Good evening. Or good afternoon. Or whatever. I've just come back from Tokyo Game Show and I'm quite sleepy. It's time for the WiiLink News.

Updates to WiiLink Checkout

Last month, we launched our new WiiLink Accounts platform, WiiLink Checkout. While we really like the way we launched that service, we felt there was still a lot more that we could use Checkout for, so we've spent a lot of time adding and refining features for the website! Here's all the features that we cooked up during September:

We made a mobile version! While the initial mobile version of Checkout was acceptable, it wasn't quite the intuitive experience we wanted for a brand new account home. Checkout now has a native mobile UI, with a new interface optimized for smaller screens. You can also save this page to your homescreen as an web app, and use the website as the Checkout app.

Checkout now displays current WiiLink data! From visiting the top page, you can now see info on current Mii Contests, Everybody Votes polls and more, letting you think about them more before logging on your Wii.

There is now a playtime calendar! We now track for playdate data, meaning you can track at what time you played your favourite games. You can see your latest playdates by default, and by contacting us for a special procedure you can see your playdata for all days.

Checkout + Themes

WiiLink Checkout supports themes, which lets you trade WiiLink Points for themes for the website. This month, we added our first new batch of themes, based on classic Super Mario Bros. games! These themes feature custom fonts and music as well, so you'll need a bit more points to claim them. Good luck!

Development Analysis: Photo Prints Channel

We're making good progress on the new Photo Prints Channel update! If you're unaware, back in December 31, 2024, Sketch shared that he had started to work on a new version of Photo Prints Channel that supports brand new cards. But why doesn't the current version support it? Let's look further in this development analysis.

Compared to channels like the Mii Contest Channel and Everybody Votes Channel, the Photo Prints Channel wasn't actually meant to be updated. For the six designs of business cards that you can order on the channel, all six are actually hardcoded into the channel. This means that they can't be altered from any servers, and they aren't designed to support any more or less card designs.

If you were around in 2021, you may remember a limited-time celebration we ran where we actually did support brand new card designs based on WiiLink and other Wii services. To actually realise this, we had to change our backend designs to replace the standard designs, and we also distributed an alternate version of the channel where the card designs reflected the change. However, this was a superficial change. The only thing that mattered in terms of getting the new designs were the server side changes, and that had to replace the original designs. This meant that during the celebration, even if you had the original version of the channel, you couldn't use the standard designs. Likewise, after the celebration it was impossible to use the limited-time designs even if you had the version of the channel where all the card previews used the special designs. It was a mess to deal with, and it's why we haven't released new card designs since.

So how do we make this support more designs? Well, we can start with changing how the channel loads cards.

While we could just normally increase the amount of designs and put them into the channel as updates, that's not quite sustainable. That would mean for every new design we add, we have to make people go back to the WiiLink Patcher and go through the process of installing the channel again. And considering that this is the Wii, we would eventually hit a limit where the channel just can't display more cards, at which point we would have to switch out designs, replicating the exact problem we had 5 years ago. So let's not do that. Instead, we can make the channel directly look at our servers for new card designs, and save them directly to the channel itself!

Saving something to the program itself as an "non-update" might sound like something you shouldn't do, but it is actually fairly common in games. For example, Tetris 99 uses non-updates to add new event themes you can use without updating the game, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons used them to allow events to take place so players couldn't just skip the timer to leak it online. Granted, none of these are on the Wii, so that does slightly complicate things.

We've already gotten past the point of testing if these non-update system can work; it does. What we're currently working on now is individually getting a 7th card on the menu to work, so we can have this be a scalable process. We're really close to getting this to work, which would hopefully let us replicate this and do this fairly simply every time.

A problem that we will have to deal with as we scale up is the filesizes. Because new designs are directly saving themselves to the channel, it means that adding new designs will increase the amount of blocks the channel takes up on the Wii. Additionally, adding cards also increases the size of the layout file that's directly loaded in the card selection screen, meaning that too many designs can just directly crash the channel. But that's something we can only really look into once this system is finished.

The Illustrated Book of Earth returns

The Illustrated Book of Earth is one of our very few completely preserved Wii Room Original shows. One of our Japanese translators Philemax has been working on translated episodes sporadically, and this month we're proud to present the fully translated version of episode 3! Human made translations take time to make, so we appreciate your patience as we make more. The video is available on Wii Room and YouTube.

The WiiLink Minecraft server returns

Lastly, we have a little bit of non-Wii news to share! About two years ago, we ended support for our WiiLink Minecraft server, mostly due to the fact that it was too costly and too taxing to maintain. Since then, we've improved various things which lets us bring back the server! This brand new server runs on the much more supported Fabric, which lets us run a lot more mods and a lot more performance enhancements, letting the game run a lot better than it used to. We also added all of Aero Serenity and Vibrant Memories, our two original soundtracks, in the game as music that can play during the game, alongside some curated video game music for over two hours of custom music!

You can join our server at azalea.wiilink.ca! We're really excited to launch this server, so let us know what you think!

And that's the WiiLink News! This month was quite front-loaded in terms of additions, but hopefully our big Photo Prints development analysis was interesting enough to those of you who felt like they didn't get any news this month. In terms of Checkout, we have pretty much finalized the launch version of the service. Obviously we'll still release updates and themes, but the current version is what we originally envisioned the service to be, and so we'll only update the service when we have new ideas for it. We're also starting to properly utilize our international teams! We can't wait for you to see what we're cooking up. See you next month!