[News] Wii browser first impressions

[tomsamson]

As there has been some discussion about the wii browser/its flash capabilities here recently and i just downloaded it and played around with it quickly (can´t do much more now,close to a deadline..),here are my first impressions:

First of all i´ve downloaded the free trial version which is available for download since today (the 22nd,may be in some hours depending on where you are located).
Trial means not everything is final yet and some things will be improved for the full release version in spring.

However,to sum up my first impressions right away it already works way better than i´d have expected from a browser running on a console.
Now a bit of a more detailed rundown:

general browsing:
-JS/HTML Rendering Functionalities seem to work fine as far as i can tell after the first quick round, i tried around 30 websites and all displayed without any problems whatsoever.

You can scroll and zoom in/out using the wiimote,go back and forth,add favorites,there´s also word autocompletition for quicker address typing.

flash content playback/performance:
Checking the flash version on the adobe page i noticed it has a player v 7.0.70.0 installed,so yeah,no flash 8/9 content will run on it.
Trying to download a newer player version leads to a "File format/octet-stream not supportet" warning.

Ok,so back to testing flash content v7 and older which is only controlled via mouse (or now wiimote ) :

flash enabled sites:
Sites like youtube.com work perfectly fine,i´ve watched several lengthy movies whithout any problems.

flash games:
game playback is as i said restricted to mouse controlled v7 and older games of course but yeah,besides that i had no problems playing the games i tried.

Overall the flash content display performance is quite good (way better than the wacky bulked v6 psp player for example),i could play most games pretty smooth.
I´ve also loaded our monster trucks on miniclip,which i can´t control of course as it needs more keys but yeah,although it runs lots of math calculations every frame refresh the performance was higher than i expected (smooth),too.
I then played several mouse controlled games and all worked very well.
Also great: as said earlier you can zoom in on any content and therefore zoom in on games,too, to have em displayed pretty much fullscreen.

ok,so much on this for now,overall,thumbs up to Opera and Nintendo,hope they add a newer version of the player for the final release but even as it is now this is a pretty comfortable solution for surfing on your couch without keyboard and mouse

[lesli_felix]

Thx for the info, it sounds really promising.

I've seen the wii in action, had a go, and it's the first time ive ever considered spending money on a console. Kudos to nintendo for innovation without a silly pricetag.

They really need to get the latest version of the player on here though, flash 9 is available for opera, and lot's of content is flash 8 minimum these days.

I wonder if people will start taking consoles into account when developing flash content (ie developing games that can be completely mouse controlled)

[hooligan2001]

Hmm interesting thanks for the heads up tom. I havent browsed the internet on my wii yet. Just been mucking around with Red Steel, Raving Rabbits, Zelda and Wii sports. I was wondering how well flash games would port across after reading that post on Line Rider getting made for the wii.

[tomsamson]

Thx for the info, it sounds really promising.

np,you´re welcome And yeah,i´m pretty thrilled by it now seeing it runs way better than i pictured it (testing lousy implementations on other consoles/mobile devices before)
I´ll definately play way more with this in my holidays once our current project is out the door =)

I've seen the wii in action, had a go, and it's the first time ive ever considered spending money on a console. Kudos to nintendo for innovation without a silly pricetag.

Yeah,exactly. I´d have posted way more about it,as i said i´m kinda under pressure these days but overall its a great machine and all Nintendo has promised so far =)
Heck,my mom never was into video games,she only tried playing mario kart with me once in snes days,moved the controller around alll the time and just pressed the accelerate button and wondered why she drove against the wall all the time.
I showd her wii sports for around 5 minutes when she suddenly said "ok,come on,let me try it now"
Then she played wii tennis nonstop for over 2 hours
On the one side its great to see it generally attracting non gamers,too,on the other side it feels really awesoeme to me that my mom can finally appreciate a game console,feels much nicer regarding she couldn´t actually enjoy/get the glimpse of what i do for a living before
(nay,i don´t mean my pornstar side business )

They really need to get the latest version of the player on here though, flash 9 is available for opera, and lot's of content is flash 8 minimum these days.

yeah

I wonder if people will start taking consoles into account when developing flash content (ie developing games that can be completely mouse controlled)

i´m sure there will be some (wink )

[tomsamson]

Hmm interesting thanks for the heads up tom. I havent browsed the internet on my wii yet. Just been mucking around with Red Steel, Raving Rabbits, Zelda and Wii sports. I was wondering how well flash games would port across after reading that post on Line Rider getting made for the wii.

I only got to play zelda for around 30 minutes and wii sports for around an hour up to now thanks to much work (yeah,its crazy my mom played with my new console longer than me ),all really nice =)
have a go at the browser man,its free

[Cimmerian]

(yeah,its crazy my mom played with my new console longer than me ),

True, Thats crazy!!
Anyway, a bit offtopic but did you saw how it runs director's games?

[tomsamson]

True, Thats crazy!!

yeah,i´ll catch up in the next few days =)

Anyway, a bit offtopic but did you saw how it runs director's games?

no director/shockwave plugin is installed,i checked several director game pages aswell as the adobe player page where it also checks your shockwave version,same result everywhere,it shows a blank "plugin content" labelled frame with no content,plugin is not auto obtained and as i wrote earlier there´s no obvious solution for installing plugins manually.
I don´t know if some hacky guys will come up with a workaround for this (or the full release version of the browser will feature a director plugin by default),but as it stands,yup,there´s no director there.

[walsher]

Very cool, thanks for the info there Tom. Glad to see Nintendo getting some things right there first time around.

On a side note Tom, have you had any of the Wii remote problems?

[renderhjs]

I am glad Opera finally gets the success they really deserve (by far most impressive single browser software imo.).
I´ve heard that the PS3 has some kind of opera browser as well though the PSP has a different solution- but I can´t verify this.

@tomsamson: it would be nice to know how the opera browser for the wii handles websites in terms of scaling and autofit things (win: ctrl+f11). What the available browser screensize is and for example if it supports sharing Objects in flash (e.g download/ save).

[tomsamson]

Very cool, thanks for the info there Tom.

glad if it was interesting

Glad to see Nintendo getting some things right there first time around.

I think they screwed up things on some ends with the n64/gamecube but yeah,with their current consoles (ds/wii),so far they do way more things right than the contenders (come on,a console for 600,sony,whom are you kidding,don´t tell me its cheap for a bluray player cause i don´t want one )
Xbox 360 is on second place regarding home consoles right now in my eyes,mostly with adult games like graw,dead rising ,gears of war and their xbox live arcade offerings,but yeah, nintendo has the better price/original and mass entertainment fun titles right now.
In either case this round of console wars will get really interesting once the ps3 shapes up with more (exclusive) slick games and propper online service once all runs and the developers are used to the hardware.
Still,on christmas holidays i´ll get raving rabbits and play that and wii sports with the family and virtual console games alone to bring back memories =)

On a side note Tom, have you had any of the Wii remote problems?

No,i don´t have any problems with the remote or some other part of the console.
Controlling works fine with the wiimote,in all games i tried up to now (as i said not that many besides zelda and wii sports yet) movements were recognized directly and on the spot. The only game where the movement was ported to game action with (very subtle) delay was boxing from the wii sports package.
I think that´s rather due to it beeing thrown in late in the dev phase though because all other games in the pack have great direct controls.

If you were asking regarding the wii strap getting loose:
I´ve got two wiimotes right now,one has the old strap,one the new one and neither of em got loose up to now. I´m sure it can be broken with some pressure to it,but if you don´t put some heavy pressure on it and use it as intended there shouldn´t be any issues.
The funny side is once some idiots threw their wiimote into their tv or achieved to brake the straps with force,Nintendo announced straps would be replaced for free right away,i never heard of tv remotes having straps or the manufacturers of those helping people who throw their remote into their tv..
I understand one can get into heavy movements with the wii (if wanted,its not actually required to play the games),but come on,you should still be able to hold something in your hand

I am glad Opera finally gets the success they really deserve (by far most impressive single browser software imo.).
I´ve heard that the PS3 has some kind of opera browser as well though the PSP has a different solution- but I can´t verify this.

Yeah,kudos and praise to opera for getting a nice version going there
Some sites like jayisgames which render crappy on IE but nice on firefox for me on pc look perfectly fine on the wii,its impressive it outbeats IE on several sites
Obviously i don´t have a ps3 yet and don´t intend to get one before the price drops a fair amount so i can´t verify that either.
I have a psp,too but only tried the browser on it for around 10 minutes,was heavily disappointed by the normal browsing performance/lack of functionality and then even more about the crappy flash playback "performance" there,so i never tried it again.
(its a shame sony so wasted up all that huge potential of that great little machine btw,not at all just on browser end)

@tomsamson: it would be nice to know how the opera browser for the wii handles websites in terms of scaling and autofit things (win: ctrl+f11). What the available browser screensize is and for example if it supports sharing Objects in flash (e.g download/ save).

I´ll check all that tomorrow,have to work for some more hours now.
(regarding scaling it shows a page at 100% scale by default and you can scroll it around and/or zoom in and out to see the portion you want if not all fits on one screen or you just want to see something big;scaling things big has no noticable impact on performance,the look stays crisp,too)

[Captain_404]

I've been wondering if flash could use buttons on those games that allow you to program your own controls, have you tried this?



[advertisement]someone try Valo (in my sig) and let me know how it works...please?[/advertisement]

[tomsamson]

ok,latest built of our current project is ready now,so while copying stuff over to my notebook (which i´ll take with me on my holiday trip so i can work some hours a day),i can check things some more on this end

I've been wondering if flash could use buttons on those games that allow you to program your own controls, have you tried this?

yeah,buttons/mouse events work fine as far as i´ve tried up to now.
Will code something myself and try it on it on my holiday trip to get a more exact what works list up,right now i can only say buttons/click events worked in all content i tried.

[advertisement]someone try Valo (in my sig) and let me know how it works...please?[/advertisement]

I tried your game on wii now,overall it worked; i tried 2 levels, but the wait between levels was quite long (around 30 seconds),dunno what you do there.

[walsher]

Glad to see that you haven't gotten any problems.

The funny side is once some idiots threw their wiimote into their tv or achieved to brake the straps with force,Nintendo announced straps would be replaced for free right away,i never heard of tv remotes having straps or the manufacturers of those helping people who throw their remote into their tv..

YA, once I heard of people breaking there tv's and/or windows I was laughing. I haven't actual played one but I think they go on the wraist. I'm guessing so you don't drop the controller. Which seems like a good idea.

I find it funny that after Nintendo announced it would be doing a virtual console, Microsoft then all of a sudden started getting older games.

[VENGEANCE MX]

Tom, don't suppose you could use the Wii browser to open an swf with a dynamic text field and a getKeyCode() to see if the various buttons on the Wiimote and nunchuka are translated into key codes (and if so, what those key codes are)? Might be the case that you get completely bizarre numbers over and over again, like if the motion sensor signals are read by the console as keypresses, but if that's not the case and everything works fine, there could very soon be a new target market for Flash games (been dying to see how well Commando 3 would work on an actual games console ).

[bogeybot]

Only mouse click (A-button) is communicated to the flash plugin; all other button have browser related functions attached to them (except for the crosshair ... for now).

[Captain_404]

Only mouse click (A-button) is communicated to the flash plugin; all other button have browser related functions attached to them (except for the crosshair ... for now).

Is this true of only the wiimote? Do the control-stick-add-on-thing buttons/joystick do anything?

[adit_ya_sharma]

very cool. Can you test this game out on it

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/233489

[tidenburg]

I have a Wii now and I was thinking about getting the Wii browser. Is it really worth it when I have a computer?
P.s. If you can download files then isn't it opening up the WIi for modding?

[UnknownGuy]

Wii browser is free right now, this is a test period.

[hp3]

We should get some information about this listed in the devices forum too. I was not even aware of Flash support in the browser for Wii.

Where is the link to download the browser for Wii and is there an official press release about Flash support in Opera for Wii?