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Forums - Gaming - Is it possible for the Wii to have games like Bioshock, MSG 4, and GTA 4?

Mifely on 01 July 2008
Just_Ben said:
Mifely said:

Do all Wii owners imagine that they purchased a console that will, someday, be able to play all the HD console games, merely with a minor loss in texture quality? Textures take a fair chunk of memory, yes, but... its hardly the sole contributor to the memory footprint of an application like GTA4 or AC. Lemme throw up a sample memory budget for a run-of-the-mill HD game:

* 30-60 MB -- OS (I think the Wii has a much smaller OS)
* 4 MB -- screen buffers (easy to shrink if you lose HD)
* 60 MB -- code and global data (next to impossible to shrink without changing the game)
* 30 MB -- game objects (next to impossible to shrink -- see above)
* 20 MB -- animations (easy to shrink... but with substantial quality loss)
* 60 MB -- physics/collision data (pretty hard to shrink without serious level changes, which means you're re-doing all the content)
* 120 MB -- textures (easy to shrink, acceptable quality loss, IMO)
* 60 MB -- visual geometry (kinda hard to shrink, but somewhat doable, depending on artist skills and tools... and time)
* 20 MB -- sound (easy to shrink if you lower quality and compress like crazy... maybe)
* 20 MB -- AI navigational data (pretty dang hard to shrink without really messing up the AI and re-doing the content)
* ~60 MB -- misc crap I forgot (most stuff is usually much harder to shrink than textures)

Now fit that on the 64+27MB of the Wii, after accounting for, I would hope, 8MB or less for the Wii's OS. You come out with a completely different game, that is also lame compared to its HD counterpart(s).

And yes, HD cross-platform games ALWAYS use ALL the memory available. I don't think I've ever heard of a HD game that didn't have to squeeze into its platform(s) memory budget at some point in its development cycle. This has been true for... eons. Consoles never have as much memory as the developers want.

I am no game developer, but at least a developer, and this numbers look awfull wrong to me. 60 MB code, compiled, in the ram? Only 120 MB for the textures? Thats not much. Sorry but I think all things you mentioned are way to high and the textures are way to low.

 

Textures, sound, and animation (a lot of the things that can be made lower-quality easily) are usually compressed as well.  120MB of textures is a lot more texture data than 30M 32-bit RGBA values, in other words.  My numbers are pretty close -- The textures might take up some additional memory (like part of the 60 extra megs I mentioned), but not as much as you might think. The screen buffers, the visual geometry, and textures all tend to occupy VRAM, but in some cases they might add up to more than 250M with a performance hit.  The remaining 256M still needs to squeeze into the 64M of main RAM on the Wii... that just isn't very doable without changing the game completely.

I should add that, if the texture/animation/sound data is compressed, it requires some CPU horsepower to decompress and utilize each frame... another gotcha for the Wii, relative to the PS3/360 -- in order to process the data fast enough the Wii not only needs the data to be smaller, but in some cases might require less efficient compression than the more powerful consoles.

The Wii will always have great exclusives.  It will never share games experiences with the other consoles, but that doesn't mean it won't have great games -- obviously it does.  Downporting to it is kinda pointless, in that its so difficult, that developers are always better off making a game focused solely on the Wii's strengths, instead of trying to shove a game that uses the "big" consoles' strengths onto the Wii.

 



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Ail on 01 July 2008
Mifely said:
Just_Ben said:
Mifely said:

Do all Wii owners imagine that they purchased a console that will, someday, be able to play all the HD console games, merely with a minor loss in texture quality? Textures take a fair chunk of memory, yes, but... its hardly the sole contributor to the memory footprint of an application like GTA4 or AC. Lemme throw up a sample memory budget for a run-of-the-mill HD game:

* 30-60 MB -- OS (I think the Wii has a much smaller OS)
* 4 MB -- screen buffers (easy to shrink if you lose HD)
* 60 MB -- code and global data (next to impossible to shrink without changing the game)
* 30 MB -- game objects (next to impossible to shrink -- see above)
* 20 MB -- animations (easy to shrink... but with substantial quality loss)
* 60 MB -- physics/collision data (pretty hard to shrink without serious level changes, which means you're re-doing all the content)
* 120 MB -- textures (easy to shrink, acceptable quality loss, IMO)
* 60 MB -- visual geometry (kinda hard to shrink, but somewhat doable, depending on artist skills and tools... and time)
* 20 MB -- sound (easy to shrink if you lower quality and compress like crazy... maybe)
* 20 MB -- AI navigational data (pretty dang hard to shrink without really messing up the AI and re-doing the content)
* ~60 MB -- misc crap I forgot (most stuff is usually much harder to shrink than textures)

Now fit that on the 64+27MB of the Wii, after accounting for, I would hope, 8MB or less for the Wii's OS. You come out with a completely different game, that is also lame compared to its HD counterpart(s).

And yes, HD cross-platform games ALWAYS use ALL the memory available. I don't think I've ever heard of a HD game that didn't have to squeeze into its platform(s) memory budget at some point in its development cycle. This has been true for... eons. Consoles never have as much memory as the developers want.

I am no game developer, but at least a developer, and this numbers look awfull wrong to me. 60 MB code, compiled, in the ram? Only 120 MB for the textures? Thats not much. Sorry but I think all things you mentioned are way to high and the textures are way to low.

 

Textures, sound, and animation (a lot of the things that can be made lower-quality easily) are usually compressed as well.  120MB of textures is a lot more texture data than 30M 32-bit RGBA values, in other words.  My numbers are pretty close -- The textures might take up some additional memory (like part of the 60 extra megs I mentioned), but not as much as you might think.

I should add that, if the texture/animation/sound data is compressed, it requires some CPU horsepower to decompress and utilize each frame... another gotcha for the Wii, relative to the PS3/360 -- in order to process the data fast enough the Wii not only needs the data to be smaller, but in some cases might require less efficient compression than the more powerful consoles.

The Wii will always have great exclusives.  It will never share games experiences with the other consoles, but that doesn't mean it won't have great games -- obviously it does.  Downporting to it is kinda pointless, in that its so difficult, that developers are always better off making a game focused solely on the Wii's strengths, instead of trying to shove a game that uses the "big" consoles' strengths onto the Wii.

 

 

Your general numbers are right but a few things are off.

Remember the PS3 only has 256 Mb + 256Mb for graphics ( most of it is going to be texture)

20 M for the sound, I would be hardly surprised if sound took more than a couple Mb honestly, it's uncompressed on the fly and played like that, there's no sound buffering per say in memory, nothing significant at least.

60Mb Physics/Collision data is mighty high too. The way it's handled is the game has the Visualization tree in memory and it's used for Physics/Collision too.



PS3-Xbox360 gap : 1.5 millions and going up in PS3 favor !

PS3-Wii gap : 20 millions and going down !

Mifely on 01 July 2008
Ail said:
Mifely said:
Just_Ben said:
Mifely said:

Do all Wii owners imagine that they purchased a console that will, someday, be able to play all the HD console games, merely with a minor loss in texture quality? Textures take a fair chunk of memory, yes, but... its hardly the sole contributor to the memory footprint of an application like GTA4 or AC. Lemme throw up a sample memory budget for a run-of-the-mill HD game:

* 30-60 MB -- OS (I think the Wii has a much smaller OS)
* 4 MB -- screen buffers (easy to shrink if you lose HD)
* 60 MB -- code and global data (next to impossible to shrink without changing the game)
* 30 MB -- game objects (next to impossible to shrink -- see above)
* 20 MB -- animations (easy to shrink... but with substantial quality loss)
* 60 MB -- physics/collision data (pretty hard to shrink without serious level changes, which means you're re-doing all the content)
* 120 MB -- textures (easy to shrink, acceptable quality loss, IMO)
* 60 MB -- visual geometry (kinda hard to shrink, but somewhat doable, depending on artist skills and tools... and time)
* 20 MB -- sound (easy to shrink if you lower quality and compress like crazy... maybe)
* 20 MB -- AI navigational data (pretty dang hard to shrink without really messing up the AI and re-doing the content)
* ~60 MB -- misc crap I forgot (most stuff is usually much harder to shrink than textures)

Now fit that on the 64+27MB of the Wii, after accounting for, I would hope, 8MB or less for the Wii's OS. You come out with a completely different game, that is also lame compared to its HD counterpart(s).

And yes, HD cross-platform games ALWAYS use ALL the memory available. I don't think I've ever heard of a HD game that didn't have to squeeze into its platform(s) memory budget at some point in its development cycle. This has been true for... eons. Consoles never have as much memory as the developers want.

I am no game developer, but at least a developer, and this numbers look awfull wrong to me. 60 MB code, compiled, in the ram? Only 120 MB for the textures? Thats not much. Sorry but I think all things you mentioned are way to high and the textures are way to low.

 

Textures, sound, and animation (a lot of the things that can be made lower-quality easily) are usually compressed as well.  120MB of textures is a lot more texture data than 30M 32-bit RGBA values, in other words.  My numbers are pretty close -- The textures might take up some additional memory (like part of the 60 extra megs I mentioned), but not as much as you might think.

I should add that, if the texture/animation/sound data is compressed, it requires some CPU horsepower to decompress and utilize each frame... another gotcha for the Wii, relative to the PS3/360 -- in order to process the data fast enough the Wii not only needs the data to be smaller, but in some cases might require less efficient compression than the more powerful consoles.

The Wii will always have great exclusives.  It will never share games experiences with the other consoles, but that doesn't mean it won't have great games -- obviously it does.  Downporting to it is kinda pointless, in that its so difficult, that developers are always better off making a game focused solely on the Wii's strengths, instead of trying to shove a game that uses the "big" consoles' strengths onto the Wii.

 

 

Your general numbers are right but a few things are off.

Remember the PS3 only has 256 Mb + 256Mb for graphics ( most of it is going to be texture)

20 M for the sound, I would be hardly surprised if sound took more than a couple Mb honestly, it's uncompressed on the fly and played like that, there's no sound buffering per say in memory, nothing significant at least.

60Mb Physics/Collision data is mighty high too. The way it's handled is the game has the Visualization tree in memory and it's used for Physics/Collision too.

Of course.  These numbers will vary *vastly* from title to title... my point was more to illustrate that memory isn't just "textures" or things that are easily reduced in quality to make the game fit.  A game which is "room based" will have a load less collision geometry loaded at once than a game with outdoor environments, for example.

Lets revise my texture number and say it includes the extra 60MB I had for "misc" data, and another 10MB (so 190MB total), just to fill the 250-ish M of VRAM along with the geometry.  The basic issue hasn't really changed, in spite of that revision.

 Unlike textures, sound, and animations, the other stuff can't just be compressed away (usually), and even using compression taxes the CPUs/GPUs on the higher end machines... the Wii would have to overcome that hurdle as well as quality reduction, just as a start.



HappySqurriel on 01 July 2008
Mifely said:
Just_Ben said:
Mifely said:

Do all Wii owners imagine that they purchased a console that will, someday, be able to play all the HD console games, merely with a minor loss in texture quality? Textures take a fair chunk of memory, yes, but... its hardly the sole contributor to the memory footprint of an application like GTA4 or AC. Lemme throw up a sample memory budget for a run-of-the-mill HD game:

* 30-60 MB -- OS (I think the Wii has a much smaller OS)
* 4 MB -- screen buffers (easy to shrink if you lose HD)
* 60 MB -- code and global data (next to impossible to shrink without changing the game)
* 30 MB -- game objects (next to impossible to shrink -- see above)
* 20 MB -- animations (easy to shrink... but with substantial quality loss)
* 60 MB -- physics/collision data (pretty hard to shrink without serious level changes, which means you're re-doing all the content)
* 120 MB -- textures (easy to shrink, acceptable quality loss, IMO)
* 60 MB -- visual geometry (kinda hard to shrink, but somewhat doable, depending on artist skills and tools... and time)
* 20 MB -- sound (easy to shrink if you lower quality and compress like crazy... maybe)
* 20 MB -- AI navigational data (pretty dang hard to shrink without really messing up the AI and re-doing the content)
* ~60 MB -- misc crap I forgot (most stuff is usually much harder to shrink than textures)

Now fit that on the 64+27MB of the Wii, after accounting for, I would hope, 8MB or less for the Wii's OS. You come out with a completely different game, that is also lame compared to its HD counterpart(s).

And yes, HD cross-platform games ALWAYS use ALL the memory available. I don't think I've ever heard of a HD game that didn't have to squeeze into its platform(s) memory budget at some point in its development cycle. This has been true for... eons. Consoles never have as much memory as the developers want.

I am no game developer, but at least a developer, and this numbers look awfull wrong to me. 60 MB code, compiled, in the ram? Only 120 MB for the textures? Thats not much. Sorry but I think all things you mentioned are way to high and the textures are way to low.

 

Textures, sound, and animation (a lot of the things that can be made lower-quality easily) are usually compressed as well.  120MB of textures is a lot more texture data than 30M 32-bit RGBA values, in other words.  My numbers are pretty close -- The textures might take up some additional memory (like part of the 60 extra megs I mentioned), but not as much as you might think.

I should add that, if the texture/animation/sound data is compressed, it requires some CPU horsepower to decompress and utilize each frame... another gotcha for the Wii, relative to the PS3/360 -- in order to process the data fast enough the Wii not only needs the data to be smaller, but in some cases might require less efficient compression than the more powerful consoles.

The Wii will always have great exclusives.  It will never share games experiences with the other consoles, but that doesn't mean it won't have great games -- obviously it does.  Downporting to it is kinda pointless, in that its so difficult, that developers are always better off making a game focused solely on the Wii's strengths, instead of trying to shove a game that uses the "big" consoles' strengths onto the Wii.

 

Honestly, if the actuall code and global data when loaded into memory takes up more than (about) 8MB you're a crappy developer or using an inappropriate language for developing a game ...

Most memory usage in a videogame is made up of 3D objects, their associated textures, as well as sound, music and video files; all of which would be (greatly) reduced in size if you're targeting a videogame with the graphical and sound capabilities of the Wii. Skeletal animation takes up a bit of memory, but its growth in memory usage has not grown as dramatically as geometry or textures since its initial introduction in the late 90s; AI memory usage is tiny being that it is (typically) made up of a set of small textfiles that are for scripting, physics is also takes up a tiny ammount of memory being that you're creating a collision detection frame and associating a couple of parameters to it, and navigational points are (typically) represented as a vertex that is attached to other navigation points with a set of edges and I would question any developer who used more than 128k on a level in path-finding data.



Mifely on 01 July 2008
HappySqurriel said:
Mifely said:
Just_Ben said:
Mifely said:

Do all Wii owners imagine that they purchased a console that will, someday, be able to play all the HD console games, merely with a minor loss in texture quality? Textures take a fair chunk of memory, yes, but... its hardly the sole contributor to the memory footprint of an application like GTA4 or AC. Lemme throw up a sample memory budget for a run-of-the-mill HD game:

* 30-60 MB -- OS (I think the Wii has a much smaller OS)
* 4 MB -- screen buffers (easy to shrink if you lose HD)
* 60 MB -- code and global data (next to impossible to shrink without changing the game)
* 30 MB -- game objects (next to impossible to shrink -- see above)
* 20 MB -- animations (easy to shrink... but with substantial quality loss)
* 60 MB -- physics/collision data (pretty hard to shrink without serious level changes, which means you're re-doing all the content)
* 120 MB -- textures (easy to shrink, acceptable quality loss, IMO)
* 60 MB -- visual geometry (kinda hard to shrink, but somewhat doable, depending on artist skills and tools... and time)
* 20 MB -- sound (easy to shrink if you lower quality and compress like crazy... maybe)
* 20 MB -- AI navigational data (pretty dang hard to shrink without really messing up the AI and re-doing the content)
* ~60 MB -- misc crap I forgot (most stuff is usually much harder to shrink than textures)

Now fit that on the 64+27MB of the Wii, after accounting for, I would hope, 8MB or less for the Wii's OS. You come out with a completely different game, that is also lame compared to its HD counterpart(s).

And yes, HD cross-platform games ALWAYS use ALL the memory available. I don't think I've ever heard of a HD game that didn't have to squeeze into its platform(s) memory budget at some point in its development cycle. This has been true for... eons. Consoles never have as much memory as the developers want.

I am no game developer, but at least a developer, and this numbers look awfull wrong to me. 60 MB code, compiled, in the ram? Only 120 MB for the textures? Thats not much. Sorry but I think all things you mentioned are way to high and the textures are way to low.

 

Textures, sound, and animation (a lot of the things that can be made lower-quality easily) are usually compressed as well.  120MB of textures is a lot more texture data than 30M 32-bit RGBA values, in other words.  My numbers are pretty close -- The textures might take up some additional memory (like part of the 60 extra megs I mentioned), but not as much as you might think.

I should add that, if the texture/animation/sound data is compressed, it requires some CPU horsepower to decompress and utilize each frame... another gotcha for the Wii, relative to the PS3/360 -- in order to process the data fast enough the Wii not only needs the data to be smaller, but in some cases might require less efficient compression than the more powerful consoles.

The Wii will always have great exclusives.  It will never share games experiences with the other consoles, but that doesn't mean it won't have great games -- obviously it does.  Downporting to it is kinda pointless, in that its so difficult, that developers are always better off making a game focused solely on the Wii's strengths, instead of trying to shove a game that uses the "big" consoles' strengths onto the Wii.

 

Honestly, if the actuall code and global data when loaded into memory takes up more than (about) 8MB you're a crappy developer or using an inappropriate language for developing a game ...

Most memory usage in a videogame is made up of 3D objects, their associated textures, as well as sound, music and video files; all of which would be (greatly) reduced in size if you're targeting a videogame with the graphical and sound capabilities of the Wii. Skeletal animation takes up a bit of memory, but its growth in memory usage has not grown as dramatically as geometry or textures since its initial introduction in the late 90s; AI memory usage is tiny being that it is (typically) made up of a set of small textfiles that are for scripting, physics is also takes up a tiny ammount of memory being that you're creating a collision detection frame and associating a couple of parameters to it, and navigational points are (typically) represented as a vertex that is attached to other navigation points with a set of edges and I would question any developer who used more than 128k on a level in path-finding data.

I agree that shovelware and puzzle games definately fit your criteria.  The OP was asking about games like GTA4 and MGS4, however, which just don't fit into the bucket that you describe, I'm afraid.  If you don't like the details on the numbers I scribbled down, lets just pretend that we can get away with:

PS3 or 360: 256M textures + screenbuffers + geometry, 256M of OS+code+gamedata

Wii: 27M textures + screenbuffers + geometry, 64M of OS+code+gamedata

 

That's a 9.5:1 ratio, and a 4:1 ratio.  Lets say the 9.5:1 can be reduced in quality to an "acceptable" degree.  I'm saying that the 4:1 part is not really reduceable without changing the game in a really un-fun way.

The Wii is better off with exclusive titles, in my opinion.  And um... the publishers and developers seem to agree with me.

 



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pearljammer on 01 July 2008
myfazz said:
The Ghost of RubangB said:
GTA3 and FF10 have been ported back to NES. I don't see why MGS4 and GTA4 can't be.

Expect someone to come in and say that the difference between Wii and PS3 is bigger than the difference between NES and PS2.

 

My, my. Quite negative and pessimistic aren't we?

Anyhow, I agree with most here that yes, most games could be done on the Wii. Both in terms of gameplay and graphics. The only concern I would have is the potential loss of atmosphere, but I don't think the technical difference is enough to really erode the atmosphere much, if at at all (as opposed to the examples provided by Rubang).

 

 



javierdacosta on 01 July 2008

I think so, but it would be like playing GTA3 or MGS3 not 4. And I don't think that the publishers are going to spend so much money on a hardcore game when the platform is oriented in a different way.



javierdacosta on 01 July 2008

What you are saying is that the software companies really enjoy making crapy games??????????? I don't think so, they have treied but its not easy or as easy as on a PS3 or 360



javierdacosta on 01 July 2008

I think with the necessary downgrading anything would be able to be develop for sega master system... of course it would look like a sega master system game



.:Dark Prince:. on 01 July 2008
colonelstubbs said:
MGS4 on the wii would be quite frankly, embarassing


A Wii version would look at least a bit better than this:

Is that "embarassing" ?