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Forums - Gaming - UE4 Scaled down to run on PS4, why not Wii U?

I have copied this quote from another thread that explained it to me.

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.

 

This pretty much covered it as far as I can tell.

Edit: Here is the post as it seems to get cut off.



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Sensei said:
Perhaps devs want the Wii U to die/fail? I remember on PS1 and PS2 gens, devs would focus on a single console and let others die, perhaps making a single game is cheaper than making it multiplat. This gen (7th) was different because both X360 and PS3 were successful so they had no choice but develop for both equally.

Or the devs still think they can't compete with Nintendo's first party and their games will sell better on PS4 so they don't bother with the Wii U.


"Devs want the WiiU to die" .. well thats nothing new... 



 

keroncoward said:
kitler53 said:
keroncoward said:
kitler53 said:
UE4 scaled to wiiU is UE3..


Marc Rein was specific when he said UE4 can be scaled down to Wii U. UE3 is a different engine so please provide a discussion that makes sense or a source stating that he said what you just did.

 

What is the target platform for UE4? What kind of hardware are gamers going to need to run UE4 based games?

Unreal Engine 4’s next-generation renderer targets DirectX 11 GPU’s and really starts to become interesting on hardware with 1+ TFLOPS of graphics performance, where it delivers some truly unprecedented capabilities. However, UE4 also includes a mainstream renderer targeting mass-market devices with a feature set that is appropriate there.

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/articles/stunning-videos-show-unreal-engine-4s-next-gen-gtx-680-powered-real-time-graphics

 


Thanks for the info but where does it say the engine will be UE3 if its scaled down?

right where i bolded it.  for hardware that cannot take advantage of the UE4 engine's advanced capabilities it renders in the "mass-market" engine without all of the additional effects UE4 offers.  aka,.  UE3.  it might not be called out at UE3 but if it quacks and floats on the water..

UE3 is already up and running on wiiU.  so ask yourself this...  if wiiU can't take advantage of UE4's advanced capabilities due to its technical limitations and UE3 is already up and running..  why would epic spend the money to put UE4 on wiiU?   to make you feel better?  no.



RenderMonk said:
The main differences between the PC version and PS4 version is the lighting and particle effects. Where an extremely top of the line PC (or custom rig for the demo) will be able to pump out a bit more in both the lighting and particle effects department, that's not a "Huge Difference." It's minor. The difference between PS4 and WiiU is the RAM, which is a crucial part in getting the lighting (like bloom, light scatter etc) and particle effects to run right and run smooth. This is more than likely than main reason why it's not ideal to run on WiiU. But the differences at the moment between PS4 and PC are negligible at best. And as the PS4 devs get better accustomed to the coding environment for PS4 it will keep up with most high-end PC's with, again, negligible differences.


THIS, anyone who says the ps4 will be scaled down has no clue what they are talking about.



SENTIENT6 said:
RenderMonk said:
The main differences between the PC version and PS4 version is the lighting and particle effects. Where an extremely top of the line PC (or custom rig for the demo) will be able to pump out a bit more in both the lighting and particle effects department, that's not a "Huge Difference." It's minor. The difference between PS4 and WiiU is the RAM, which is a crucial part in getting the lighting (like bloom, light scatter etc) and particle effects to run right and run smooth. This is more than likely than main reason why it's not ideal to run on WiiU. But the differences at the moment between PS4 and PC are negligible at best. And as the PS4 devs get better accustomed to the coding environment for PS4 it will keep up with most high-end PC's with, again, negligible differences.


THIS, anyone who says the ps4 will be scaled down has no clue what they are talking about.


Will it on par or upscaled then?



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UE3 is better suited to what Wii U is capable of.
Although Unreal Engine 4 was developed for high-end PCs, next-gen consoles were always kept into consideration.



keroncoward said:
SENTIENT6 said:
RenderMonk said:
The main differences between the PC version and PS4 version is the lighting and particle effects. Where an extremely top of the line PC (or custom rig for the demo) will be able to pump out a bit more in both the lighting and particle effects department, that's not a "Huge Difference." It's minor. The difference between PS4 and WiiU is the RAM, which is a crucial part in getting the lighting (like bloom, light scatter etc) and particle effects to run right and run smooth. This is more than likely than main reason why it's not ideal to run on WiiU. But the differences at the moment between PS4 and PC are negligible at best. And as the PS4 devs get better accustomed to the coding environment for PS4 it will keep up with most high-end PC's with, again, negligible differences.


THIS, anyone who says the ps4 will be scaled down has no clue what they are talking about.


Will it on par or upscaled then?

None. The engine is being re-tooled to take advantage of PS4s features.



So here's the funny thing, I think the specs that Sony revealed so far about the PS4 were firstly to get the fanboys hyped and their knickers wet, and secondly to try and get Microsoft to bite and say, oh shit here's Xbox 720. Sony only succeeded with one of these...

With that said, Sony's track record, in terms of console unveiling verses actual release, leads me to believe that even PS4 will be scaled back come launch 2013 (if it makes 2013), which means that that UE4 on PS4 will be scaled back even more. So try not to get too fond of what you're seeing now boys and girls.

Once PS4 is scaled back, Sony will come out and say never mind that, because UE4 still runs on PS4 and still looks better than WiiU. And the Sony fanboys will continue to rejoice.



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I love My Wii U, and the potential it brings to gaming.

maybe PS4 and NextXbox spec has the minimum requirement for the UE4 scaled down...??



Wait are those pics mixed up because the one on the right honestly looks better to me. Also I would never notice the differences if I were just playing a game and didn't have a side by side comparison. Oh well I'm happy with what PS4 can produce if that's it for gen 1 games.




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