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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.'"
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.
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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.
Taken the HL engine is highly outdated, it was still very funny for me to see.