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Tim Sweeney Talks Unreal Engine 3
An anonymous reader writes "Following the recent unveiling of Epic's Unreal Engine 3, Beyond3D has interviewed Tim Sweeney of Epic about the next-gen videogame engine. The discussion is mainly about the 3D requirements, but they also touch on other technologies that are used or required: 'Off-the-shelf 32-bit Windows can only tractably access 2GB of user RAM per process. UT2003, which shipped in 2002, installed more than 2GB of data for the game, though at that time it was never all loaded into memory at once. It doesn't exactly take a leap of faith to see scenarios in 2005-2006 where a single game level or visible scene will require >2GB RAM at full detail.'"
...but gameplay started going backwards some time 1995-2000.
I thought that I read the memory addressing in 64bit windows was also set to 32bit addresses. Would this means that current 64bit windows binaries also limit this? It'd be pretty cheasy to have multiple processes with IPC's to fully load the games, or anything into memory.
Bye!
It doesn't exactly take a leap of faith to see scenarios in 2005-2006 where a single game level or visible scene will require >2GB RAM at full detail.
That might help explain DNF
(ducks...)
UT2003, which shipped in 2002, installed more than 2GB of data for the game, though at that time it was never all loaded into memory at once.
This makes sense. I was able to run UT2K3 without a problem, but after installing UT2K4 I've been playing less solely because the game is a bit jerkier, takes forever to load initially, and is less reliable (I get "hardware failures"). I have a suspicion that this is very much related to RAM usage. I'd love to see an accurate depiction of how detail settings affect RAM usage-- ie on such and such a detail level, you use X amount of RAM. How about a patch for the UI to optionally show this? I know it would be useful for about, oh, a thousand users tops, but knowing how much leeway I have in my detail settings would be a damn nifty thing to have.
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
Tim Sweeney will, in my mind, forever be linked to the wonderful ZZT. This interview, given some time before Unreal 2 is an interesting contrast to the one posted above. In particular, he talks about ease-of-creation:
Hercules: You moved onto to other, bigger projects long ago. It must be good to know that the first thing you ever created is still used/played a lot. Does ZZT still cross your mind, sometimes?
Tim Sweeney: Yes, one of the interesting things to do is contrast ZZT and Unreal, and look at how incredibly far we've come in graphics quality in that time. But also to see how little the industry has progressed -- or maybe even gone backwards in some respects... So, how will game development be 10 years from now? If levels take six months to build, and compiles take 5 hours each, and it costs $20 million to develop a game, then developing games won't be fun or even possible anymore.
I'm a fan of creation tools that are accessible to anyone who can play the game. (Casual players who may not be technically inclined.) As a developer, I'm hoping that we will be among the first to offer something that lets even the most casual user plink around. As a player, I'm hoping that Sweeney has retained this philosophy, and that future Epic offerings let us build -- at least a little bit -- with the same ease that ZZT did.
We're indie. We're working on our 14th game.
It doesn't exactly take a leap of faith to see scenarios in 2005-2006 where a single game level or visible scene will require >2GB RAM at full detail.
<Insert obligatory Microsoft Longhorn joke here>
Kidding aside, this really isn't surprising in the slightest. Games and memory have all been exhibiting 'Moore's Law'-like performance. Heck, most high end rigs nowadays could easily install and play, in memory, an entire game less than a few years old.
--LordPixie
That's all nice and well, but who actually makes the content that fills up those 2GB? You'd need a pretty large team and several months or years to make that much stuff, if you need it per room it wouldn't surprise me if future games were as long as movies or had a level design like Halo or Metroid 1 (that is, you have room 1 ten times then room 2 ten times then a few room 1's and maybe a room 3 with a really big monster for a little variety).
This is going to hurt gaming. We're already seeing shorter games and copied&pasted rooms simply because the effort to make those rooms is too high.
I have a feeling that despite having lower sales, making a 2d game with a tiny team in a few months might actually have larger profit margins than top-end development.
Also, as always, higher costs mean more need for the games to actually sell means publishers won't allow as many risky games to be made since taking a risk on one could blast ther entire company.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
will the AI be still as dum as today? scripted and all that boring stuff? all those MiBs go to graphics ?
I've been wondering about this: is there a project to create a competitive OSS game engine? Or any commercial games produced with such a thing?
Is it because it's freakin' hard?
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
-cough-96k-cough-
Holy crap. Actually, i have to clean out my case. My MX440 SE (PCI) just wet itself. I've heard talk that U3 will want 1 gig of VRAM for full detail, which needless to say, doesn't really exist (for mortal consumers) yet.
2 Gig of data loaded into ram to run a game?!?
I think while game developers a whining about rediculous resource limitations the creative developers will be doing sensible things like creating algorithmic game assets using iterative fractals or some other more advanced techniques. In the end you'll have products that are smaller, faster, and cheaper to produce.
I guess the lack of creativity isn't surprising considering that Epic is still making the same old FPS games.
Rats would be more funny if they could fart.
And they think I'm going to have 2 gigs of ram in just two years? Not at these prices! Hell, I'm still running a Radeon 7500! I've been waiting to upgrade until Half Life 2 and Doom 3 come out. No sense in buying a new card before then.
They're nuts. I develop games. I don't see any need to use that much ram for textures. Look at what games like Metal Gear on the PS2 look like, and they've only got a fraction of the ram that PC game developers have.
Before they switch to high res texture,s maybe they ought to start hiring artists who can make the most of what they have. Because IMO, Unreal's art looks like crap, and they're wasting 90% of thr polygons on the characters rather than the environment, because it's easier to throw more polygons at chracters than to build more detailed levels.