New Wii Engine

It’s nothing new that often 3^rd party developers don’t put a great amount of effort into some for their games, not pushing the limits of what a consol can do. So when a small time developer creates an entire new games engine, which also works both well and has real effort put into, it certainly is bound to raise a few eyebrows.

This new engine is for the Wii, and has been created by a company called ‘High Voltage Software’ who in the past have made games such as Lego racers and family guy, so from the track record you wouldn’t really expect anything amazing from these guys, and yet they’ve seen the Wii and pushed it’s capabilities further with a rather ingenious design.

This new engine they have designed has been specifically design for the Wii to make the most of it. It will be able to display graphics that no other games on the Wii can do, making use advanced detailed bump and secular maps and also refraction and reflection maps, better LOD’s along with all real time rendering and lighting. There is a claim they want it to stand up to graphics of the 360, which even as it is a highly claim to make, shows there determination and passion to push the Wii, and I believe this is only the first of the push, in time as with all consoles, the power gets pushed further along the lifeline.

The game that they are creating, called The Conduit, useing this engine also looks to be shaping up very good, a first person shooter where aliens have invaded earth, in which you must haul round big guns to blow them the hell away, sounds good to me anyway.

Now the game their making may possible not be the best which would be a real shame because this game is going to be the marketing point for the engine, hopefully we will see a fully immersive single player story along with a multi player mode, and I wouldn’t think it is going to have online, but I suppose that’s always a plus. So I really hope this engine will be successful and in the future more games developers utilize this to make their games, this could very well be the start of the second generation of Wii games.

http://www.n-europe.com/news.php?nid=11725

http://uk.wii.ign.com/articles/867/867498p2.html - a link to IGN, where there a screenshots and a tech demo of the new engine

http://www.n-europe.com/forum/showthread.php?t=20368 – a link to a forum where there are more screenshots and technical information. (Please keep in not that this game is still in the making stages, and so is not finished and may have missing textures and the like.)