Is it legal to use wii controllers on PC(or on other platforms) games?

Hi,
I know that you need to be registered with nintendo to make games for their platforms. But the situation is a bit different. Two situations actually.
1. Game will be exported to PC-Mac-standalone(windows store or on steam) or xbox one(XBL). Users will be required to purchase a nintendo wiimote-nunchuck to play because inputs are being handled by those devices.
2. Game will be exported to PC-Mac-standalone and it will be shown to a commercial event handled by local clients. Crowd will play the game using nintendo input devices.

Do these work legally? Do these even work if we get ourselves as registered nintendo developer?

Reminder: There will be no binaries exported for nintendo platforms using any(whether nintendo's official or not) SDK. Its just about the controllers.

Please shed some light on it.

Thanks and regards
Kaiyum

 

From a Unity Input perspective having support for these controllers I don't see any issue with legally. All the possibly illegal part is going to be centered around the 3rd party driver that would need to be used. I would think bundling that with the game would be a no go but if you state that you did support it and left it to the end user it would probably be fine. That would of course mean you game would have to function on normal inputs to ever get off the ground on PC (Xbox would probably not be capable of running the 3rd party driver).

This is just my speculation though perhaps others can shed more light on the subject.

 

In case of xbox one, prebundled native plugin will do the job. However I will be sure of it, when the devkit arrives.

 

I think if you bundled the driver it is probably going to land you in legal trouble. Since there is no way for an end user on xbox to install the driver themselves I don't think you have an option for Xbox. PC would have the option but again for legal reasons you wouldn't want to bundle the driver.

Again just my speculation perhaps others know better.

 

Ops, what a mess. Xbox One does not have any bluetooth on boards, so directly with bluetooth it is impossible. There could be indirect setup to redirect bluetooth signals.... Anyway leave the XB thing. I need at least for PC, to work this legally. Hope someone shed light on this matter.

 

The Xbox One will be a no-go (I'm not a registered developer so I can't say, but i'm like 99.99% sure, but contact them) because of obvious reasons... Why not just support Dualshock 4 gamepads

It's worth looking into the PS Move controller, Johann Sebastian Joust uses it and IIRC it was on PC before PS and is still on PC with the Move controller supported.

 

Actually it does not suit the situation. Its a cricket game with virtual reality. For client, our plan is to set a motion sensing device with a cricket bat and use that bat to give input. Just like in normal world we hit the ball. wiimote and nunchuck is a good candidate for this situation. However we do have other plan to go. One is with mio .And another one is with a custom controller we created in lab. The custom controller can give rotation value, but we are deeply concerned with positional value which is much needed. We are going on a tight schedule. So many things can not be done even if I want to or/and I can. May be, finally I will go with kinect with mio setup. Its just wiimote-nunchuck which would make the job easier as most works for them, is already done by us/others. Anyway, lets see.

PS Move is a good things. But does it work well on PC? Does it have any licensing restriction?

 

I've been wondering about this as well. I have a small Unity program (not really a game) that uses the Wii Balance board using the Wiibuddy plugin. I've been wondering if it was possible to distribute it or sell it.

For motion controls, I'm currently using the Hydra until the Oculus Touch, Lighthouse or the STEM come out.

 

Couldn't you just use (I need to say it, sorry) uhrm... Kinect (now that's out of my system) and let the bat be just a prop handled by players?

 

Or go one step further and just launch on the Wii.

I would expect a legal challenge from Nintendo on this if it becomes popular. Regardless of win or loose, it could get relatively nasty.

Disclaimer: I'm totally guessing, best bet would be to give Nintendo a bell and ask.

 

Exactly. Launch it for the platform where the player is expected to have these controllers. Don't expect players to want to spend a fair amount of money on controllers because you thought it was cute to require them for your non-Wii game.

Optionally supporting them is another matter.

 

Does not work for various reasons.
1. Nintendo does not support development from Bangladesh. All of our developers are from Bangladesh, right now we can not work from our newyork office.

2. Wii is too low in power to handle our game. That is why binary must not be for wii.

 

Kinect's bone joint's rotation is not much smooth.

 

Ok rant over. We will go with kinect+this:

 

what is that?

 

Its an in-house motion controller to replace anticipated nintendo's controllers in future, altogether. Right now it can give us position and rotation data quite smoothly. I should say, better than wiimote . One thing problematic in rotation right now, Y is Z and Z is Y. May be the quaternion code in hex, is messed up a bit. Other than that everything is ok. Hopefully tomorrow I can fix this.

 

You can put simple code fix:

Code (csharp):

1. z = oldz;
2. z = y;
3. y = oldz;

You're welcome.

 

Microsoft has been sold out of the Kinect V2 adaptors for a while. This thread got me to check again. They are back in stock so I bought one. It is definitely better than V1 but I don't think it is quite good enough for me to use in game. I'm using Cinema mocap to record animations. It works pretty good but the resulting animations need to be cleaned up in Blender. If you figure out how to use it in game, let me know.

 

Oh boy, syncing animation with a realtime bat was a tough bitch to handle. We ended up converting the game into a turn based one. You perform some hit gesture, kinect record your movement and then output your gesture like "straight6", "off4", "leg6" etc. Then you play corresponding animation and send ball to some adjusted normalized vector3 via physics.

I had IK in my mind, but we dont have that huge amount of time to spend on IK for this project. Actually its my bad, may be I could make it work with mecanim/root motion asset, by the time I spent upon autodesk middleware humanIK.

 

mecanim is really powerful, should be sorta easy to implement that,
you have an axis for each 3d direction?

then, with your animation you have the extreme position of every axis.. totally left, totally right, totally up, totally down, forward, backward.

and use a blendnode with the 6 animation positions, and feed it the axis inputs vars.

guess theres a bit more to perfecting it to look amazing, but whatevers lols

 

Thanks for the input, but later our client requested to change camera view to ugly first person. So now animation does not really matter much to users. Now we send the ball to exact direct of hit, however.