It would suck if Sega doesn't release this game on Wii. Sure, Project Needlemouse is made for HD, but it shouldn't be too difficult to downgrade the resolution to 480p. I guess time will tell. Perhaps it'll be one of the first games announced for Wii HD!
I always expected the game to be a XBL download HD graphics game so no suprise here.
I dont really care, it would be nice to play it but with no wireless or Hard drive on my 360 its useless to me anyway.
I think when they say HD graphics they dont just mean the resolution, they mean all the detail and effects etc too.
gamingeek said:I always expected the game to be a XBL download HD graphics game so no suprise here.
I dont really care, it would be nice to play it but with no wireless or Hard drive on my 360 its useless to me anyway.
I think when they say HD graphics they dont just mean the resolution, they mean all the detail and effects etc too.
Have you ever played a PC game? Detail, effects, and resolution can all be adjusted or turned on/off in order to fit the needs of the hardware. I seriously doubt a 2D, downloadable Sonic game will push the HD consoles so hard that the game couldn't possibly run on Wii. It's not like they're trying to make Bioshock run on Wii.
Personally, Sega would be stupid if they don't release it on Wii. That's a HUGE part of their Sonic market that they've been milking for years now. They should go all out and release it on retail disk so that every Wii owner could easily buy it, not just the internet savvy.
Of course, this is assuming that it'll actually be a good game, which I doubt.
I direct you here where one of the developers of the COD MW Wii port talks about the transition process.
Ignorant me thinks that all you need for a Wii port is essentially like dialing down the graphics options in the PC version. Shadows? Off. AA? Less/off. Number of corpses? Low. Textures? Low. This is why I'm not a dev. |
We were able to simply downsample assets in some cases, but new asset pipeline techniques were required in a lot of situations. Purely downsampling only gets you so far. You have to realize that the data for each level (this includes textures, animations, map geometry, audio, scripting, characters, props, particle fx, UI, etc.) had to be shrunk from around 80mb on the xbox 360 to around 25mb on the wii. If all we did was simply downsample everything to the point where it fit in memory, the game would look more like star fox on the snes than call of duty 4. In some cases, we had to come up with programmatic ways to get similar graphical fidelity with less texture memory. In other cases, we were able to stream higher-res assets off of the disc, but then you run into the problem of how the game knows what to stream in, and when to stream it such that you don't get texture pops, audio stutters, and things like that. So each level had to be retrofitted with triggers to tell the game what to stream in, and partitioned into chunks of coherent stream data. Then there had to be a balancing act to keep from exceeding the wii optical drive bandwidth. We had this same problem with all asset types, not just textures. Memory management tasks like this took up a huge amount of time, and had to be done individually for each SP and MP level.
Other than memory restrictions, CPU time was the other main bottleneck. Even running the absolute lowest quality assets, a huge amount of CPU time is tied up in level scripting, AI logic, line-of-sight traces, and everything else central to a first person shooter. When everything first fit in memory, the game ran at about 2 frames per second, and hundreds of engine optimizations had to go in to bring that up to 30. Cod4 runs with 32 AI at times (safehouse, heat, and the bog are the worst cases), and each one is calculating animation matrices, doing geometry traces, and running thousands of lines of script - every single frame. We weren't able to reduce the number of AI without significantly changing the gameplay, and so other elements of the engine had to be re-engineered to maintain an acceptable framerate. Building off of WAW for the wii gave us a head start, but a lot more engineering and optimization had to go into this project to raise the quality above what it was last year.
I know it's easy to look at some screenshots of the game and dismiss it as a phoned-in port, but try to realize the sacrifices that had to be made to maintain the original cod4 content and gameplay - it's a lot more complicated than just turning the "good graphics" knob all the way down. There is a reason you don't see more ports of 360/ps3 games to the wii that don't try to substantially change the game in some manner.
Well he's talking about a port.
Whereas we are talking about a new game. If they started making a game with the knowledge that it was going to be multiplatform from the start then you wouldn't have the same problems I'm guessing.
Dvader said:I come in here expecting something new... grrrrr.
There is new . . . the whole rumor about it being downloadable-only, and no Wii version.
Ravenprose said:Dvader said:I come in here expecting something new... grrrrr.There is new . . . the whole rumor about it being downloadable-only, and no Wii version.
I thought we knew about no Wii version. And I though downloadable only was expected. Maybe Sega sends me messages directly to my brain, that is how I know these things.
Dvader said:Ravenprose said:Dvader said:I come in here expecting something new... grrrrr.There is new . . . the whole rumor about it being downloadable-only, and no Wii version.
I thought we knew about no Wii version. And I though downloadable only was expected. Maybe Sega sends me messages directly to my brain, that is how I know these things.
It was suspected, but that guy's interview appears to confirm it; something that Sega hasn't stated officially yet.
Project Needlemouse Teaser Trailer
All-new 2D Sonic rolling out in 2010
Gamespot Project Needlemouse/Sonic the Hedgehog Q&A
New Video: Sega France Interview: Confirmed XBL/PSN download-only? Not Coming to Wii?