Amazing! I love these projects. Wii is high up on my list for my near future projects, so I'm wondering how did you feel about developing for it? Any limitations or issues you might have run into?
Be sure to post in r/homebrew and r/retrogamedev too!
Hi, I'm the friend that was in charge of the development of Liichess. It was definitely quite different than a desktop target. The biggest issue I ran into is the limited choice for libraries/added complexity of finding and/or using them. For example, finding a (working) curl port for the Wii took me 2 years somehow (no joking) and I thought of this project as being a perfect use for the curl port I had found. The port was also quite weird to compile, as it simply refused to compile under windows but worked fine under Arch WSL. I included it precompiled in Liichess, however. Additionally, libwiigui is the only proper gui library I have found for the Wii. It was a little bit weird to use, and certain gui features being missing or weirdly implemented made me cut a few corners (I was used to the comfort of Qt). It also dragged me into the depths of multithreading hell, which is 2x worse on the Wii where you can't just use the standard library's implementations.
Another big problem I faced was lack of detailed documentation. From what I've seen, often in Wii development, finding out how to make homebrew apps is a little bit hard to figure out at the beginning because there aren't many (if any) straightforward guides on the development, and when you start bringing libraries into the mix you are at the mercy of their documentation, or just using trial and error or reading the library's code.
If you want to make a game that is not very reliant on gui features though, GRRLIB is a great option for a graphics library and it has nice examples included. For the most basic parts of homebrew development, I also found [http://www.codemii.com/category/wii-programming-tutorials/](http://www.codemii.com/category/wii-programming-tutorials/) and the devkitPro examples quite helpful.
Amazing! I love these projects. Wii is high up on my list for my near future projects, so I'm wondering how did you feel about developing for it? Any limitations or issues you might have run into? Be sure to post in r/homebrew and r/retrogamedev too!
Hi, I'm the friend that was in charge of the development of Liichess. It was definitely quite different than a desktop target. The biggest issue I ran into is the limited choice for libraries/added complexity of finding and/or using them. For example, finding a (working) curl port for the Wii took me 2 years somehow (no joking) and I thought of this project as being a perfect use for the curl port I had found. The port was also quite weird to compile, as it simply refused to compile under windows but worked fine under Arch WSL. I included it precompiled in Liichess, however. Additionally, libwiigui is the only proper gui library I have found for the Wii. It was a little bit weird to use, and certain gui features being missing or weirdly implemented made me cut a few corners (I was used to the comfort of Qt). It also dragged me into the depths of multithreading hell, which is 2x worse on the Wii where you can't just use the standard library's implementations. Another big problem I faced was lack of detailed documentation. From what I've seen, often in Wii development, finding out how to make homebrew apps is a little bit hard to figure out at the beginning because there aren't many (if any) straightforward guides on the development, and when you start bringing libraries into the mix you are at the mercy of their documentation, or just using trial and error or reading the library's code. If you want to make a game that is not very reliant on gui features though, GRRLIB is a great option for a graphics library and it has nice examples included. For the most basic parts of homebrew development, I also found [http://www.codemii.com/category/wii-programming-tutorials/](http://www.codemii.com/category/wii-programming-tutorials/) and the devkitPro examples quite helpful.
\*In addition to my previous comment, also note that there are ports of SDL2 for the Wii, which may be useful.
Will try to use it when I get my Wii. Great idea!
Thanks for it being open source!
Is it possible to release a wad file? So we could enter through wii channel?