Would you consider a Wii U version of the game?

there has been one other computer consul RTS conversion handled by Nintendo and that was the original Starcraft. Starcraft 64 was far more graphically limited then its computer counter part couldnt handle true multiplayer and of course no online multiplayer as well as the army sizes being further limited. BUT the one thing it did have was praised controls. it isnt impossible to have effective rts controls on console and with added touch screen capabilities (which is already used frequently in sc2) controls is not a concern.

This is incorrect. I mentioned this on the previous page but since it was the last post there I'll mention it again, just because you're used to doing things though a "dumb interface" (ie. age old way of giving "orders") made to work by virtue of a "very precise control method" (ie. keyboard and mouse) doesn't mean the genre itself or the implementation on another system has to work the same way: you can have a really smart interface, working with a less exact control method (be it touch or otherwise).

The level of control scales with the combination of control method and the interface. You can praise mouse hardware all you want but no matter how good a mouse gets your hand can only go so far. On the other hand the interface can scale almost infinitely.

A player with a "inferior control method" but advanced interface could for example effortlessly split up workers to build several buildings simultaneously while with the mouse (since selecting and splitting are fairly hard problems) you might simply resort to queing several workers to work on one building at a time in a long shift que. Similarly a more advanced interface can just make it easy for you to say launch an infinite number of attacks at multiple angles whereas even attacking two sides of a base now at the same exact moment is hard due to having one "pointer" and no control over the timing of actions. From a perspective of a strategy game these both should be extremely basic yet they're not in the current interface/control scheme and the mouse is unlikely to evolve into anything that will ever help you with them when working with the current interface.

The reason RTS sucks on consoles is because nobody has come in and actually made a proper one; we have the same problem with space sims. Also, all the bad console ones are all ports, and any PC enthusiast should know how much effort/creativity companies generally put into ports. Even FPS games don't all easily move between console/PC though a lot of the ground there has been covered.

just a matter of having the right input devices ... that is all ... to me consoles are no more different then a pc honestly
they are simply closed systems ... that is the main problem ... go hack, crack and mod them and you could do all sort of stuff with them you could do on a pc ... i know easy said ...

: / 'specially since the main issue here is hardware not willpower or belief.

right ... i dont think a game as extensive as PA would ever run on a current gen console propperly ...
but rts´s made with consolehardware in mind isnt that big of deal it has been done before ... it is as said before a problem of consoles being closed systems that do not allow other input devices such as keyboards and mouses and limiting the use of hardware that way ( not to forget you cant change RAM or the CPU and GPU of it )

i dont think playing a rts game in the livingroom with a bluetooth mouse and keyboard would be that big of a deal either ...
the general question is would people be ok with that ...
because lets be honest no matter how good the ui of a game is in more complex games you simply are better of with inputdevices that have as many buttons as you need because you would do most things faster that way ...
on the other hand however playing with a keyboard in the livingroom on a couch may not feel all that well ...

Here is my two cents. I doubt keyboard or buttons as important for anyone except pro-players. I know that many players don't actually use lot of shortcuts except menu, shift for queues, units groups, commander and idle builders. Many of those can't be replaced with some good UI solutions that can work fairly well.

Still I suppose it's nearly impossible to port mouse-centric UI to use it with traditional gamepad and this why I see Valve idea with touchpad can work fairly well. Touch screen or multi-touch might work too, but consider current screen and accuracy I'm not sure it's will work.

1GB RAM is an immediate showstopper. PA will not run on that amount, no matter how good the CPU or GPU.

Even if it was done, I would never even consider it. That just sounds like torturous gameplay to me. Imagine if the networks were all combined across platforms; people with keyboards and hotkeys would always dominate you. This is reducing PA to an insultingly casual level.

If this is true, how did they manage to squeeze a game like battlefield 4 or the latest assasins creed in the xbox 360.
A machine with 512 MB of ram. With the pc versions demanding 4 GB.

What's the use in comparing hardware anyway. It's pointless. Hardware limits graphics. For me the least important factor in a game.

Economically, I do believe it would sell. Sure, only 6 million people has a Wii U and the majority of them are gamers, not families as it was with the orginal Wii. So even if 1million or 2 million copies will be sold, Uber would get somewhere between 50 - 100 million $ in income. The economical problem exists in the gap between the final release of the current versions and the release of the Wii U version, will the income from the Wii U version fill that gap?

Good point!

Crytek for example tried to run Crysis 3 on Wii U and it worked, EA just turned them down as usual. Even Wii U runs Assassins Creed with even better graphics than last gen consoles and that game ain't optimized for the system, it's just a port. Wii U can run all existing graphic-engines by this far (I'm not sure if it runs all of the new one that has been shown at GDC).
So graphicwise, it wouldn't be a problem at all. The main problem is, will it handle 5000 units or 10 000 units on a multiple solarsystem? Will it be unstable? Will it drop from the 60 fps? We don't know if it can be run on that console unless Uber tries it.

Pointer, well my concept might not be the best solution, but it gives a clear hint that it could be done together with a button combination.

Or Uber could go by building a more TA-like strategy game (i.e. flat map, no solarsystems) specially made for the Wii U.

Memory architecture difference is how it works..
Consoles predating the most current gen (ps4,xbox one) have different memory architectures to pc ram.

Think of it like this, pc ram is generic designed for many purposes, and the memory in the consoles predating the current gen use memory specifically designed to handle gaming needs.

Unfortunately this requires many games that were designed for pc to be "optimized" to run on specific hardware's.
one example could be "lost planet 2" i have this on both my pc and on ps3.
On PC the graphics are better, higher res textures, higher quality model assets, more environment mapping and features, larger levels and 2x the enemies to fight.

This is a big reason why the console market has adopted using standard pc hardware and architecture to make the current gen consoles as there is no other way to compete with the current pc market

Toy Rush is Unity 3d 4.2 for tools and renderer.
Planetary Annihilation is a custom in house engine without any kind of "tools" like you might think of in terms of Unity. PA's engine has been built to make PA and not as a general engine. We use 3ds Max, Photoshop, and a handful of text editors (Visual Studio, Sublime Text, emacs, whatever), and that's about it. When I make effects I just write the json by hand in Sublime Text. We also do have tools like those include with FMOD and commercial web tools for the UI.

Also, I think there's some confusion here as for what Unity, Unreal, Frostbite and CryEngine are, as they are nearly identical conceptually being a combination of engine specific tools, a game engine, and renderer. Unity comes with Monodevelop, but this is just a pre-existing tool that Unity includes with it's install. Unreal originally included a text editor inside of UnrealED, and later versions included a separate tool for editing UnrealScript, though they've been pushing towards purely visual scripting languages more recently.

I also haven't seen or heard anything about Project CARS using Unity 3d for their tools; Unity as a rule doesn't give out their editor code which would be needed to facilitate using their tools on another engine, unless that "engine" was just an extension to Unity itself. The most plausible thing for me is Project CARS is using Unity as a way to help external contributors preview their content prior to it getting into their own game engine.
Unreal on the other hand has been used for years as "just a tool" for level editing by a large number of companies entirely replacing the renderer or the entire engine to meet their needs.

As far as RTS games on consoles, there have been quite a few that are really good. Usually though they get called just "strategy" games or "tower defense" or come in some form of hybrid where you only directly control a single unit. They don't fit the confined box that the term RTS conjures for most gamers. Console games tend to simplify game concepts down to their core components; that's not to say they're simple, just the interactions are less about needing to drag select with extreme accuracy.

That being said there are certainly a number of those traditional PC style RTS games that have made it on the consoles and have found ways to change the controls to still work. Generally the recent examples have shown the fiscal results in such efforts aren't worth the cost, so it's a serious gamble.


And yes I realize none of this answers the original question, so here's my answer.
Note: This is my personal take on the topic, not the official Uber response.

Hell No.

Ahem, I'll rephrase.

Unless the Wii U shows a significant increase in sales of both hardware and third party software there's just no point in developing for it. The hardware issues are solvable, but not without considerable compromise. As has been mentioned we would have to basically rewrite the game's code to work on the PowerPC CPU and the GX2 graphics API, and that's a lot of time, effort, and money for what we can have no reasonable assumption to be able to make back in sales. There's a reason why even the big developers are effectively abandoning the Wii U as a main platform. I suspect going forward we're going to see what we saw happen before with the Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii with major games being developed for both the 360 and PS3 with ports to the PC, and the Wii version being developed completely separately by smaller for hire companies that specialize in making Wii games.

I'll just leave this here...

Thank you for your answer.

Then I was totally wrong when it came to how this game was built and I thank you for clearify it for me, same thing goes for the other engines.

I've read it somewhere about Project CARS building equivalent DirectX 11 effects for Wii U and Unity is taking part of that, I could be wrong though (don't remember clearly). I'm sorry that I can't find the information again.

I totally understand that from your point of view that this won't happen. And you also confirmed what I've said about the economical problem - it will cost a lot to bring it to the Wii U.
But I do also like that you are not totally against the idea, you mention that hardware issues are solvable and if Wii U shows a significant increase in sales of both hardware and third party software.

So with other words, there is hope but not for now as long as Wii U isn't doing well.

Once again, thank you for your answer.

Unity 3d has become the official engine for the Wii U, so they have gotten significantly more access to the internals of the Wii U than most third parties have been able to. I can see it being plausible they're assisting other western developers working on Wii U.

It should also be noted "DirectX 11 equivalent graphics" doesn't mean anything really. There's very little that DirectX 11 can do that DirectX 9 can't reproduce visually, just slower. Console graphics chips tend to get a little bit more than their PC brethren though; the Xbox 360 had a GPU similar to the AMD Radeon X1800, but has features available the PC didn't get until DirectX 11.

The Wii U's GPU is however based on a DirectX 11 AMD GPU and is capable of OpenGL 4.3 but uses it's own graphics API similar to OpenGL called GX2.

I have to wonder if the whole "different architecture" actually applies when you're dealing with "cloud based gaming" (or personal cloud based gaming; ie. your pc via steambox source or otherwise) everyone is so happy to create vaporware for these days. =P

Technically it's just an investment in the control system, assuming the requirements of getting into "the cloud" aren't preposterous. You're already kind-of invested into control with the whole steambox/linux side; assuming you're not going to do what everyone else has done and failed and just "port mouse to controller". Strategy games also don't suffer much, if at all, from slower control latency... outside of some super pro level <1% of the playerbase.

because those games are close to non-demanding when compared to supcom or PA.

Battlefield 4 requires less hardware than BF3 to run for example.

Crysis 3 pales in comparison to what Crysis 1 needed.

and in anycase these games only ever have an average of 12 "units" on screen and the poly count is infinitely lower then that of PA.

Pa loading it's hundreds of thousands of trees and units and biome bits make the memory cost skyrocket.

You seem to have some insight when it comes to the Wii U hardware and just told us information that is really hard to get.

However, I feel confident with your answers. The consideration is a big no, but could be plausible if Nintendo managed to sell 10 million units per year after this E3 and also bring back all those 3rd party developers on track. If that happens, I'll come back and ask you again

Time to convince people why Wii U is a good system after all

read closer, even with ten million Wii Us sold you need a consistently big number of PA for the Wii U sales to make the investment worthwhile.

furthermore, we aren't talking about the current Wii U we're talking about (either hardware upgrades IDK if that's possible, or) an entirely new Wii U with consistently better hardware. (we're talking about much more money the gamer has to pay up).

Why aren't you shifting your focus to the SteamBox/SteamMachine instead ?

You'd basically solve the hardware problem thanks to the Game playing on your PC, plus you'd get the kickass in-hand controler, which is basically what you want (touch screen and joysticks right? the steam controller is even cooler because it features these really presise trackpads in place of the joysticks.) Neutrino even seemed to think this was a good idea :

Code:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09CjiUTnpK0&feature=player_detailpage&list=UUcNE9TRcOCOoOB0Dy5ediPg#t=329