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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Anonymous Dev documents Wii U experience

supernihilist on 11 January 2014
Hynad said:
supernihilist said:
Sad story indeed. Hearing devs complain about ridiculous details making excuses not to develop for a console...hard stuff


Nah. It's people like you being in denial no matter what that is the sad part.


you seem to think you are smarter than me. ill tell you smthing. you are not. can i think for myself at least on this one lol. can i?



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supernihilist on 11 January 2014
curl-6 said:

Some interesting excerpts:

"Code optimised for the PowerPC processors found in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 wasn't always a good fit for the Wii U CPU, so while the chip has some interesting features that let the CPU punch above its weight, we couldn't fully take advantage of them. However, some code could see substantial improvements that did mitigate the lower clocks - anything up to a 4x boost owing to the removal of Load-Hit-Stores, and higher IPC (instructions per cycle) via the inclusion of out-of-order execution."

"The GPU proved very capable and we ended up adding additional "polish" features as the GPU had capacity to do it. There was even some discussion on trying to utilise the GPU via compute shaders (GPGPU) to offload work from the CPU - exactly the approach I expect to see gain traction on the next-gen consoles - but with very limited development time and no examples or guidance from Nintendo, we didn't feel that we could risk attempting this work...The GPU is better than on PS3 or Xbox 360"

"I've also seen some concerns about the utilisation of DDR3 RAM on Wii U, and a bandwidth deficit compared to the PS3 and Xbox 360. This wasn't really a problem for us. The GPU could fetch data rapidly with minimal stalls (via the EDRAM) and we could efficiently pre-fetch, allowing the GPU to run at top speed."

Sounds like exactly what I and others have been saying for over a year now; an eccentric design that isn't fully utilised by quick and nasty PS3/360 ports due to its different architecture.

We haven't what Wii U can really do, not by a long shot.

oh i see. so it only was a embarrasing nitpicking from ANti-nintendo crowd. embarrasing for them of course. thank you for clearing it out for me pal.



Cobretti2 on 11 January 2014

To me it sounds like its just Nintendo being Nintendo. Doing their own thing which we know always alienates them from the rest.

Arty's comment kind of supports that (which we already knew):

  • arty1 hour ago

    Sounds like this guy hasn't worked on Nintendo platforms before. They're all like this, no visual studio, long compile times, cygwin etc, you get used to it. Nintendo hardware separates the men from the boys. Reply+3-+

  • Sunjammer1 hour ago

    @arty Haha that's kind of how I've felt. It's the first piece of kit I've worked on where I felt like I was properly in the mines.


 

 

walsufnir on 11 January 2014
Cobretti2 said:

I think this comment sums it up nicely on that site:

 

Sunjammer1 hour ago

@peasoup IMO the key takeaway from this article isn't that the hardware underperforms, it's that a) Third parties are in the shit because they can't port easily to it while supporting the other systems and b) Nintendo needs better SDK tooling. 

To work with Nintendo I think you have to Work With Nintendo in a way that's asking a lot of developers, both logistically and philosophically. Unity is an attempt to meet a lot of indies half-way, but for the rest of us wanting to adapt existing native tools to the platform, there are some real acrobatics to be done.

For and my tiny team, we pull most of our income from other sources so it's more a labor of love than anything else that we choose to focus on the Wii U (tbh the weirdness of the platform actually makes it more fun for us), but I can fully understand why 3rd party giants like EA and Ubisoft don't really see the point.

Also, a pet peeve of mine: Indies complaining about the weak CPU on a system when they are typically otherwise used to working with far worse CPUs on mobile, that they barely ever even attempt to or even CAN max out. Most devs simply have not earned the right to complain about the Wii U's horsepower.


All excuses and explanations don't change _anything_ on the situation.



walsufnir on 11 January 2014
supernihilist said:
curl-6 said:

Some interesting excerpts:

"Code optimised for the PowerPC processors found in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 wasn't always a good fit for the Wii U CPU, so while the chip has some interesting features that let the CPU punch above its weight, we couldn't fully take advantage of them. However, some code could see substantial improvements that did mitigate the lower clocks - anything up to a 4x boost owing to the removal of Load-Hit-Stores, and higher IPC (instructions per cycle) via the inclusion of out-of-order execution."

"The GPU proved very capable and we ended up adding additional "polish" features as the GPU had capacity to do it. There was even some discussion on trying to utilise the GPU via compute shaders (GPGPU) to offload work from the CPU - exactly the approach I expect to see gain traction on the next-gen consoles - but with very limited development time and no examples or guidance from Nintendo, we didn't feel that we could risk attempting this work...The GPU is better than on PS3 or Xbox 360"

"I've also seen some concerns about the utilisation of DDR3 RAM on Wii U, and a bandwidth deficit compared to the PS3 and Xbox 360. This wasn't really a problem for us. The GPU could fetch data rapidly with minimal stalls (via the EDRAM) and we could efficiently pre-fetch, allowing the GPU to run at top speed."

Sounds like exactly what I and others have been saying for over a year now; an eccentric design that isn't fully utilised by quick and nasty PS3/360 ports due to its different architecture.

We haven't what Wii U can really do, not by a long shot.

oh i see. so it only was a embarrasing nitpicking from ANti-nintendo crowd. embarrasing for them of course. thank you for clearing it out for me pal.


So you didn't read the article and still posted? Man, things can't get worse. And I am not Anti-Nintendo crowd. Why do you even use this term? Look at the thread title. It's not always "we" and "them"...



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SubiyaCryolite on 11 January 2014

Wow, certain fans already spinning this into something positive. "Separating the boys from the men" *wtf*



I predict that the Wii U will sell a total of 18 million units in its lifetime. 

The NX will be a 900p machine

curl-6 on 11 January 2014
walsufnir said:
curl-6 said:

Some interesting excerpts:

"Code optimised for the PowerPC processors found in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 wasn't always a good fit for the Wii U CPU, so while the chip has some interesting features that let the CPU punch above its weight, we couldn't fully take advantage of them. However, some code could see substantial improvements that did mitigate the lower clocks - anything up to a 4x boost owing to the removal of Load-Hit-Stores, and higher IPC (instructions per cycle) via the inclusion of out-of-order execution."

"The GPU proved very capable and we ended up adding additional "polish" features as the GPU had capacity to do it. There was even some discussion on trying to utilise the GPU via compute shaders (GPGPU) to offload work from the CPU - exactly the approach I expect to see gain traction on the next-gen consoles - but with very limited development time and no examples or guidance from Nintendo, we didn't feel that we could risk attempting this work...The GPU is better than on PS3 or Xbox 360"

"I've also seen some concerns about the utilisation of DDR3 RAM on Wii U, and a bandwidth deficit compared to the PS3 and Xbox 360. This wasn't really a problem for us. The GPU could fetch data rapidly with minimal stalls (via the EDRAM) and we could efficiently pre-fetch, allowing the GPU to run at top speed."

Sounds like exactly what I and others have been saying for over a year now; an eccentric design that isn't fully utilised by quick and nasty PS3/360 ports due to its different architecture.

We haven't what Wii U can really do, not by a long shot.


And what many others said: It's not worth it. It is ok to select only "interesting" parts but the development situation is a MESS, obviously, and Nintendo is to blame.

I'm not really interested in third party multiplatform games.

What I am interested in is the references to the Wii U chipset that support what I've been saying for over a year now.



Porcupine_I on 11 January 2014
Turkish said:

"Wii U on the other hand seemed to be trying at every turn to make it difficult to compile and run any code. Nintendo had provided an integration of their development tools into Visual Studio - the de facto standard for development - but it didn't work, not even close. So time was spent trying to get this fixed up, while reporting the issue to the platform holder.

As a team, we lost days of time to the compile/link/debug overheads and this negatively impacted the amount of features that we could put into our game before the release date."

 

But 3rd parties were lazy....

Of course they were lazy! Didn't you read the article? They were drinking tea and chat, while the Wii U did all the work...



“It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grams a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.”

- George Orwell, ‘1984’

Troll_Whisperer on 11 January 2014

Sounds very Japanese.

Meetings are not about "let's find solutions together" but about "this is what we're doing and this is how you're going to comply with that".

Emails are all answered in chronological order and not in order of importance, and everything must go through several layers of management to make sure everything is OK.

When emails do go through, then it's not uncommon to have endless exchanges because every little detail must be thoroughly explained.

Then, we have the general poor English level and the endless meeting (up to several hours a day).

In Japanese companies the process is often as important as the result. That's why they can't compete these days.



No troll is too much for me to handle. I rehabilitate trolls, I train people. I am the Troll Whisperer.

PattonFiend on 11 January 2014

...and Titanfall is 720p... What is your point?

This is what happens when PPC architecture is unknown to developers. It is not Nintendo's fault that developers have no experience coding on PPC architecture...

Maybe they should get their game up, you know, hone those skills instead of complaining about their lack of education and experience and not having everything handed to them on a silver platter...

I suppose they want Nintendo to make their games for them as well...