Hacking When Wii Wifi shuts down...

[Elliander]

Nintendo announced that it will be shutting down the Wifi service for Wii games on both Wii and vWii.

My Question is simply this: How will that impact the Homebrew titles? And would there eventually be a way around it? And could there be a way around the block on playing wii games online?

I have been out of the scene since Summer and just getting back into it and that overall looks like bad news, but I understand that eventually all the features on the Wii will be on the Wii U, so wouldn't it be interesting if the modding community is able to restore all the features Nintendo took away? If only on the Wii U?

Also, can someone explain how the current system works? It's obviously not as advanced a network as the PS3 has. How much does it even depend on external servers? Aside from match making, that is?

 

[portugeek]

Nothing will change as far as homebrew goes. When you connect online with Homebrew apps, they're connecting directly to that specific homebrews servers, it's not getting routed through Nintendo's network first. And, it's not like Nintendo's disabling the Wii's ability to connect to the internet, that feature is built into the console, so they can't stop people from connecting to private dedicated servers in the future.

They are just shutting down the servers that the Wii and DS games connect to for online play. And even then, they're ONLY shutting down the gaming servers, the Wii shop will still be available. (until they eventually shut that down too)

Also, it doesn't matter which hardware you own, be it Wii or Wii U, all Wii games connect to the same gaming servers. So when they shut down those servers, you won't be able to "officially" play Wii games online, regardless of console.

 

[Elliander]

That is good news about the homebrew. About the games though do you know how difficult it would be to redirect the servers? I mean, what method did they do to set that up?

 

[WiiPower]

It would be very difficult to redirect the servers, the whole software that runs on the servers would need to be rewritten almost blindly. If there's one game you'd like to play online in the future, you can log the network traffic and post those logs in the puplic, so intertested developers can find it. If there's no log at all, the chance for a fan server is 0%, with the logs, i'd say it's 1%.

You might want to do some research on the Resident Evil: Outbreak fan servers.

 

[Elliander]

Well, the type of connection means everything. I was playing online games back in the dial up era and most games were TCP/IP where one player hosts for the others and online services were little more than a matchmaker to connect devices together in a lobby. On the PS3, for example, you can play online through a computer based matchmaker - but only with games that use a certain type of connection. The rest would probably require, as you said, servers to be built - but even these games could still be worked around in theory. For example, "Fat Princess" seems to use a mix of a server and a host (when one host drops, the server controls who becomes the host).

From what I have seen of Wii games, well, I never had any good connections so it's not like I have any particular game in mind, but it also means that I don't really know the methods that Nintendo employed to manage online games.

Of course, I have done anything with networking in over 10 years so I am way behind on things. I went to school to work on networks, but I never made a career of it