Support NeoGAF

[Hero of Legend]

I got confused, I guess Revelations isn't AC3, nor was Brotherhood.

Ubi Quebec and other Ubi studios did help out with both of those though.

 

[watershed]

A multiplat AC game comes out every year, though, so I'm worried that Wii U will end up with a spinoff of lower quality than the "real" one come from Montreal next year.

Also, I really don't trust Ubi on Nintendo-exclusive ACs after AC: Lost Legacy (3DS) went vaporware before we got anything beyond a title.
.

Maybe its the same game moved from the 3ds to the wii u. I believe ubi quabec was the team working on that game as well.

 

[AceBandage]

Maybe its the same game moved from the 3ds to the wii u. I believe ubi quabec was the team working on that game as well.

Don't even joke about that...

 

[Athletic_Werewolf]

I think that the GPU will be somewhere in between the mobile R770 and the Reptar 500. That is of course if the casing can handle the heat of Reptar's fire breath. It would be a tough decision for Nintendo because Reptar is not as good at shading as he used to be, but I feel like a lab-made heavily modified Reptar 500 could handle current generation shading. We can speculate, but I guess we won't really know anything until we know how many Chips Reptar can eat....

.....CAN I JUST KNOW TEH DUCT TAPE??

 

[walking fiend]

did you watch that whole video? Did you see the smoke effects? Actually, a big bulletpoint of the Frostbyte 2 engine according to DICE is the ability for them to put in virtually unlimited light sources at no cost and still have alot of particle physics, destruction, etc.

yes, but I judged it based on what I saw at 50 secs till around 20 secs afterward, the rest didn't have a similar settings to zelda, and I couldn't tell if the lighting was that good, the same that I couldn't tell if texture/geometry was good in LoS since it was too dark.

It looks really good anyway, I'm not telling it doesn't, I actually really like it, it has the best graphic of any "game" I have ever seen.

walking fiend: you have no idea what you are talking about. No clue whatsoever.

I don't know technical stuff and I don't want to argue over them, I confessed this much.

I believe the games that "look" this good don't exist. I haven't "seen" otherwise yet either. anyway, It seems technically, at least the Japanese Garden has everything going on too.

Radiosity is seen in the garden tech demo, no question though. It's essentially the phenomenon where if you light a colored surface, that surface will radiate the color of that surface. Tesselation, from what I understand is just the ability to scale polygons though working down with a tesselated pattern of polygons, but these are both things that are very much on the level of modern PCs.

I see, thanks.

 

[BurntPork]

Don't even joke about that...

This. We want both games, dammit!

 

[hellclerk]

yes, but I judged it based on what I saw at 50 secs till around 20 secs afterward, the rest didn't have a similar settings to zelda, and I couldn't tell if the lighting was that good, the same that I couldn't tell if texture/geometry was good in LoS since it was too dark.

It looks really good anyway, I'm not telling it doesn't, I actually really like it, it has the best graphic of any "game" I have ever seen.

Except the first video is an ACTUAL game, and the geometry has to account for procedural destruction. The other technical stuff is pretty apparent too with the great volumetric fog and smoke effects. If you can't keep up with the technical discussion though, you probably shouldn't be a part of it in the first place. For what Battlefield 3 and the Frostbyte 2 engine practically show, it's more impressive than the very impressive WiiU tech demos in alot of different areas. This isn't a knock against the WiiU, it's just that in order to get all of those features at a steady clip, you need a thoroughly modern, and very hot CPU, something the WiiU will not have for matters of practicality and price. Don't fret though, since the tech demos look fantastic and knowing Nintendo will probably be feasible in real time. So let's just wait and see, shall we?

 

[Risk Breaker]

uh...what? cuz that's what I said how?

I thought you were saying that both Samaritan en Zelda/Garden were both unimpressive to you because... well, you said the Samaritan thing was unimpressive and he was talking about the Zelda/Garden ones. What did you mean then? If you don't want to explain fine, it's nothing of importance anyway.

 

[blu]

did you watch that whole video? Did you see the smoke effects? Actually, a big bulletpoint of the Frostbyte 2 engine according to DICE is the ability for them to put in virtually unlimited light sources at no cost and still have alot of particle physics, destruction, etc.

Unfortunately, there does not exist such tech today. What FB2 does is deferred shading, which does allow for a significant jump in the number of light sources, but has its associated costs, and has been around for, well, a long time. KZ2 used it to a good effect.

For the record, I'm not dissing FB2 - i think it's some impressive tech, but the deferred shading in it is not what i'd commend it for.

 

[Jim E. Rossler]

Except the first video is an ACTUAL game, and the geometry has to account for procedural destruction. The other technical stuff is pretty apparent too with the great volumetric fog and smoke effects. If you can't keep up with the technical discussion though, you probably shouldn't be a part of it in the first place. For what Battlefield 3 and the Frostbyte 2 engine practically show, it's more impressive than the very impressive WiiU tech demos in alot of different areas. This isn't a knock against the WiiU, it's just that in order to get all of those features at a steady clip, you need a thoroughly modern, and very hot CPU, something the WiiU will not have for matters of practicality and price. Don't fret though, since the tech demos look fantastic and knowing Nintendo will probably be feasible in real time. So let's just wait and see, shall we?

Consoles are more efficient than pc. Could you get Gears 3 graphics out of a 2005 256mb gpu?

 

[FreeMufasa]

I wonder if we'll see PS3/360 collections for the WiiU, similar to what they're doing with PS2 games for the PS3. It's the only way i'll buy them.

Bioshock 1/2, AssCreed 1/2/Bro, GTAIV complete, Mass Effect 1/2/3 etc.

 

[Kunan]

also that tech demo (the Zelda one) was nothing stunning from a technical standpoint

I thought the lighting was stunning, particularly on his neck and face.

What makes you think he doesn't have a dev kit?

There's also Ken Levine's hesitation, and the BG&E2 guy.

To be fair, the club of things that make Ken Levine hesitate is fairly large lol. The good news is that when he stops hesitating, we will get a Wii U port of his next game and a new entry for 3DS.

 

[Anasui Kishibe]

Posted yet? (This seems to be the general Wii U thread, I wasn't sure if this deserves its own thread):

http://nintendoeverything.com/68397/

Apparently Ubi Quebec is doing AssCreed Wii U, Montreal is the one that does the series normally, so could this be evidence towards it being a brand-new, exclusive AC game for Wii U?

meh, it will be a remake/remastered game at best. i just cant see Ubi putting all this faith in the U with an exclusive of this magnitude

 

[lednerg]

At the end of the day, it all boils down to what the games are and if they're fun. And by 'fun', I obviously mean Shader Model 4.1 at the very least.

 

[bgassassin]

Sorry I'm sometimes dense and try not too use too much induced information to parse posts. I read what is there and try to make minimal assumptions, because these can be false. As I said before I not necessarily arguing the points, but much more the presentation.

Well I've enjoyed the debate personally and it filled in a lot of gaps both from things presented on your end and from my own thoughts causing me to look up stuff from questions that I formed. I think I have hit the point of understanding that I am looking for so this will be it from me and you are more than welcome to have the last response. I've concluded we're virtually on the same page with the difference being that you prefer hard facts, while not wanting speculation presented as facts. And I'm pursuing reasoned out educated guess and not attempting to go beyond that because information available does not allow that. And this is probably why you are having such a hard time with the presentation, because you want it to be something it is not designed to be. Which also seems to be explained by your career.

Shit, I think how anal I am stems from having to deal with too many academic papers that are trying to pass BS by you.

1. (underlined above by itself) Your conclusions have to be convincing though. That depends on the evidence that you supply and the knowledge of your audience. It's what would differentiate a weak induction from a strong one. IMO the evidence was not strong enough for the conclusion.

2. (bold above) A new build of what? The rendering engine? sure fine I'll give you that. But for what I consider a game engine that would make up maybe 20% of it. I wouldn't call 20% constructing something new. Now again, remember, I'm not arguing that they won't build a new engine. Something that has changed with the new hardware that is going to be much more fundamental is the level of parallelism exposed. Multiple CPU threads and lots of CPU cores (depending on how much these are exposed to general compute/stuff that isn't synthesizing an image). Effectively making use of parallelism is a much, much bigger beast than the evolution of shader model from 0 to 3. Why? 1. Because in the case of shaders they can still mostly fit into the concept of geometry transformation and fragment shading, which you have even with model 0. So you are not changing the fundamental operations and the pipelining concept your engine might be based on could still be perfectly relevant: just update it a bit to add binding of the programmable parts. 2. a paradigm shift from having mostly sequential execution to algorithms that most be conceived to expose more parallelism to be effective is currently a big issue with software development. It requires a different way of thinking about things, and producing such algorithms is much harder. Sorry I don't have time to find specific resources for that (talks at AMD's Fusion 11 conference might be good -- C++ AMP -- and you can always start with (wikipedia).

And because of your career I wanted to target this first. That helps bring things into perspective why you are wanting the type of information you do other than just being the nature of your character. As for the two points

1. That style of reasoning has been considered flawed by some anyway, so you are looking perfection that will not happen, nor have I portrayed that it will give perfection. However it's still applicable in situations like this or else it wouldn't even have a definable existence.

2. I had already come to the conclusion that it's subjective anyway. Using the example you gave, a 20% change in something might be a revision to one person and new to another. That could be because of the amount of change, or where that amount of change might occur. Changing the rendering engine might be all it takes for someone to want to call it new. Another person might call it new just because they added a few more available textures.

Plus I'm left kinda scratching my head because the "Shader Model 0.0" was more of a joke and it feels you took that seriously. But if we're looking at if from the perspective you give there then why call a car new if it still has four tires, seats, a steering wheel, an engine and other parts reused throughout the decades?

Sorry I fail to see how the following sentences support the task being "hard". If you're saying you have to do something as opposed to nothing to get it working, then I wouldn't call that "hard". Also, particularly when it come to assets, I can say for a fact that that is a gigantuan amount of work that goes into building content pipelines. These depend on two things: 1. the producer and 2. the consumer. In our case 1. the producer is a various set of tools like Maya for models/animations, Audio composition software and what have you. These software suites have a much more long-lived development cycle and typically change incrementally. 2. The consumer is the game engine that needs to be able to understand the assets and process them properly. Although the refresh cycle of these engines might be more dramatic than the producer software, what assets are and how they are described usually doesn't. Also no matter what your rendering special effects are, a mesh is a mesh so to say, and it's description is fairly stable. 90% of a game (if not more) is assets and optimizing the asset management, making sure you get the most out of your artists is important. All of this is to support the following proposition: developers are likely to separate out how an asset is managed from other components of the engine, such as the rendering engine. And that is to support: they are likely to reuse, without loss of functionality or "power" their asset pipeline. So finally, I would rather say that the task of using "old assets" with a "new engine" is likely not "hard".

LOL. That's a long paragraph that will get no disagreement on my part. The problem is it still misses that I said "hard" figuratively, not literally (I think you still stopped short of that part). So while a very good point with lots of knowledge I can use, it's not addressing the context I use hard making a good point unfortunately irrelevant from a debating standpoint.

And you are also missing my point (most likely because I don't express it properly enough). I'm not saying the capabilities of UE2 vs UE3 aren't different and that running a game on one vs the other is not going to "gimp" it. I was talking about how fundamentally different Engine6 is as opposed to Engine5 (using UE as an illustration, not that I'm going to spend half a day googling and contrasting their internals): say 90% of the Engine6 uses the same code as Engine5 will you call it "new"? The most obvious changes from a users point of view are the graphics, but that is only one component of the engine. The point is that you don't know what the capability of Nintendo's engine is, nor how much needs to change for it to completely exploit the capabilities of the new hardware.

Ok, because it was feeling like you were debating something different from what I was saying. As for Nintendo's engine, it was never said nor implied that I know what it's totally capable of. However through reasoning from the available evidence, I believe there is enough information to make a good educated guess of what it can do/has done. You just have to realize that there is no attempt to go beyond that because in the end this is all hypothetical. I can't tell you to go against your nature, but I can ask you just to bend it a little to accept the premise of all this not being an attempt prove the stated view(s) at 100% accuracy.

 

[rezuth]

meh, it will be a remake/remastered game at best. i just cant see Ubi putting all this faith in the U with an exclusive of this magnitude

They made a lot of money from Nintendo, of course they can.

 

[Anasui Kishibe]

They made a lot of money from Nintendo, of course they can.

yeah, with casual shit

 

[lednerg]

Wii was stuck in a vicious cycle of 1) not having 'hardcore' multi-plats, 2) which drove away 'hardcore' gamers 3) which led to it not getting 'hardcore' exclusives and 1) multi-plats. Wii U breaks that cycle by addressing the main reasons why it didn't get those multi-plats to begin with: namely the late 90's GPU tech and the lack of buttons on the controller. It's obviously already working since the major engine developers are already on board as well as some of the biggest franchises, most of which were completely absent on the Wii.

 

[bgassassin]

Yeah that cycle made Wii hit a wall very quickly. It was one of those things you won't quite know will happen till it happens.

yeah, with casual shit

Imagine: Casualz

 

[lednerg]

Imagine: Casualz

DO NOT CLICK THIS

 

[bgassassin]

DO NOT CLICK THIS

Must... Not...

*click*

 

[Sammy Samusu]

That Assassins Creed is a multi-player game, isn't it obvious?

 

[Louis Cyphre]

Wii was stuck in a vicious cycle of 1) not having 'hardcore' multi-plats, 2) which drove away 'hardcore' gamers 3) which led to it not getting 'hardcore' exclusives and 1) multi-plats. Wii U breaks that cycle by addressing the main reasons why it didn't get those multi-plats to begin with: namely the late 90's GPU tech and the lack of buttons on the controller. It's obviously already working since the major engine developers are already on board as well as some of the biggest franchises, most of which were completely absent on the Wii.

So what happens in 1 to 3 years time and the Wii-U is now looking like the original Wii against the new systems? Will the system once again get the watered down ports the hardcore crowd no longer wants?

Nintendo is in a tough position, they try hard to be distinct from the others while still being affordable and not selling their systems at a loss. It is very hard to coerce publishers to adapt to your philosophies unless the market goes that way, and that is exactly what Nintendo is again banking on. They want, or shall I say need, to get 3rd party publishers on-board and make the new controller a priority.

I find the Wii-U very interesting but I'm not sure how widely adopted the developers will utilize what makes it unique.

 

[AceBandage]

So what happens in 1 to 3 years time and the Wii-U is now looking like the original Wii against the new systems? Will the system once again get the watered down ports the hardcore crowd no longer wants?

Nintendo is in a tough position, they try hard to be distinct from the others while still being affordable and not selling their systems at a loss. It is very hard to coerce publishers to adapt to your philosophies unless the market goes that way, and that is exactly what Nintendo is again banking on. They want, or shall I say need, to get 3rd party publishers on-board and make the new controller a priority.

I find the Wii-U very interesting but I'm not sure how widely adopted the developers will utilize what makes it unique.

Completely impossible. There is no scenario in which the PS4/720 will be anywhere close to as powerful compared to the Wii U as the PS3/360 was to the Wii.
Not only that, but because the Wii now has programmable shaders, engines can be ported down with little loss in quality.

 

[bgassassin]

So what happens in 1 to 3 years time and the Wii-U is now looking like the original Wii against the new systems? Will the system once again get the watered down ports the hardcore crowd no longer wants?

LOL. The belief that will never die.

EDIT: Fixed to avoid confusion.

 

[AceBandage]

LOL. The belief that will never die.

The Witcher 2 and BF3 are both being ported to systems far weaker than the Wii U, and those are games that push high end PCs....

 

[pieatorium]

The Witcher 2 and BF3 are both being ported to systems far weaker than the Wii U, and those are games that push high end PCs....

Ive' been out of the loop on wii U rumours for a week (lol) has there been info on how much more powerful it will be compared to the current HD systems?

 

[Instro]

Ive' been out of the loop on wii U rumours for a week (lol) has there been info on how much more powerful it will be compared to the current HD systems?

Nope, nothing new. New dev kits should be going out next month or something so I'd assume we'll get some new leaks then.

 

[AceBandage]

Ive' been out of the loop on wii U rumours for a week (lol) has there been info on how much more powerful it will be compared to the current HD systems?

According to that guy from Dice, "far" more powerful.

 

[pieatorium]

According to that guy from Dice, "far" more powerful.

Eh, why are they so bad at giving good leaks lol.

 

[Plinko]

LOL. The belief that will never die.

I'd actually argue his point as well simply based on the fact that Xbox 360 and PS3 were HD and the Wii was only SD.

We won't see a notable difference in graphics and visual clarity like that for a decade or more. They'll definitely be more powerful than Wii U and I'm sure GAFers will have no problem noticing the differences. The general public, however, will probably be another story.

 

[Plinko]

According to that guy from Dice, "far" more powerful.

Where is this quote? I must have missed it.

 

[bgassassin]

The Witcher 2 and BF3 are both being ported to systems far weaker than the Wii U, and those are games that push high end PCs....

Uh Ace. I'm referring to the other guy. You should know where I stand by now.

 

[Instro]

According to that guy from Dice, "far" more powerful.

This is old no? I thought those comments were made during E3? Unless he' said something more recently?

 

[AceBandage]

Didn't say it wouldn't compete with current gen.

But I know how much RAM the WiiU has and I have an idea of how much "we" developers would like to see in the next Xbox and PS4, and they differ a lot.

Still, the WiiU will be the most powerful console out there when it's released, BY FAR!
But I wonder for how long...
Nintendo cant go and compete with MS and Sony i think because they want to keep their console cheaper as with the Wii.
BUT, I might also be wrong and this is Nintendos real hunt after the hardcore MS and Sony players.

And I agree with the controller, it looks amazing, but I dont see you playing BF3 on it (switching like they did in the rpg they showed) but maybe have the minimap up with chat support etc, that would be awesome!

The future will tell =)

http://www.gustavhalling.com/2011/06/08/wiiu-thoughts-nintendos-new-console/

Uh Ace. I'm referring to the other guy. You should know where I stand by now.

Sorry, it's late and I'm tired man.

 

[BurntPork]

Ive' been out of the loop on wii U rumours for a week (lol) has there been info on how much more powerful it will be compared to the current HD systems?

According to possible leaked dev kit specs from a GAFfer, the underclocked dev kit used up until very recently is about 3x as powerful.

 

[Truth101]

Where is this quote? I must have missed it.

"Didn't say it wouldn't compete with current gen.

But I know how much RAM the WiiU has and I have an idea of how much "we" developers would like to see in the next Xbox and PS4, and they differ a lot.

Still, the WiiU will be the most powerful console out there when it's released, BY FAR!
But I wonder for how long...
Nintendo cant go and compete with MS and Sony i think because they want to keep their console cheaper as with the Wii.
BUT, I might also be wrong and this is Nintendos real hunt after the hardcore MS and Sony players.

And I agree with the controller, it looks amazing, but I dont see you playing BF3 on it (switching like they did in the rpg they showed) but maybe have the minimap up with chat support etc, that would be awesome!

The future will tell =)"

As a PC developer of course they are going to want all the RAM possible to be stuffed in a console, but even then he still admits the Wii U will be FAR more powerful than the PS3/360.

Spoiler

All my anger Ace, always beating me to the punch =[

 

[Plinko]

Oh yeah, forgot about that one. Thanks for re-posting.

 

[AceBandage]

Crytek wants 8 Gigs of RAM in consoles.
8!
That's insane! And if Dice thinks even like 4 or 6, I really think he's going to be disappointed.

 

[antonz]

I really expect 1.5GB of ram in the Wii U when all is said and done. Developers with heavy PC focus I can see being upset with that but in the end Its not that awful for a closed environment

I cant see Nintendo undercutting the memory in the GPU when the line is designed around 512MB. I guess they could get away with doubling system memory but it would be shortsighted to a degree.

The notions of consoles need 8GB of ram etc is absurd. That 8GB would operate like 12-16GB in a PC

 

[Truth101]

Crytek wants 8 Gigs of RAM in consoles.
8!
That's insane! And if Dice thinks even like 4 or 6, I really think he's going to be disappointed.

They want consoles to become PC's. =/

 

[bgassassin]

I'd actually argue his point as well simply based on the fact that Xbox 360 and PS3 were HD and the Wii was only SD.

We won't see a notable difference in graphics and visual clarity like that for a decade or more. They'll definitely be more powerful than Wii U and I'm sure GAFers will have no problem noticing the differences. The general public, however, will probably be another story.

Looks I shouldn't have used Ace's post for the reply. >_<

 

[AceBandage]

They want consoles to become PC's. =/

Overpriced consoles, at that.
I mean, how many PC games even use 4 Gigs fully? Very very few. Most can run on less.

 

[Plinko]

Looks I shouldn't have used Ace's post for the reply. >_<

LOL...looks like it.

 

[bgassassin]

Overpriced consoles, at that.
I mean, how many PC games even use 4 Gigs fully? Very very few. Most can run on less.

You see, it's the principal. There's principalities in the whole thing.

 

[kIdMuScLe]

correct me if I'm wrong but I thought having more than 2GB of RAM is kinda pointless since most PC games don't use that much RAM or something like that so wouldn't that be a waste in a console..... right?

 

[Veal]

Consoles are more efficient than pc. Could you get Gears 3 graphics out of a 2005 256mb gpu?

You probably could...if the game was coded just for that gpu. But that can't feasibly happen with todays tool sets and the need for compatibility.

 

[AceBandage]

correct me if I'm wrong but I thought having more than 2GB of RAM is kinda pointless since most PC games don't use that much RAM or something like that so wouldn't that be a waste in a console..... right?

Developers ALWAYS want more RAM. Always.
But it's just not practical. We're not going to see the leap that developers want on next gen consoles, simply because that leap hasn't even been made on PCs yet.

 

[BurntPork]

Crytek wants 8 Gigs of RAM in consoles.
8!
That's insane! And if Dice thinks even like 4 or 6, I really think he's going to be disappointed.

Crytek only wants that because it means they won't have to put work into plugging memory leaks. *looks at Crysis 1*

Also, remember that he said "minimum."

 

[kIdMuScLe]

Developers ALWAYS want more RAM. Always.
But it's just not practical. We're not going to see the leap that developers want on next gen consoles, simply because that leap hasn't even been made on PCs yet.

Yea, i know they would always ask for more RAM but at this point is just wishful thinking to be asking for more than 2GB-3GB of RAM right? Also, let's say that MS and/or Sony puts in 6GB of RAM in their next consoles. What would that mean to those games that are ported from consoles to PC?