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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.
Please don't give me 'the tech wasn't available' or 'the tech was too expensive at the time'
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.
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?
This was simply a case of either lazyness or greed and it should've been implimented in originally anyhow, the way that it appeared to be advertised in the first place!
Now you've gone and you're going to seggregate the market, the ONLY way to now handle this properly is to price the Wii motion plus at a sensible price (slim profit margin) and bundle it in for free from now on, if not re-release the Wii remote with motion plus, effectively making the 'non motion plus' model impossible to buy.
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. (in the bookshelf cupboard sitting next to monopoly, to be pulled out at xmas since grandma and the family like it so much)
In conclusion, you guys damn well should've got it right in the first place, you've lost me as a customer and no, I won't be buying a Wii again.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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?
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/
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
> 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.
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"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.
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.
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?"
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.