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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Anonymous Dev documents Wii U experience

supernihilist on 11 January 2014
PattonFiend said:

So you're saying you wouldn't be happy if you had to do actual work...

Hmm...


lol this is exactly my thoughts. its like "oh man we have to work a lot here to make cool things. Why dont you gives us the work half done so we can half do the other half part? Why you so bad Nintendo?"



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S.Peelman on 11 January 2014

I'm not going to read this.

I'll probably won't believe a word anyway, and frankly I don't care in the slightest. Third parties mostly haven't been able to produce something good for generations now anyway, so as long as the specs fit Nintendo's needs and I get a mind-blowing Zelda (which will be a looker no matter the 'power') I'm happy.



MikeRox on 11 January 2014
S.Peelman said:
I'm not going to read this.

I'll probably won't believe a word anyway, and frankly I don't care in the slightest. Third parties mostly haven't been able to produce something good for generations now anyway, so as long as the specs fit Nintendo's needs and I get a mind-blowing Zelda (which will be a looker no matter the 'power') I'm happy.


Wat?



RIP Dad 25/11/51 - 13/12/13. You will be missed but never forgotten.

S.Peelman on 11 January 2014
MikeRox said:
S.Peelman said:
I'm not going to read this.

I'll probably won't believe a word anyway, and frankly I don't care in the slightest. Third parties mostly haven't been able to produce something good for generations now anyway, so as long as the specs fit Nintendo's needs and I get a mind-blowing Zelda (which will be a looker no matter the 'power') I'm happy.


Wat?

Yep.

Mostly (meaning there's the odd good one), it's the first parties that make games worth my while... For any console.



Anfebious on 11 January 2014

Wow this seems to be "beat Nintendo to a pulp" day!

Anyway from the article it seems that the OS and networking wasn't finished before launch. They kinda rushed it to get the Wii U out on the market it seems.

I have an interesting article here about the Gamecube. It's about the story behind it. You can see in there that Nintendo wanted to launch the N64 and the Gamecube before competition but never succeded in doing so.

Maybe they wanted to have that advantage this time around. Anyway it seems it didn't pay off.

I'll leave the article here if anyone wants to read! Beware though... It's a really fucking long article: http://www.dromble.com/2014/01/07/dolphin-tale-story-of-gamecube/



"I've Underestimated the Horse Power from Mario Kart 8, I'll Never Doubt the WiiU's Engine Again"

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Turkish on 11 January 2014
Porcupine_I said:
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...

LOL

 

but the Wii U couldnt do the work, devs couldnt get it to work...



Turkish on 11 January 2014

It's not surprising seeing so many Nintendo fans dismiss the article as "3rd party talking shit about wii u whats new".
I hope some mod comes in and starts to warn these people for shitting up the thread. They havent even read the article the way they are dismissing this as another nintendoom thread.

Never has there been a more detailed report from a 3rd party wii u dev as to whats wrong with the console.

Unlike the people here who moan about 3rd parties, this guy actually made and delivered a game on their console, and explains the difficulty in doing so.

Mods please enforce your authority on this thread, thank you.



drake4 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.

LOL sure, better could mean anything, we have have heard from there devs, that are not calling them self secret say it's slighty more powerful, this dev says it's better but,  doesnt really go into detail, like the othere dev does, he also says the cpu is very weak. i find it funny how you call the ports quick and nasty, when developers asked nintendo to make the console more powerful, so they can port 360/ps3 games easily, infact they even did tests that showed it would have problems running, 360/ps3 and no way it could run xbone/ps4 games, the whole article explains nintendo just doesnt care for third party's and its nintendo being lazy not devs.



Anfebious on 11 January 2014
Turkish said:
It's not surprising seeing so many Nintendo fans dismiss the article as "3rd party talking shit about wii u whats new".
I hope some mod comes in and starts to warn these people for shitting up the thread. They havent even read the article the way they are dismissing this as another nintendoom thread.

Never has there been a more detailed report from a 3rd party wii u dev as to whats wrong with the console.

Unlike the people here who moan about 3rd parties, this guy actually made and delivered a game on their console, and explains the difficulty in doing so.

Mods please enforce your authority on this thread, thank you.


Don't worry Turkish. I actually made a post that isn't defending Nintendo a couple of posts above this one.

There is even a long article to read in it if you want.



"I've Underestimated the Horse Power from Mario Kart 8, I'll Never Doubt the WiiU's Engine Again"

Cobretti2 on 11 January 2014
walsufnir said:
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.

I never said it did. I am simply pointing out that it appears to be like any other Nintendo system. Did we really epext any different? Did you think they would go buy PC parts of the shelf and call it a steam box lol.

Being outside the norm has alwyas been hurting Nintendo. This news is nothing new. Also some of those dev comments sound like its the worst thing ever on the planet which we know is total over exaggeration considering there are games running on the system.