Wii's LiveMove could be building block for industry's future

by James Ransom-Wiley { Oct 25th 2006 at 8:30PM }

We were skeptical about AiLive's motion-making development tool when it was announced earlier this month, but after seeing a tech demo of LiveMotion in action, we're convinced it can produce novel work. The problem is the price. At $2,500, LiveMotion is only attractive to a select crowd and excludes smaller parties who will likely turn to Microsoft's XNA project for a more affordable creative outlet.

Nintendo should consider setting up a program, like XNA, that would invite indie game makers and hobbyists to explore Wii's ingenuity. The DS's success has shown that there's an interest, a market, for small quirky games -- it's what Jaffe was getting at; an era of churn'em-out hits. With Wii, Nintendo could p0wn this niche.

Tags: AiLive, homebrew, indie, LiveMove, Virtual Console, VirtualConsole, Wiimote

Related From Joystiq

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

:p @ Oct 25th 2006 8:48PM

So why the YouTube video the real video on wii.com is so much better

http://ms.nintendo-europe.com/wii/?l=enGB&site=v4_04_ailive.html&mov=ailive/enGB/ailive.swf&l=enGB

And I really want $2500 so I could buy this program NOW!!!

robotplague @ Oct 25th 2006 8:48PM

Are you kidding me? $2,500 seems pretty dirt cheap to me, not pricey at all for what you get.

Lex @ Oct 25th 2006 8:53PM

Hmm... Am I missing somthing? Is what he is really doing is just assassing buttons to what would be an action in game?

AssemblyLineHuman @ Oct 25th 2006 8:55PM

Maybe I'm delusional, but wasn't there an article on Joystiq a while back about how original games on Xbox Live Arcade cost between $10,000 and $100,000 to make? Suddenly, $2,500 doesn't seem so bad.

Lex @ Oct 25th 2006 8:57PM

Geez what bad proof-reading on my part.

"Isn't all he's really doing is assigning buttons to what would be an action in game?"

That's better not by much but still better.

clay @ Oct 25th 2006 9:00PM

you misspelled pwn

Josh @ Oct 25th 2006 9:03PM

Lex, I'm still not sure what you're trying to say.

Anyway, I think $2,500 is a great deal, considering how much you could get back if you game actually made it onto the Virtual Console.

Moogle @ Oct 25th 2006 9:14PM

Yes, LiveMove is a tool to recognize and distinguish classes of actions. It's basically a shortcut so developers who want to be able to have simple gesture input don't have to build their own complicated intelligent systems to tell a slice from a block, or whatever.

It's not necessary for developing games, it's merely a time-saver for developers on a schedule. Otherwise they'd have to spend months in developing, testing, bug fixing, tweaking.

What we've seen so far is just binary operations. They player is doing action A, or action B, or neither. It's possible and somewhat likely that it offers, or will offer in the future, data associated with the move, such as the angle of a slash, the speed, etc.

Personally I think this isn't even useful for small quirky games. More interesting uses of the controller will come from delving in the guts of its data streams, not from simple surface pattern recognition.

Psaakyrn @ Oct 25th 2006 9:52PM

I would be more interested if it can determine a value dependant on the location, speed, and angle in which a certain motion is done though, aka analog values as opposed to true/false capture.

DrkMatter @ Oct 25th 2006 9:25PM

Whoever has had to buy devellopment kits, tools and libraries would know that 2500$ is far from the kind of price that makes a product "only attractive to a select crowd". Even for an indie devellopper, if you are in any way serious about making games for a profit, it's a pretty small investment.

rockintom99 @ Oct 25th 2006 9:48PM

See, the problem with this is that this isn't motion detecting that is fun. This is just more complicated version of a button.

Whereas something like Wiisports baseball, the remote *is* your bat. You move it up, and the bat goes up, etc. With this, it is just making a swinging motion, and then it recognizes it as "Oh hey, you swung your bat. Now your character will respond".

This is the kind of thing I am afraid of for Wii's future. I want games where the remote is *part of the game*. Not a glorified and more complicated (and error-prone) way of simply pressing a button.

:p @ Oct 25th 2006 10:11PM

Sorry for the n00bish-ness but here is the source for that $2500 figure

http://press.nintendo.com/articles.jsp?id=10431

member kids you can get kicked out of college for not showing sources ;)

@ rockintom99

You make a good point, but you've got to agree if your like me, A tool like this can help you get your idea out of your head on to the screen much faster while learning your way around the Wii.

Jonn @ Oct 25th 2006 10:59PM

>More interesting uses of the controller will come from delving in the guts of its data streams, not from simple surface pattern recognition.<
What are you talking about? I'm not insulting you, I just have no clue.

Atomsk @ Oct 25th 2006 10:33PM

Considering that the original dev kits for the Wii only cost $2500, if this is an extra $2500, thats not really that bad... its only a $5000 dev kit total... O_o;

Doesn't Sony's dev kit cost like $20k? what about 360?

dvddesign @ Oct 25th 2006 10:39PM

Yeah, I gotta agree. As someone who works in the video industry, $2500 is a bargain. I used to peddle HD video editing systems that were $20,000 that sold to people less seriously interested in their work than a serious game developer looking for a cheap investment.

I blew $3600 on a full editing system 3 years ago that's still paying off. If I made games, I'd drop $2500 on a mo-cap system if it does add a serious cut in development time, costs, and testing.

Probot @ Oct 25th 2006 11:12PM

"The problem is the price. At $2,500, LiveMotion is only attractive to a select crowd and excludes smaller parties who will likely turn to Microsoft's XNA project for a more affordable creative outlet."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't XNA only allow non-commercial demos to be made with their cheaper toolset. So to make any money, you'd have to pay for the full dev kits and licensing fees.

According to the developer of Marble Blast Ultra:

"Creating an XBLA game is taking most studios 6-12 months. Costs are currently ranging from $100,000 to $300,000...The industry standard arms race will quickly make the top end $300,000 budget a cheap product. Right now, I wouldn’t consider attempting to make an XBLA game with a $100,000 budget. Development kits and Certification (QA testing) would eat up half of that, not leaving much for the actual game development."

http://makeitbigingames.com/blog/?p=35

According to casual game developer, King Lud, totalling all the (known) costs of developerment for the Wii (including LiveMove), the minimum is around $40,000-$50,000.

"LiveMove costs $2500 to use per computer/NDev pairing, and $10,000 per title published. Meaning the minimum budget is about 40-50k, and that profitable games could be produced with budgets in the 150-300k range."

http://kingludic.blogspot.com/2006/10/casual-games-on-wii.html

Clizz @ Oct 25th 2006 11:35PM

if you can't afford $2,500 middleware you shouldn't be investing in making video games.

Invader Alex @ Oct 25th 2006 11:45PM

i saw this video a little while ago (not complaining)

But the one im angery about.
People use different hands the most, some people are left handed, some people are right hand. Me, I am left handed. The controler can fit in each hand equally. But the game will only reconize the hand genuse if the controller is in that hand. This means that games designer must have the game reconise the genuse with both hands program.
If they dont, alot may not be able to play some games...

Dylan @ Oct 25th 2006 11:55PM

LiveMove sounds good (and I swear, they were using either Gnome or KDE in that presentation... I can't tell the difference between their file selector dialogues, but it definietly wasn't Explorer. It's pretty lame that I am pleased by that, but it is pleasing).

However, it's unfortunate they they didn't demonstrate an improvisation system.
It would be cool (and completely possible!) to have motions recognized by a particular aspect of their shape, with the engine deciding the speed of the animation or to mix in another motion (pushing a rolling pin while spinning it).
Undoubtedly it will be done. If not, I will be very angered.

Hopefully developers won't get too used to this library, because there are far better things that could be done.

Inspired @ Oct 25th 2006 11:59PM

worst ... chicken ... dance ... ever.

LOL!

epobirs @ Oct 26th 2006 12:20AM

$2500 is a pittance for any developer making a serious move into Wii projects. A big part of any new platform is the expenses of reinventing the wheel. This is why standards are so important. If a new platform requires data to be represented in an oddball file format and the SDK doesn't include a tool for efficiently converting from an established tool for creating those files, the developer needs to write their own.

The more time a developer needs to invest in tool creation, the longer and more expensive that first project is going to be. When a platform brings in something new then new category of tool is needed. In this case we have something similar to a mouse movement recorder for the Wii-mote. Considering the integral use of gestures in games making heavy use of the Wii-mote, this is a truly trival amount of investment to get useful code produced that much sooner and in a way that delivers an immediate understanding of the final gameplay effect.

Compared to some development situations I've seen, where the coder has to directly generate numbers the machines wants but are not especially representative of anything that connects to action for a human, this is worth every penny. Back when I was involved in games with $40K-80K budgets, a $50 tool to perform batch file conversions was seen as far more cost effective than having someone inhouse produce the same thing.

So for professional projects where ten times that budget is considered the very low end, $2500 is really peanuts. It isn't for the guys working in garages on their first serious console project but that can happen down the road as the tool grows and the older versions can be repurposed as cheap entry level versions.

epobirs @ Oct 26th 2006 12:30AM

#18

Alex, that is a trivial problem. You just flip the data on the affected axis. (The support for flipping the screen and controls on the Atari Lynx was a very cool feature that took little effort but showed real thought.) It's just a matter of developers recognizing the need and taking the time to test the gesture from both perspectives.

It also means having a real dominant left-hander on the testing staff. (I'm left handed for writing and some other stuff but have no problem with standard control layouts, so I could never serve as a real test for lefty controls.)

I believe that counts as fulfilling the federal ADA requirements.

Meophist @ Oct 26th 2006 5:37PM

I think I heard this is more so that developers can test ideas without having to go the full length of programming them in. This makes the gestures to make a demo to see how a particular mechanic can work(or not work) so it can give developers thier time exploring more ideas rather than spending that time testing fewer ideas.

epobirs @ Oct 26th 2006 12:40AM

One thing that has to be remembered when somebody claims a remarkably low budget for their game, what was their compensation for the time invested? Was this project their sole employment for its duration or was it something they did on the side while holding down regular jobs.

Some teams may manage to produce very professional results with the homebrew XNA product but if the game becomes a purchasable item on XBLA and they tally the proceeds after a year of sales, they may find that the time invested would have put more money in their pocket if spent working a minimum wage job.

Sure, the out of pocket expenses may have been very low but your time has a value. If you're hoping to turn pro, that time can be chalked up as an educational expense but don't have the illusion you achieved a miracle of economy.

V1L3 @ Oct 26th 2006 12:43AM

"an era of churn'em-out hits."

Oh. Joy.

the Brayn @ Oct 26th 2006 10:26AM

Correct me if I am wrong here but this is just motion capturing software and not a full Wii SDK. So for developers it wouldn't be just $2500 to develop for the Wii but to give them an application that will read user input so they don't have to program it themselves. It seems like a lot of comments are treating this like a full on dev kit.