Slashdot Mirror
Hands-on With the Wii MotionPlus
Parz writes "In June, Nintendo will be releasing a peripheral called MotionPlus. This small device attaches to the bottom of the Wii-mote and acts as a more sophisticated motion-sensor to the controller as it currently stands. Its goal is to bring greater parity between a user's movements and the animations that they bring to life on-screen. Gameplayer got some hands-on time with the device, and they are extremely impressed."
The MotionPlus will only affect new games; Nintendo has said they have no plans to add support for older titles. Virtua Tennis 2009 will be the first game to support it, and Eurogamer has a look at the game both with and without the MotionPlus.
Hasn't that been everybody's dream game for the Wii?
Man, I would like them to rerelease the golf and bowling with support, so it actually works.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/11/13/
How we know is more important than what we know.
You know.. I was all ready to hate them for not making the new sensor backwards compatible with older games, but then it occurred to me that it says that the new motion sensor hooks into the base of the existing Wiimote. It may simply be that the connection there for peripherals/nunchuks doesn't allow the new sensor to supercede the existing Wiimote movement sensors.. that may be why only new games will be able to make use of the extra information.
Of course we could then always argue that Nintendo should have re-designed the Wiimote from scratch with the new sensor embedded if that's the case. If so, I would hope that they do, because there are a lot of existing Wii games that would benefit from the extra sensitivity.
Read: It's a near impossibility to support older titles. It would be nice to head over to http://hackmii.com/2009/02/why-the-wii-will-never-get-any-better/ and find out why; specifically:
This is just refinement. It was bound to happen. I am sure, one day this technology will progress to the stage when, you need to have your 'gaming suit'(with all kinds of sensors) to play your game. It would be possible in the near future, if Nintendo and the MIT students team up.
Teledildonics !
This is just adding accelerometers, you know like the PS3 SixAxis has has from the start...
While this is amazing technological achievement, it doesn't compare to what I've discovered! Get this: real life tennis! The motion sensing capabilities of real rackets AMAZING! It's like the racket follows my hand EXACTLY.
so is bowling and golf. Where's my lightsaber?
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
The MotionPlus if fine and dandy (Though only grudgingly accepted by me since I think the original Wiimote should have been more accurate to begin with), but why not build a WiimotePlus? In other words, same Wiimote form factor, MotionPlus accuracy. Maybe some cosmetic change to differentiate it from the normal Wiimote, too.
Actually since the MotionPlus doesn't use the IR sensors that's kinda pointless. This thing contains afaik 3 multi-axis accelerometers that are way more precise than what was possible during the launch of the Wii years back. It snaps into the Wiimote which is a good thing because they have sold 50 million Wiimotes and most people won't be too happy to spend another 200$ on new controllers just to have a sword fight with their mates. Nintendo already pissed off loads of people with their strange antics, now telling me I have to throw away my Wiimotes and buy new ones -no wai. Instead it's a 20$ addon which is much more feasible to most consumers, if you want it ... it's 20$ per controller extra instead of another 50 for a new one. Other than that, older games won't work because there is no real patching infrastructure on the Wii that I'm aware of. You would have to re-write potentially large chunks of the controls code to have your game react to the MotionPlus input correctly and why bother in the first place? The games that didn't have M+ don't need it now. Most games wouldn't benefit from simply "tacked on" MotionPlus just as they don't benefit from tacked on waggle or motion control. Now, games that are built around MotionPlus ... that's a different story.
Sounds great! Is the output from the new accelerometers in an easy-to-decode format so it works on Linux with libwiimote and similar software?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
i think it has something to do with that free market thing people always rave about;
they didn't need it. the wii sold well enough with the crappy motion control that it had.
This thing isn't on the market yet, so who knows? But I'd be surprised if it wasn't. All the other things you can plugin have had the data streams reverse-engineered by various wiimote libraries.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
I don't know but I sure hope so. We'll find out after it's released, I guess.
...you've lost me as a customer and no, I won't be buying a Wii again.
How many were you planning on buying?
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
Secondly, the Wii motion plus is rumoured to be a 20$ item or included with several upcoming Wii motion plus games, so how can it go from being 'too expensive' only a few years ago to being a 'throwaway item' now?
How is 20$ individually, 10$ in a bundle (the bundled version costs a bit more than the unbundled one) a throwaway item?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
is it or will it be possible to use this controller (or some clone - are there any?) on PCs or other consoles? it might take time for games to start supporting this.. can i emulate wii on pc and use this controller?
I've purchased one, had it for 7 months and sold it.
Played Super Mario Galaxy and Zelda, the system simply did not compete (in my eyes) with the 360 and PS3 it shared a TV cabinet with.
How is 20$ individually, 10$ in a bundle (the bundled version costs a bit more than the unbundled one) a throwaway item?
How is 20$ NOT a throwaway item when a game itself is 50 or 60$ US?
How is 20$ compared to a 250$ US RRP for the product such a huge increase that it simply wasn't an option at the time, it's only 8% more, they make up money on the games anyhow.
Well they've clearly lost one customer with this guy to begin with, crappy indeed.
bring greater parity between a user's movements and the animations
You keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means.
If you think the tech is so inexpensive, why don't you try and find how much that actually cost.
There's even a site that propose the gyros the m+ is using and i can tell you it'll be cheaper to get a m+ and stip it of its gyros.
And you're talking about business sense and you don't bitch about the shoddy quality of the x360?
flamebait indeed.
Why I'm replying to an AC, I don't entirely know, your post is mostly invalidated around here without a username as it is in most peoples eyes.
How is it that you can ask me to find the value of each individual component when we know the SUM of the addon itself is 20$ ? That answers all the relevant information required.
Furthermore, you take the oppourtunity to bash the Xbox 360 on a completely unrelated topic (which I don't deny, if you were smart enough to see my slashdot history, you'll see I've been a long time, cynic of anyone who stuffs up, no matter the brand - the 360's flaws I've outline many a time)
What does poor build quality but half decent games and NOT seggerating the market with a new peripheral (Microsoft) have to do with Nintendo seggergating their market with a peripheral which should've been released in the first place.
If you're going to try and school me, do some research.
and what will be the pack-in for it?
William
(who want something w/ the weaponry variety of Ghost Squad and the targeting variety and excellent interface of Link's Crossbow Training and the fluid switch between first and third-person of Quantum of Solace)
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
1. You have to compare that to the 40$ controller, not the whole system (since it goes into each controller)
2. The components massively went down in price since the launch of the Wii, I heard about it being by an order of magnitude.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
check the price, then come back and tell me how gyros aren't exactly expensive.
Furthermore you can bash whatever to high heaven or something, your view on why you felt the Wii unworthy or your living room is as ontopic my little rant on the various pbs MSFT have with their hardware (pb they actually handle well for a change).
I mean YetAnotherInternetToughGuyBashTehWee, everybody can go to various gaming websites to see this and NEWSFLASH : nobody cares.
And I mean I'm pretty nobody cares about whether or not you'll buy another wii (as a multiconsole owner you're a minority of a minority so...yeah).
And I agree that nobody gives a shit about my view on it too (which is why i keep it to myself).
Now about the M+, the tech is indeed expensive. if it wasn't Sony would have integrated it in the Sixaxis instead of the accelerometers.
Secondly, the Wii motion plus is rumoured to be a 20$ item or included with several upcoming Wii motion plus games, so how can it go from being 'too expensive' only a few years ago to being a 'throwaway item' now?
In the same way that a DVD burner can go from $150 to $20 in a few years time, or RAM that cost you $80 a couple of years ago is now $20. Technology becomes cheaper over time.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
next time you decide to throw away $10, could you toss it my way?
$10 is $10.
Actually, it uses a 3-axis gyroscope. Accelerometers can only measure movement, but the gyros can measure position. This is why you had to use a lot of "waggle" on wii games: the accelerometers couldn't tell the difference between flicking your wrist and an arm movement. The gyros can.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/08/wii-motion-sensor.ars
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
Are you taking the piss here or something?
You link to 'gyroscope prices' this is like linking me to newegg.com/blurayreaders and insisting that's what it costs to put the bluray in the PS3.
This is a mass purchased product, it's not sold as a toy like the ones you've linked
(the individual gyroscopes I'm referring to) and again the motion plus is TWENTY DOLLARS
and gyroscopes have been around for years, I mean really, we KNOW it's 20$ - what, was the tech inside the motion plus 25$ before? 250$? is the contents of the motion plus 2000$ worth of hardware only 2 years ago?
The motion plus is a small chunk of plastic with 'stuff' in it, it is packaged, tested, includes profit, it's to be marketed, manufactured, researched all for 20$
If anything, if it was done 'in the first place' it might have been 10$ more cost to the Wii, maybe 20$, EVEN 30$! back then - considering their total sales and profit margins can you not see where I'm coming from.
Also, I'm in no way even remotely the first person to say this, there's a large backlash brewing against the motion plus online as 'how it should've been' also sales are tapering in Japan as the fad is finally wearing off.
Who cares if you care if I buy another Wii? Who cares if the 360 is a piece of unreliable shit? Who cares if my PS3's fan turns on in heavily GPU intensive games? Who cares if I sold my Wii and found it to be an unwise purchase.
The whole point of slashdot is commentary, I'm expressing my opinion, people are happy to agree, disagree, flame, moderate, laugh, cheer or sneer, I don't care too much but really half your posts sounds as if there shouldn't be any posts at all, why don't we just disabled comments?
If you can provide me with a link, clearly stating what parts are used (or similar ones) how they differ from thesixasxis, iphone and regular Wii controller, how much they cost I'd be curious to read it.
I realise the Wii is still highly defended on slashdot, since we like to defy the norm here but having been an owner of a 360, PS3 and a Wii in the past 12 months, I can assure you that if you're a 'traditional' gamer rather than a party or social gamer, that little white box is a nasty, overhyped little fad and I look forward to it going where it belongs and what it's being sold as.
the system simply did not compete (in my eyes) with the 360 and PS3 it shared a TV cabinet with.
Maybe you don't like it, but it's hardly as black and white as you try to make it sound. A lot of people enjoy it, and not just grandma. I can definitely be included in the 'traditional gamer' category and my Wii gets plenty of use. There's more of a market than you give it credit for.
The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.
they make up money on the games anyhow.
So you claim above that nobody but grandma and little Billy play it, but now you claim they're making money on games. Which is it?
The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.
I was all ready to hate them for not making the new sensor backwards compatible with older games
How should they go about it?
I theorize that the library I've used to program the wiimote with (cwiid) reflects what the wiimote sends over bluetooth. If that is the case:
The games are written to expect a number between 0 and 255 for each of the three accelerometers. How do you backwards-compatibly make the game make use of a wider range of numbers?
You can do fixed-point arithmetic, putting the past-the-dot bits somewhere else in the bluetooth packet and round them off to the nearest eight-byte value. What does that win? So you go to nearest instead of nearest-below. Big whooping deal.
Or, you could monkey-patch the game to make it store a bigger number for the accelerometer data, but that's basically unpossible; how do you pack three 8^H32-bit values into one machine word? How do you monkey-patch a program which tries this? And especially, how do you find out which bytes are just plain old bytes and which are accelerometer data? How do you find out when a byte switches from storing accelerometer data to storing some other byte-valued thing?
Not to mention: you have to monkey-patch all code; if a program generates code dynamically (ewww, but possible), you have to detect it.
Monkey-patching: not gonna' happen. Any other kind of patching?
You could fairly easily (in theory) modify the OS so that whenever it "runs a disc", it checks whether it has any patches stored for the disk, and dynamically applies those (think "Overlay" on the file system layer). You _could_ do it, but then you have to store patches on the (somewhat small) drive; and you have to download them from somewhere. Plus: congratulations! your stick-it-in-and-play console now requires system administration. Isn't the point that you don't want that?
Maybe so but I play single player games for a great storyline, I play my PC and PS3 extensively.
The wii caters for the casual, party casual crowd with very very few games for a regular single player gamer (Mario and Zelda aside)
The controller is downright infuriatingly inaccurate and I honestly present to you, just how many bloody Wii games can be clocked, simply by putting the controller in the dryer on a spin cycle? (seriously!)
There's little to no element of skill in using it and that translates to a lack of 'seriousness' in the gaming that FAT NERDS I ADMIT like myself appreciate.
The direct motion plus feel would've been badass, I could've looked past 480p, I could've looked past no internal storage or shitty SHITTy online matchmaking, naming etc I could look past a plethora of other technical issues with the thing if at least the games, gameplay and controls were at least cool, badass or downright fun.
I happily maintain and I will stand by calling it a toy, the vast VAST majority of Wii purchasers are buying it to put it in the loungeroom as a guitar hero and Wii play / Wii sports machine, it's like a kareoke machine to an extent, it really doesn't have the feel, design or user experience as a 'proper console' and I feel, besides the controllers unique angle, it's comfortably living in the late 90's - right down to the terrible online experience.
Yes I owned one but sorry I would not again, I don't even rate the 360, yet it's 348$ AUD and the Wii is 399$ AUD - that's a 60gb 'pro' 360 mind you.
Really, this thing is over-rated and the least of my complaints should be the terrible controller which could've been right from the get go.
Flame me away and enjoy your Wii (although much like many internet bandwagon products, I wonder how many of the defenders here actually own AND use the product)
If they redesigned it from scratch, they still couldn't make old games support it. The Wii does not really have the ability to inform a game about new features that the console might offer. As for why it was easier to not redesign it, they did do a good job making the Wii remote extendable. The Nunchuck port is I2C, and the Wii remote can be directed to talk to many I2C devices connected to that port.
I think if the new device were just accelerometers, as the other poster believe, they would be able to place them in the same address as the accelerometers in the nunchuck, and old games would get something. I would suspect they have moved to gyros. Paired with the three axis accelerometer in the Wii remote already, that would provide 6 degrees of movement.
I completely disagree, the motion sense on the wiimote is not that hot, it's pretty notchy and sometimes I miss things in Wii sports tennis because I'm setting up for a shot (I like to actually move my arms) and the wiimote decides I've made a swing when I'm clearly making a setup. Older games could DEFINITELY benefit HUGELY from an improvement in accuracy. Too bad they won't be able to because Nintendo didn't make the wiimote just a tiny bit smarter.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There's actually a water gun FPS coming out for the Wii. Could be fun.
The Nunchuck port is I2C, and the Wii remote can be directed to talk to many I2C devices connected to that port.
The old stillborn Philips CD-I also had I2C ports, allowing you to chain 1P, 2P, etc, controllers together. (Or was that the 3DO?)
Indeed, there is no operating system on the nintendo wii. Basically when a game boots, it takes the all control on the platform. The only things that stays is some kind of IRQ that is used for networking. The "wiimote input library" is statically linked into each game. So it will not be changed easily. More information on http://hackmii.com/2009/02/why-the-wii-will-never-get-any-better/
If it could have "been like this in the beginning", then it wouldn't have taken 2 1/2 years to release it, would it? If they were being greedy, they would have released it as a separate add-on at the same time as the Wii came out. If they were lazy, they wouldn't have released it at all.
Technology is a moving target, and 30 months is a long time. Maybe the tech was around at the time, but obviously the Wii was good enough for the masses as it was originally released without adding undue cost. As it is, Nintendo made a product that a lot of people liked (enough that even in its 3rd holiday season it wasn't necessarily easy to find one in many places), they've made a healthy profit, and are now adding a new level of functionality. So sue them.
Please don't give me 'the tech wasn't available' or 'the tech was too expensive at the time'
Okay I won't tell you the uncomfortable truth that you don't want to accept. Unless that sentence counts.
Firstly, Nintendo was making a profit on the Wii hardware from the get go! They should've put it in even if it reduced that margin, other manufacturers make a loss out of the gate.
Up until this generation, no they didn't. Microsoft lost money on the XBOX, because they believed the urban legend that all console makers used the console itself as a loss leader. Halfway through the generation, both Sony and Nintendo revealed that no, they didn't, but were happy to have Microsoft design their console strategy around it. This generation, both Sony and Microsoft decided to go balls-out on the hardware necessitating their per-unit losses. They do this by subsidizing their games business with profits from other business units.
Nintendo can't subsidize their game consoles. You're basically saying they should have risked going out of business if the "lose money on the console and make money on games" model, which hasn't worked out for Microsoft yet, didn't work out for them.
But yeah, those greedy bastards wanting to sell their only product at a profit!
Secondly, the Wii motion plus is rumoured to be a 20$ item or included with several upcoming Wii motion plus games, so how can it go from being 'too expensive' only a few years ago to being a 'throwaway item' now?
[Insert any of a thousand graphs showing price decreases in technology over time]
The enemies of Democracy are
the wii...wouldnt it be cheaper and more fun to get off your ass, pick up a golf club and hit a few balls?
the wii, at the risk of a trollmod, seems like a toy for fat lazy kids. they sell an accessory wiifit waterbottle that, lets not pretend, likely sees more mountain dew than water in the average home.
for those who already have a wii, try my new "total reality" game where you buy a tennis racket and some balls. its perfectly acceptable to hit the courts dressed as mario or luigi however princess peach is firmly restricted to female players.
Good people go to bed earlier.
the motion sense on the wiimote is not that hot, it's pretty notchy and sometimes I miss things in Wii sports tennis because I'm setting up for a shot (I like to actually move my arms) and the wiimote decides I've made a swing when I'm clearly making a setup.
Indeed. I've lost count of how many times I'm winding up for a forehand and Wii tennis decides I just tried a backhand.
I know "pro" Wii players will advise to stop making full body movements and just use wrist cheats, but I play Wii tennis because I love the game of tennis, not because I want to get a high score at a video game. I have very high hopes for the MotionPlus to bring the real game indoors when it's snowing or raining outside & I can't hit the real court.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
I've purchased one, had it for 7 months and sold it. Played Super Mario Galaxy and Zelda, the system simply did not compete (in my eyes) with the 360 and PS3 it shared a TV cabinet with.
You played just two games on a system before giving up on it?? I also don't see it competing directly with the other systems any more than the Wii competes with the games on my iPhone. The 360 and PS3 have better graphics, Wii has better input. They're not mutually exclusive.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
> It may simply be that the connection there for peripherals/nunchuks doesn't allow the new sensor to supercede the existing Wiimote movement sensors..
While this is true, it's not the reason.
The reason is that the Wii Motionplus isn't measuring the same thing as the built-in accelerometer. The Wii remote measures linear acceleration, while the Wii Motionplus measures rotation. You can't just feed the rotation figures into a game, and expect it to do something useful with them.
The only way to add support to an older game would be patching it. Since the Wii lacks any mechanism for patching games, this is obviously impossible.
the system simply did not compete (in my eyes) with the 360 and PS3 it shared a TV cabinet with.
So...you wouldn't have bought another one anyway, so they didn't lose a customer now, did they? Unless you're saying that in the event some must-have game comes out for Wii, you now won't purchase one that you otherwise would have because they were, like, holding out on you.
Bollocks. I read your (poorly argued and spelled) post. You wouldn't have bought another Wii anyway and you're just looking for more reasons to (needlessly, since nobody cares) back up that decision. Now run along and play Halo like a good "hardcore" gamer.
Your brain is not a computer.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Every round that begins with a ritual: you have to calibrate the controller by pointing it at your player on the screen. Persons, teams, and nations have their pre-game hakas and so forth, but the benefit here is not psychosomatic. The MotionPlus must know precisely where it is before it can work its magic."
This might mean that using the wii motion plus in a newer game like Red Steel or Zelda would not work. You would need to periodically recalibrate it during the game, and that would defeat immersion.
Not a price issue, a supply issue.
Should we sell x minus y fully functional Wiis, or x fairly functional Wiis and get our foot in the door of more households?
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
My impression is that the values sent from the Wiimote are jittery in the 0-255 range, a bit like the old joystick pots were. That is, holding it at a certain value might result in 32, 37, 29, 30, 35... and a bit of smoothing is done to get a 'real' value. If the peripheral can ensure that these values are more consistent and accurate, it might help pre-existing games.
Not by that much, really. Just thinking out-loud.
No, I named the 2 games which appeal to the single player demographic, maybe Okami as well but that has been completed on the PS2 and Madworld isn't getting rave reviews either.
I'll bite,..
Please point out the spelling mistakes, I try to make my posts at least pass the grammer nazi test and I'd be curious to know where I apparently failed.
Halo is a terribly over-rated game, please don't associate my posts with it again.
When they made the first Wiimote? Why did they simply not include enough sensors to track the device?
Wouldn't six degrees of freedom (x, y, z translation and yaw, pitch and roll) demand at least 6 sensors? Yet it has only three.
I guess I could forgive them, after all, they might have been looking to cut cost after spending so much packing that thing with 92MB of ram...that's almost 64 floppies worth of data!
Anyways, seriously, you can't be uptight and be a Nintendo fan for too long. Their decisions are baffling.
But I love their brand of craziness.
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
I doubt very seriously that the M+ is going to be worth it. If many games even take advantage of it, most of them will also certainly be designed to function well enough without it (or else the developer is cutting out a large portion of their market.)
But that said, you have to wonder how long the Wii would have been delayed had they chosen to include these capabilities from the start. Even if it only added $20 to the system, it could have added months of development and testing. Timing on the release of the Wii was intentional, so this could have really changed their game.
Furthermore, Nintendo was taking a pretty big chance on the Wii. They knew that they were basically making Gamecube 1.5 (in terms of power) and that they'd be relying on the unique control mechanism to sell the unit. Getting it out early with a less precise sensor really made a lot of sense. If they'd waited 6 months to release it (or more likely a year to get a Christmastime release date), they'd be competing with 18-24 months of Xbox360 and 6-12 months of PS3 in the market, rather than competing with a fledgling PS3 which had very few games (and fewer still which were highly regarded.) Releasing the console late with better controls would have been a fairly large risk, and it could have backfired. I doubt very seriously that the backlash that they're suffering now will cost them anywhere near what they made by timing the release of the Wii as they did.
In short, there are plenty of legitimate reasons for releasing the M+ late that have nothing to do with wanting to squeeze a little extra money out of their customers. My hunch is that the Wii would have completely tanked had they delayed the release long enough to incorporate the gyroscope.
In what regards? While I would readily agree that the wii has shortcomings (RAM, online, lack of 'motion plus' to begin with...), the sensor bar works great.
Have you not played shooter on wii play or links cross bow? Both demonstrate the worth of the sensor bar.
If they made a game like golden eye, but used the sensor bar for aiming and added head tracking it would be the best shooter ever, even given the other limitations of the wii (RAM, lame online, no motion plus). Why won't that ever happen? Because Nintendo exists to drive it's fans nuts.
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
Well, you see, you use different moves when you're fighting half a dozen people than when you only have to be worried about ... one.
If I were Nintendo, I would have saved this for the next-generation console they will have to release in 2-3 years. Everyone knows peripherals don't sell, especially ones that don't add much to a game.
As it is, it makes the already heavy Wiimote downright clunky.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
"lazyness" should be "laziness"
"implimented" should be "implemented"
"seggregate" should be "segregate"
Halo is a terribly over-rated game, please don't associate my posts with it again.
Fair enough. Please don't make uninformed statements about the habits of traditional gamers.
Your brain is not a computer.