Nintendo-Scene

The Wii Opera SDK team has released a tech demo to showcase their new features. While true Wii homebrew is not yet available the Wii Opera SDK is able to utilize the pointing and button functions of the Wii Remote to do some interesting things.

The Demo released is a simple First Person environment where you’ll be able to walk around and look at things. While the demo does crash after a few minutes it gets the point across about the potential of developing for the Wii Opera Browser.

Since the demo is browser based you can view the demo on any non IE browser. However, unless you’re playing on a Wii you will not be able to control it. The SDK creates an environment with the graphical capabilities about that of an SNES.

From the Release Notes:

Controls:
Pointer up - move forward
Pointer down - move backward
Pointer left - turn left
Pointer right - turn right
B - shoot
A - reload
C - cycle down weapon*
Z - cycle up weapon*
*Not possible with the primary Wii Remote

Graphics
At the moment, the early engine is polygon-based, but I plan on rewriting it as a raytracer, allowing larger levels at less processor load. The graphics will be the same as a raytracer, but that will make it harder to create features like stairs. Since the textures are PNG-based, transparency and translucency are possible in the engine’s current state, but a raytracer would not allow that due to speed issues. I know it sounds like a raytracing engine would have less features, but memory issues with the current engine keep crashing my Wii.

Multiplayer
Multiplayer will be inevitable, but I’m not sure if that will be online or split-screen at the moment. If it would be split-screen for two players, three Wii Remotes would be needed because the Nunchuk on the primary one is inaccessible.

Sound
Since this is all Javascript based, sound is not possible, unfortunately. If I was to port all this to Flash (as many people assume is possible), I would be forfeiting speed and graphical capabilities, rendering the engine worthless.

There are also other demos and documentation available.

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