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Unreal 3 Engine to Skip the Wii
Mark Rein, speaking with Chris Kohler and Game|Life, has stated that Epic's next-gen Unreal engine will never make it to the Wii. Touting the virtues of high-definition gaming, the 360, and the PS3, Rein said that their engine is simply not designed for Nintendo's hardware. He also quickly mentioned the upcoming deal between Epic and Square Enix: "It's definitely a challenge to convince Japanese developers to work with a third-party technology like ours. But Square Enix, they're the granddaddy. I'm hoping that'll be pulling the stopper out of the drain, and we'll gradually crack that nut. We've been looking to hire somebody in Japan, to be our representative there. " Update: 02/06 04:19 GMT by Z : Accidentally misattributed the interview to CVG when it was a Game|Life piece. Fixed. Also, Chris made sure to point out that a partner of Epic's is trying to get UE3 onto the Wii, so ... maybe someday?
No, its because the Wii's graphics card isn't capable of doing the kind of things that this engine is designed for, which is obviously delivering realistic graphics, which isn't the focus of the Wii. Seems abit stupid to gut the main feature out of the engine just to get it to work, only to have an engine equivalent of the previous generation.. I could be wrong, but didn't they say the Unreal 2 engine would work fine on the Wii?
Running a DX9/DX10-class game engine or graphics application on a DX7-class or DX8-class GPU is not remotely close to being as easy as 'compiling it for the Wii and the PS2'. No offense, but if you knew *anything* about game engines, you'd realize this. There are significant hurdles preventing an engine like Unreal 3 from running on hardware like the PS2 or Wii without being designed specifically for it in the first place.
The problem here is that UE3 was designed for a system with a modern graphics processor and fairly high end CPU. The Wii and PS2 have neither of these things, so UE3 simply won't run on them. Obviously, stuff like the previous Unreal Engine (used by Red Steel) runs fine on the Wii, so it's not as if the Wii can't run games. It just can't run UE3.
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Your 5 step process falls apart around #2. It's not as trivial as you imply and you make two assumptions that aren't justified.
In a nutshell:
The UE3 engine is heavily built around pixel shaders. Everything it does is based around shader support.
The Wii is not capable of doing pixel shaders. The hardware can't do it. Period.
Take away the shader support, and UE3 becomes no different than UE2. Note that UE2 does, in fact, support the Wii platform.
This is a hardware issue, it has pretty much nothing to do with Epic.