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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?
I am sure they will plenty of other engines for Wii. Maybe even a few just for it.
Half of writing history is hiding the truth.
"I'm hoping that'll be pulling the stopper out of the drain, and we'll gradually crack that nut."
Yeah, better jump under that bandwagon before the train leaves the station!
OMG! Wau!
Sorry, didn't realize they were only referring to the next-gen version of the engine. I know, I know, "Please read the summary before responding. It's fun. It's like reading, but ... of the summary."
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Huh? Nintendo came out said (and proved through actions) that the Wii was not about graphics, but gameplay. Why should it be a surprise that Epic took that to heart and decided not to invest in getting it's latest engine to run on underpowered hardware?
And really, is this a loss for Epic or Nintendo? If a killer game comes out using unreal 2 I think I'd still buy it.
I thought this was known back in August/September?
...
I swear I saw an interview saying that Red-Steel was an Unreal 2 Engine game and it was unlikely the Wii could support an Unreal 3 Engine game
The fact is that the Unreal 3 Engine was designed with a reasonably powerful GPU (probably in the Geforce 6800 range) and a reasonably powerful CPU (AMD X2 3800+ as a guess) in mind and the Wii simply isn't in the same league. The Wii should be able to handle the Doom 3, Unreal 2 and (maybe) the Source engine which are all solid game engines which should be good for several years.
"never make it to the Wii"
That sounds like a painful medical problem.
Monstar L
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?
What version of the Unreal engine didn't support "high def" resolutions?
Oh, that's right... None of them... Yet they all managed to support running at a lower resolution too. This is a huge load of marketing bullshit.
Besides, they'll change their mind and compile it for the Wii (and the PS2) as soon as not doing it costs them a licensing agreement. (Unless Microsoft or Sony is paying them actual cash to be High-Def only?)
So Epic wants to have a "representative" in Japan, but their newest engine doesn't support Wii? Doesn't Nintendo own the market over there?
This is not a troll. Anyway, who cares? The whole point of the Wii is not to deliver stunning movie-quality graphics. The point of the Wii is to change the way games are played. High end graphics are overrated anyway. Doom 3 and Quake 4 both have fantastic fx but the game play is not innovative and is boring. WarioWare for the Wii has minimal graphics, but IMHO, is very replayable. I know I'm sounding old here but I'm sick of the argument that graphics are everything. In other words, the PS3 and the Xbox 360 may render a piece of crap in high detail... capturing all the intricate details and using 16X anti-aliasing to render the post steam convecting off of it... but it still a piece of crap. I want to be able to play with that piece of crap... toss it around like bowling or in tennis. I can do this with the Wii and it smells fantastic.
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
It could be that Unreal 3 simply has too much overhead to be practical on GameCube, but I have my doubts about that. While the new-gen consoles are very powerful, it's not exactly like the Wii is a complete slouch in terms of processing power. Games tend to be fairly scalable by their very nature. After all, there's nothing that *demands* a certain number of polygons in a scene. I worked at a company that (in a different division) made kids games using the Unreal Engine. They even integrated a software-renderer for the inevitable compatibility problems that would crop up.
My guess is that, as alluded to, Epic felt that the market simply wasn't/wouldn't be there for a middleware engine. It could be that they were predicting the demise of Nintendo's new console, and simply guessed wrong.
If they suddenly realize there *is* a big middleware market, I'd guess you'll see a pretty quick about-turn. It's not all that hard to port an engine that already has proper abstraction layers in place (which Unreal3 surely has, being cross-platform). The GC was one of the more straight-forward systems to develop for, and I'd imagine the Wii is no different (although I'm not developing for it at this point).
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
1) Yes, but the latest version of Unreal is something else.
2) The Unreal Engine is designed for hardware with shaders. The Wii hardware doesn't have full-fledged shaders like the PS3 and 360 have. Even if Unreal 3 would run on the Wii, there would be no point. Without shaders, you couldn't do any of the fancy lighting and texture effects that Unreal 3 is designed to enable.
Ultimately, it's just Epic admitting that the Wii isn't designed for the kind of games that will use Unreal 3. And that's OK, Nintendo has its niche, Epic has theirs.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
You're forgetting the flip-side to that argument. There are a large category of games that are *expected* to look great. Zelda: TP got a lot of flack for looking last-gen, because people expect Zelda to both have great gameplay *and* look pretty. Licensing something like Unreal 3 frees a lot of developer resources to working on other things besides the graphics engine, allowing for better gameplay.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Exactly! I actually think the graphics on the Wii are _too_ flashy! All those polygons are detracting from my gameplay experience, when really they could satisfy me with simple cubes and squares to represent the players. Why not have Wario be a cube with a W on it, Link a green pyramid with an L, etc. And now seeing as they aren't going to have one of the industry standard engines on the Wii, well, we should probably reduce the expected level of graphics requirements that gamers want since getting anywhere will be that much harder. ...
Ok, I can't continue with that. But seriously, just because it doesn't have the "leading edge in graphics" doesn't mean it has no graphics, or is going to get along with stick figures. Its more powerful than the Gamecube, and the cube had some pretty nice looking games last generation, at least on par with the Xbox and PS2, and in many cases (personal opinion, of course), exceeded them. And yes, yes, the Wii is all about gameplay and not graphics, BUT getting to at least the bar set by the last gen is hard enough - the bar is only going to get higher. Line up a late gen PS1 game next to a late gen PS2 game (or N64 to GameCube). Its a pretty big difference. How do you get to that bar and possibly surpass it while still having lots of resources to focus on the gameplay? By having someone else do the work of course! That's where engines like Unreal come in - they do all the fancy shading techniques so you don't have to. You have extra costs in the terms of artists, but in your average shop the realities of the situation are artists and art techs are cheap, graphics engineers are not. Its a shame they're losing Unreal, which is a great engine. I don't know if Unreal2 is on the Wii, but it seems likely given the similarities to the GameCube.
To sum up: gameplay for graphics was a trade-off made by Nintendo to reduce costs for the system. Its not quite the same for gamedevs - you don't magically get a game thats more fun by firing all your graphics engineers and hiring 2x more designers. You still make models, textures, build sets, etc. Its at least as much work as it was last-gen. BUT those tasks can be done in parallel, and having the code partly done for you gets them completed faster.
Is anyone really surprised that UE3 won't run on the Wii?
I mean, far be it from me to drone on about hardware limitations, but the Wii wasn't even made for that kind of software. It's all about gameplay, man, the gameplay! When will you people learn that the ability to wave a stick around offers endless gameplay possibilities?!? You can pretend it's a sword or a bat or a racket or a longer stick or some bat/sword hybrid. A bword, if you will. The Wiimote responds to your every movement, duh. It then translates that movement into a general "the Wiimote is moving" signal which then triggers one of three generic sword-swinging animations. How can you not see the potential?
Seriously, though: there may be a shortage of horsepower for the Wii, but thankfully the world will never run out of people to say "Man that game would be soooo awesome using the Wiimote".
His point exactly - Zelda isn't a Nintendo exclusive for technical reasons, obviously..
And really, is this a loss for Epic or Nintendo? If a killer game comes out using unreal 2 I think I'd still buy it. I think you're missing the very obvious point: if Epic doesn't port the Unreal 3 engine to Wii, then that's Y games that won't be appearing on the Wii.
Here's how it works:
1). Publisher creates game for Xbox360 using Unreal 3 engine
2). Publisher realizes he can rework the control scheme, turn down the model polygon count and texture resolution, and recompile the code for the Wii engine at marginal extra development cost. The profit and revenue generated from hitting an extra market (of 10+ million consoles or however many Wii's are out there) far outweighs the porting cost.
3). Publisher sells video game for not only Xbox360, but Wii also
4). ???
5). Profit!
If the engine isn't there the Wii can't play the game.
The people who own wiis, or the target audience for wiis compared to the target audience of Unreal are like comparing Slayer fans to Radiohead fans, they're so far apart it's like night and day almost. I mean there's really no reason to have unreal on the wii when it's on every other platform. That said, there will be FPS titles on the wii and I'm sure a developer with a 3d engine developed for the wii will emerge as the defacto wii 3d engine soner or later, or a ported engine will take that place until something beter comes along. It obviously won't be able to compete graphically, but the gamers on the wii are looking forward to Mario Planet (or whatver it's called) or Metroid Prime to establish what we can come to expect from the wii in graphics as well as gameplay, we don't particuariuly care if unreal makes it to wii or not and we know the hardware isn't going to support Crysis or Company of Heroes really - but that's not the wii's niche anyways.
Gaming for over 25 years
Aiming the bow (or boomeraing, or whatever else) is much, much, better with a pointer than with an analog stick.
People who have never actually tried the system, and are just talking out their ass, tend to assume the Wii has nothing but motion sensing, but it's not so.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Ok so basically nobody is going to be able to make horrendously ugly "realistic" graphics that end up looking like a 12 year old made them in bryce and poser right?
Nintendo must be sweating bullets.
The new Wii controller isn't necessarily going to work with "traditional" games like Unreal. Red Steel for example was completely crap... even if you factor out the bad graphics and horrible voice acting, the gameplay itself was pretty lame *because of the controller*. For me at least, the Wiimote is going to supplant, not replace, the existing types of games out there. When GTA4 comes out I'll grab a PS3 or 360, but when friends come to visit I'll throw WarioWare up on the Wii for everyone to laugh until it hurts.
501 Not Implemented
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.
1) Calling its Texture Stages with Logical Operations a 'shader' is abusing the terminology. At best, it has a PSEUDO-pixel shader, like the DX7 style texture stages, not the PROPER DX8 pixel shaders.
2) The Wii doesn't have vertex shaders -- unless you write your own. Are you going to call CPU skinning a 'hardware vertex shader' ??
So it's not ridiculous to claim the Wii has no shaders. I agree with the gp "the Wii doesn't have full-fledged shaders" At best, it has 1/2 a pixel shader.
Or do we need to take this to the 'rvl.graphics' group?
I had the pleasure of hearing a speech from Epic at The Tokyo Games Show earlier this year (titled "Opportunities for Japanese Corporations in Middleware for Next-Generation Hardware"). While Sweeney did a good job of coming off as confident, but not overly so, in the Unreal engine itself. He was willing to offer the mostly Japanese audience a handful of reasons why their engine is and isn't the right way for companies to go, based on what sort of game you're trying to make. I could tell that the Japanese developers around me were on the same page as Sweeney, based on their gestures and the fact that they were actually taking notes about things that he said.
After that, Jay Wilbur decided to add a few words. Or rather, to be American. Now, don't get me wrong, I generally approve of being direct and selling your selling points, rather than mentioning that, yeah, our product isn't going to butter your toast every morning... BUT... when dealing with a Japanese audience, upfront honesty is the best way to go. Sweeney also had the "I'm roughly Japanese-sized" thing going for him. When rotund Wilbur stepped up to the plate, he set a bad tone by telling the rather humble but proud crowd of Japanese developers that "You need this engine". I heard one guy whisper to his friend, "Where does this guy think games started? Huh? *WE* __NEED__ them? Pfft." (in Japanese, so that's paraphrasing, of course)
What started as a good, solid discussion into the benefits of buying A game engine, ANY game engine, was quickly derailed into a product pitch for THEIR game engine. The thing is, Japanese companies, despite what modernizations have happened here, are still rather loyal when it comes to their big huge purchases. They'd rather go with someone they know, and I'm fairly certain that if Wilbur had just said nothing, or said much less than he did, and used much less arrogance and self-pimping in his speech, that the Japanese crowd would have gone home thinking, "You know, there's a company that's honest about their product, and that's willing to come all the way out here to persuade us that game engines are worth buying. We should seriously think about buying theirs". Instead, a lot of people left the room shaking their heads, muttering things about "Typical Americans. All talk. All about them. (etc)"
The thing about dealing with a foreign country is to go in and appreciate their background, their culture, and their style of work. To go in and trample all over their acheivements in an attempt to hock your wares just doesn't cut it.
Don't get me wrong, I've been labeled a nintendo fanboy by most people I know...
But red steel as an example of good game play? Give me a break. I own the title, and the controls outright suck. The FPS controls on a minigame in monkey ball are more responsive than red steel. From what I hear, far cry is a massive improvement, and of course we can expect metroid to be better still... but the controls in red steel are, to use the vernacular, teh suck.
I just played it for the first time on my friends 72" plasma, and the cursor was much more accurate than I'm used to (of course my tv is only a 28" LCD so it could have been that). I've played the new monkey ball too, and I thought the controls for that were pretty rough, but maybe if I play more I'll get better. I sucked at red steel, but thats mostly because I kept moving both hands at the same time when you need to gesture with them independently. Maybe I'm overconfident, but I think when I master the controls it'll go pretty smooth.
"Full-fledged" was the key-word there. The Gamecube has shaders, but they're a step above register combiners, and not the general processors that you find on modern GPUs. They have a lot more features than the register combiners found in NV20-class hardware, but they're not fully programmable the way the shaders on modern GPUs are. Modern GPUs have shaders with looping, procedure calls, and a full instruction set capable of supporting a C-like language. The Gamecube's TEV's are still oriented around rearranging fixed-function blocks of effects.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Zelda: TP does look great (I own it too). But I remember when I got Ocarina of Time, and was blown away by how it looked. When I got TP, I was like "oh, this is pretty", but I didn't have the "totally new experience" feeling I had with OoT.
My point is simply that graphics are part of the whole package. Think back to some of the great games Nintendo put out on the N64. Would Mario 64 have been quite as immersive if it had looked like the blocky, pixelated games on the PSX? No! Mario 64 had the whole package, it played great, and it looked incredible. In a lot of games, good gameplay can make up for mediocre graphics, but in a series like Zelda, where you're expecting 99% of everything, it hurts to not even be competitive in the graphics department.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
He said a *good* Wii joke.
You're right about the XBox, but that's kind of a moot point -- UE3 isn't going to be ported to the original XBox either, at least AFAICT. UE3 really seems to be targeted at DX9-10, even if they do plan on making it run eventually on some lower end PC hardware. So, let's just say the Wii doesn't have shaders in the sense of a 360 or PS3. The definition of a "proper shader" has been a moving target for several years now, and will continue to be that way. In the meantime, we can revel in the Wii's inexpensive hardware and focus on fun gameplay.