Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Andrex 1368 days ago
New Horizons used the standard internal game engine Nintendo deploys for most of their flagship Switch games, called LunchPak/LunchPak 2.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/fnfdic/nintendos_g...

Which is crazy since (having played NL and NH for a combined 1500 hours) even the little, deep details carry on from New Leaf. If I didn't know better I'd say NH was using an evolved NL engine.

1 comments

Hmmm, I wonder! My experience with this comes from doing some minor reverse engineering work on the Wii game back in my teens, in order to pass all the dialogue through Google translate, for great amusement [0].

My observation was the data structures/file formats were basically slight modifications of the ones used in other first party Nintendo games, primarily Mario Kart and Mario Party. So it seems like it's always drawn heavily from some internal SDK/engine, it's just not clear how much, or how much of that engine is saved between consoles.

Anecdotally, the DS and Wii (and ... maybe the GC? I don't remember now) used the same file format for the dialogue scripts, although the DS version was little-endian, and broke all my (terribly brittle) "tooling". The 3DS was totally different, and I ... Think the Switch was a variant of the 3DS format? It's been a hot minute since I've looked at any of this stuff :-)

[0] https://imgur.com/a/hFRbY