Takeshi Shimada, from Nintendo, recently spoke on new development tools for the Wii at GDC.  He detailed a few different tools they are designing for developers to easily create Wii games.  Here are some of the details:

  • ‘Nintendoware‘, a tool made by HAL Labs and Nintendo, that emulates the Wii on a high-end PC so artists can quickly see an accurate preview of special effects without having to load everything onto an actual Wii kit
  • He also stated that the team is currently working on an easy-to-incorporate fur-shading middleware (think either Starfox Adventures or the Xbox version of Conker’s Bad Fur Day)
  • In addition, they are currently working on predictive motion sensing, whereby a game can predict what your next movement is likely to be to create smoother Wii controller movements in-game.
  • Finally, it was also noted that Nintendo of Japan is looking towards a program that can convert text into speech on the Wii.

Sounds like we’re in for some cool things in the future for Wii games.

Source: Cubed3