Quote:Original post by Naku
On the plus side the actual devkit hardware itself does look nice
You kidding me? It looks like a $10 amp you'd get from a yard-sale!
I've had good experience with developing for Nintendo consoles in the past, they've always had rather sensible, clean APIs (Providing you like C). It's just their IDE integration is... well, non existant. Nintendo have always been a bit raw when it comes to development.
Although I haven't actually toyed with programming for the Wii just yet, just going off GB/GBA/SNES development, so I'm not exactly in a position of authority here.
Regarding closed platforms:I'm suprised that no-one's mentioned piracy here yet, as it's probably one of the bigger reasons for keeping the systems closed off. When I was in the PSP homebrew community, what I saw was 70% bootloaders/dumpers/emulators/firmware hacks, 15% applications development, 10% tooling around and about 5% actual indie games development. Even then, only about a pitiful 0.5% of the games that people started even made it to respectable level, and most were tetris/lumines/bust-a-move clones.
NOTE: If this isn't indicative of other homebrew communities such as the XBox or Playstation crowds, let me know. The GBC/GBA communities I was involved with were a lot better, with a lot more actual games development going on, but I think this was probably because due to Nintendos games-centric hardware design. There wasn't really that much you could do on the gameboy platforms other than make games.Opening up the platform would also be opening up the doors to pirates. While the Wii/360/PS3 will all be hacked and get a generous amount of piracy regardless of the fact that they're closed platforms, these hacks will generally be unstable and/or inpermenant due to firmware upgrades, which will turn a lot of people away from living solely off pirated games collections. Open it up, and you're going to have to answer to the large development community when you start blocking out features to beef up the security, as well as giving the hackers a roadmap to exploiting your system.
Running through a virtual system or an interpreted/scripted language would probably diffuse if not destroy these concerns, but why bother for something that will take so much time and money to develop and support for the miniscule amount of decent games you'll get out of it? Microsoft already had the foundations and resources they needed for doing this with XNA on the 360, as well as the motivation with the whole Games For Windows line in an attempt to unify XBox and PC development. Sony and Nintendo, on the other hand, don't have a solid base and would have to build this stuff from the ground up, and they'll experience very little benefit from doing so.
Like a lot of people have said earlier, if you want to program games for a living, do it on the PC first. Chances are you won't get on an engine team the first time you enter the industry, so you'll have very, very little to do with the hardware specific implementations, if anything at all.
If you just want the console experience, then just get a bluetooth adapter and use your Wii controller on your PC. Drag it out into your living room and hook it up to the TV if you like. If that doesn't satiate you, then just jump into a homebrew comminity and start doing some real console development, but I'm telling you now, you probably won't learn much more than you would doing a PC game. I worked on learning the PSP inside-out just before I got my most recent job, and I only learned 2 things that helped me at all during my time of actual PSP development:
- Colors are stored as BGRA instead of RGBA
- It has the ability to use a light source to generate texture coordinates (Shade mapping, I believe they called it).
Both of which were plain-as-day in the official documentation. The rest I already knew about from PC development.
