? (honest question, I have no clue)

JEMC, I'm just keeping this thread alive =) just spreadin' the good word :D but what does that feature mean? what will it mean for games?

That's something different.

For years we've had to compress textures to save space and to make them transfer from the game medium to RAM faster.   Large textures tended to move too slowly so devs try to compress them as much as possible without losing quality S3TC's 6:1 texture compression has been the main one used for a long time.   But Ancel was saying that the Wii U was still able to move textures fast enough and process them fast enough that they could still use the large textures without needing to compress them first.

That's going to have the opposite effect because the large textures eat up a lot more space.  Using the 6:1 compression scheme for an example, you could compress 60 MB's of textures into 10 MB's.   So if you've allocated 100 MB's of RAM for textures, by not compressing them, you could eat up 600 MB's.   But it all depends on what texture compression schemes the Wii U has.

Both.   Software handles the actual streaming but it requires hardware capable of it...or rather, fast enough to handle it.