Wii Internet Channel Homebrew

Much of the Wii Opera SDK is being overhauled or rewritten from scratch for the upcoming version 3.0 release.  Unfortunately, some of the new features have to wait until the Opera 9.5 build of the Internet Channel becomes available for the Wii.  The new Wii Remote class is available now, as is the Raycasting class, in the preview release.  The new Drawing class makes use of the Canvas::transform function, which is available in Opera 9.5 but not the 9.27 build of the Internet Channel.  You can see it in action on a computer, but the demo does not work on the Wii yet.  Also coming with the 3.0 release will be a dungeon editor for the raycaster so that developers can create their own games.  The raycaster is versatile enough that it can even be used to create on-rails flight sims and 3D side scrollers.

A new Wii Remote class for the Wii Opera SDK has just been released, superceding the previously existing one.  A demonstration can be found at http://wiioperasdk.com/remote.html.

This new class contains the following features:

• Read button presses from all 4 Wii Remotes
• Read distance from Sensor Bar of all 4 Wii Remotes
• Read cursor position of all 4 Wii Remotes
• Read angle of roll for all 4 Wii Remotes
• Read button presses from 3 Nunchuks
• Read button presses from a keyboard acting as a Wii Remote
• Autodetect active keyboard or Wii Remote NEW!
• Autoswap between remote and controller orientation based on Wii Remote direction NEW!
• Autorotate D-pad orientation based on Wii Remote orientation NEW!
• Read additional keypresses when using BOTH a Wii Remote and a USB keyboard NEW!
• Toggle disabling of default key/button actions NEW!

The first demo of the Wii Opera SDK raycasting dungeon class is available for play at http://wiioperasdk.com/wall.html. Features in this beta are as follows:

• Axis-aligned grid-based raycasting
• Texture-mapped walls
• Second-pass wall effects (flashlight, gouraud, shadow)
• Variable ray resolution (for speed adjustment)
• Bounce generated by walking

I will be tweaking the engine and writing documentation for it throughout the day.

I’ve been hard-at-work on the Wii Opera SDK first-person shooter (etc. )engine for the Internet Channel.  Its release is taking longer than expected because I’m adding more features to it and tweaking the engine.  Here are some of the features:

• Raycasting-based
• Axis-aligned walls (for the first release)
• Collision-detection built into raycasting for speed
• Texture mapped walls
• Second-pass directional wall lighting (similar to gouraud shading)
• Variable screen resolution

I’m not sure when the release will be coming, but I will post more to this blog as information becomes available.

I’ve made modifications to the triangle texture mapping functionality of the Wii Opera SDK, incorporating the rotation and scaling calculations by Tangent128 for his 3D globe widget at MyOpera. This eliminated the need for scanline-based rendering and replaced it with single-pass rendering. As one can imagine, this greatly increased the speed of the triangle filling.  Based on trials I’ve done, the speed increase is probably about 20 fold, but it really depends on how big the average triangle is for each mesh. Basically, the boost probably comes down pretty close to scaling linearly with the number of scalines that would’ve been in the triangle with the old rendering method. A demo of the Super Smash Bros. logo is at http://wiioperasdk.com/texturemap.html and a ripple puddle is at http://wiioperasdk.com/ripple3.html.

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