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Unity CEO says DirectX 11 equivalent functionality 'potentially possible' on Wii U
A portion of a Gaming Blend interview with David Helgason, the CEO of Unity...
Gaming Blend: While the Wii U doesn't specifically use DirectX functionality, will the Unity Engine for the Wii U allow for DirectX 11 equivalent functionality in regards to shaders, soft and self shadowing as well as potential scalability for shader 5.0 (or higher)?
Helgason: Yeah. We'll do a – we'll make it potentially possible to do.
What's interesting is that our philosophy is always this: We have a match work flow and I'm sure we can make a decent game and prototype, and they're fun. And then we have a shared system that basically allows you to access the full capabilities of the hardware you run. That's going to be good whether you're running [software] on an iPhone, the Wii U, a gaming PC or whatever.
So what Unity is all about is the evolution from PC and you get really good cross-platform economics porting from one device to the other. But also, it's become layered between you and the hardware and layered between you and the controls. And you look back at some of the stuff we showed at the Unite Conference that we did about a month ago, and we showed some videos […] we were showing off our lighting technology and there's a demo of that, we call it a CG movie. It basically looks like a movie but it's actually in real-time.
There's a session where we walk in and pry open that movie and start moving things around – and of course all of that technology we're making available.
Full interview here
Gaming Blend: While the Wii U doesn't specifically use DirectX functionality, will the Unity Engine for the Wii U allow for DirectX 11 equivalent functionality in regards to shaders, soft and self shadowing as well as potential scalability for shader 5.0 (or higher)?
Helgason: Yeah. We'll do a – we'll make it potentially possible to do.
What's interesting is that our philosophy is always this: We have a match work flow and I'm sure we can make a decent game and prototype, and they're fun. And then we have a shared system that basically allows you to access the full capabilities of the hardware you run. That's going to be good whether you're running [software] on an iPhone, the Wii U, a gaming PC or whatever.
So what Unity is all about is the evolution from PC and you get really good cross-platform economics porting from one device to the other. But also, it's become layered between you and the hardware and layered between you and the controls. And you look back at some of the stuff we showed at the Unite Conference that we did about a month ago, and we showed some videos […] we were showing off our lighting technology and there's a demo of that, we call it a CG movie. It basically looks like a movie but it's actually in real-time.
There's a session where we walk in and pry open that movie and start moving things around – and of course all of that technology we're making available.