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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
javierdacosta said:
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

 

LOL... awesome.  Humor and truth, all rolled into one golden quote.  I salute you, javierdacosta.



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Just_Ben 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. 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.

 

Well yes, they are compressed on disk. There will be in an "inteligent" format in ram. You need to rescale them, they can't be that compressed for that. I still say that textures take up the most ram in HD games and way less on wii games, thanks to resolution.60MB is hell lot of a source code. GTA:SA for my PC has 14 MB code size on my PC(Harddrive). . And thats with a copy right protection system and linking to direct x. I takes 20 MB ram for source code (no X bit in RAM). My personal guess is, console code should be a little bit more efficient. So the sourcecode of a complex code should take 10-20MB.

But me personal agrees 100% on the bolded part ;) But the question of the OP is "... games like ...." so developed for the Wii, but from the "look n feel" like, at least that whats I understand. I say Galaxy showed that there is a lot possible on the Wii, if you know how to use it (and you can optimize a lot thanks to the lower resolution). Wii games can look pretty good, at least on my TV, you just have to go more on the "comic" side rather then the "realistic" side ;)

 



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rajendra82 on 01 July 2008
Mifely said:

The fact that the Wii has 1/4th the main memory (and not anywhere near that of video RAM) of the HD consoles is really what prevents these kinds of titles from showing up on it.

Its easy to knock down the graphics a notch or three. Fitting a game that barely fits into 512 MB (256Main/256Video -- I know the X360 can draw the line elsewhere, but this is how it lines up for cross platform games, most likely), into 91 MB (64Main/27Video)... that's not so easy.

 

Dare I say... so hard that it demands the game change fundamentally, and thus the publishers won't do it, and likely Nintendo won't allow it, unless the game is nearly as good looking on the Wii as it is on the HD platforms.  Nintendo doesn't want side-by-side comparisons if the other platforms are going to look better.  I would wager heavily that shipping a game cross-platform and including the Wii means that you make the Wii look pretty dang good next to the HD consoles, or you lose the Wii deal.

 

The XBOX360/PS3 display resolution maxes out at 1080P, while Wii maxes out at 480P.  If you divide the pixel count of each resolution you get the following relationship:

(1920 x 1080) / (720 x 480) = 6

If you multiply the 91MB of RAM on the Wii by 6, you get 546MB.  In other words, Wii should have enough RAM to do the job it is given.



fazz on 01 July 2008

For everyone that is talking about Wii's RAM... it uses an UMA just like the 360, therefore any part of the RAM, be it the A or the B, can be used for anything the developer wants. And the OS runs on the 512MB of internal flash memory, not on the RAM.

Ok, you can continue *gets popcorn and watches*



noname2200 on 01 July 2008
mrstickball said:
I guess my simple question would be that if it's possible, why aren't the developers cashing in on the Wii's sales and porting every single PS360 game to the Wii?

 

http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008/02/04/why-2k-games-pulled-the-plug-on-the-wiis-civilization-revolution/

"What I learned last week from Lewis was that, like many Wii releases in the last year or so, the Wii SKU was tacked on after the machine became a surprise success. “CivRev was originally a 360/PS3 project and was in development for over a year before the Wii/DS platforms were added, largely because we saw the success of those platforms and a lot of people (including myself) were very excited about them,” said Lewis in an e-mail to Multiplayer. But there was a bigger challenge: working on a Wii version required a completely new set of graphics and a very different control interface.

“All of our assets were originally created with the 360/PS3 in mind. In order to bring them to the Wii, a great deal of work would have to go into making those assets look appropriate on Nintendo’s system. If we had started the project with all four platforms in mind, it is far more likely that we would not have put the Wii version of CivRev on hold,” said Lewis."

 

So add in the fact that the Wii's only overcome the "fad" stigma a few months back, and that the development cycle is about two years, and I think it'll be another year or so until we start seeing more and more cross-platform titles for the system. Mind you, I fully expect the Wii version to mostly be handled by a separate team (Force Unleashed, Sonic Unleashed, Alone in the Dark, etc.) but I do expect that they will come.



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NJ5 on 01 July 2008
fazz said:
For everyone that is talking about Wii's RAM... it uses an UMA just like the 360, therefore any part of the RAM, be it the A or the B, can be used for anything the developer wants. And the OS runs on the 512MB of internal flash memory, not on the RAM.

Ok, you can continue *gets popcorn and watches*

What? Is that flash memory fast enough to execute code directly from it? I'd think the code gets copied to RAM before execution (perhaps overlaid to save memory).

 



My Mario Kart Wii friend code: 2707-1866-0957

fazz on 01 July 2008
NJ5 said:
fazz said:
For everyone that is talking about Wii's RAM... it uses an UMA just like the 360, therefore any part of the RAM, be it the A or the B, can be used for anything the developer wants. And the OS runs on the 512MB of internal flash memory, not on the RAM.

Ok, you can continue *gets popcorn and watches*

What? Is that flash memory fast enough to execute code directly from it? I'd think the code gets copied to RAM before execution (perhaps overlaid to save memory).

Well, that's what the SDK says.



noname2200 on 01 July 2008
.:Dark Prince:. said:
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" ?

 

You know it be true.



Mifely on 01 July 2008

Let me illustrate a different perspective for those who still believe that the Wii can have games like MGS4 and GTA4 for the PS3/X360.

Lets say you all live in a wonderful new place... lets call it WiiAwesomeLand (WAL for short). In WAL, all Wiis have not 1, but 4 processors, and have 6 times the memory that Wiis in other lands do. Since Wiis in other lands can run GTA4 and MGS4 nearly as well as the other consoles of its generation do, the WAL Wii has special games made just for it, that... well... are AWESOME, because the WAL Wii walks all over the Wii of the other places where you don't live.

Not only is the WAL Wii capable of performing nearly to the specs of our own X360 and PS3 with *just one processor and 1/6th the RAM*, but since it has much more processing power, and the same amount of RAM, its games are practically indistinguishable from reality!

WiiAwesomeLand... pure Nintendo paradise. The same power, yet WAY better... because yeah, its sold by Nintendo (designed by IBM of course, who also did the other consoles).

Does that make anything clearer?



leo-j on 01 July 2008
.:Dark Prince:. said:
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" ?

Id doubt it would even look that good, the AI, FR,Resolution, everything would have to be downgraded severley. MGS4 isnt just pretty graphics, it has huge environments, amazing AI, and a very steady framerate. Which I believe the XBOX 1 could only dream of running with ps2 graphics.

 



 

mM