Hardware Yet more Wii U rumours from a dev

[Hadrian]

E3 is getting into full flow, we're gonna be swamped by more rumours than usual. Here are the latest round:

Full details here: http://wiiudaily.com/2012/06/wii-u-getting-achievements-cloud-storage-social-networking/

Basically, achievements...yeah PC/360/PS3 users have had them for years now. Wii U should have them without a doubt but also with these you'll get points so you can buy skins, costumes and what not...this nameless developer says:

We have a lot of freedom with the Wii U points system, we can add “brackets” for players, e.g. if you amass X points you get promoted into a new bracket with awards such as new MP [multiplayer] skins.

Next up again with more cloud storage, only this time apparently gamers will get "a few hundred mb" for free. This will only be used for saves and profiles.

Social networkings...again...more integrations with Twitter, Facebook and youtube. Players can upload screen grabs, "auto-tweet" game progress and record and upload game videos onto Youtube. This dev says:

They’re working on a UI overlay for the OS to add Twitter and FB notifications, but so far we haven’t seen it. They’ve reserved a lot of system memory for stuff like that. There isn’t much documentation about it in the new SKD, but they’ve told us it’ll be available in the future.

Mii's are still there, yeah we knew that when Nintendo showed the NSMB Mii demonstration. These ones are said to be in HD of course and like the 3DS you can take a picture of yourself with the controllers camera and it'll turn into a Mii version...I look like a melon when I do mine a dev has this to say:

There’s an API for the camera to scan faces and turn them into low-res 3D versions for games. But it’s still buggy as hell and it depends a lot on the kind of engine you’re running.

Finally according to this dev, porting titles over to the Wii U isn't as easy as it was thought to be (or as what Gearbox say it is) however that is just PS3 to Wii U.

much easier to port to Wii U than PS3 versions. A lot less headache involved because their architecture is similar. Technically, you can just recompile X360 to the Wii U and it’ll pretty much run, but PS3 to Wii U is much much trickier. We’ve spent a lot of time creating our own tools for the X360 this generation, and we’ve already tweaked a lot of the tools to work on the Wii U. But if you code on the Wii U from ground up and have to use middleware, it’s probably gonna be tougher than doing an X360 game from ground up.

No shit Sherlock! Obviously as always take these rumours with a pinch of salt but I think some are pretty obvious.

 

[triassic911]

Sounds good, finally the Wii U will be up to par. For that last part, I've read that a lot of devs prefer developing on the 360 then porting to the PS3 for similar reasons.

 

[Deleted_171835]

I would expect achievements and all that jazz. I just hope Nintendo doesn't forget about the 3DS with the Wii U and add these features to the 3DS as well.

Twitter and Facebook notifications are welcomed by me (Twitter specifically). It would be awesome if we could instantly take pics and post it on Twitter. Cloud storage is great for storing saves and should be on every platform, IMO.

With all the rumors we've been hearing about the OS taking up a lot of RAM, it better be awesome.

 

[DigitalDeviant]

If Nintendo gets social networking right then it will at least be on par with this generation of consoles.