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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.'"
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.
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.
Yeah. UT2004 at least had vehicles, but I've been using those on Battlefield 1942 for almost two years now. Show me new gameplay, and I'll consider buying one of the new games. I'm just sick of the same old FPS crap. Deathmatch is dead.
I bet Epic and ID Software are making these new engines just to license them to other companies.
More than enough BS
will the AI be still as dum as today? scripted and all that boring stuff? all those MiBs go to graphics ?
the Quake3 engine gave us Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast
The Unreal engine gave us Deus Ex and America's Army
We all know that even if Doom 3 sucks as a game, the engine will licensed and used in an even better game
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
Given certain constraints, the more complicated the rules that govern a FPS, the more depth it can have. You could try totally non-sensical rules, such as:
"If you enter water while strafing, your movement speed while you are in the water will be 300% normal"
but that's not usually very much fun because people can't relate to it. More realistic physics allow more fine-tuning of strategy with a minimum of annoyance incurred by adding more rules, since it's an approximation of what people are already familiar with.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
-cough-96k-cough-
Crystal Space fits the bill in my opinion.
It is being used for a couple of commercial level games from what I understand.
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.
Realistic physics makes sense in some games, where photorealism is a goal. But realistic physics is a loss for most games.
Think of the great games of the past. Donkey Kong- realistic physics? Nope. Good game? Yup. Mario- realistic physics? Nope. Good game? Yup. Zelda- same. Even other genres of games: Street Fighter 2, NBA Jams, etc. None featured realistic physics, but all were great games.
Realistic physics is a crutch "feature" that developers claim do to the current realism push. Its the same thing that makes them claim 1st person and 3D are better because "its more realistic", when truthfully most games would be better without them. The truth is that it makes all games indistinguishable- you can play any FPS of the last 5 years and have a hard time telling them apart. Its why the industry is in a rut right now- gameplay has been ignored at the expense of "realism" and graphics.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Another good one is Ogre. It's purely a rendering engine, which lets you choose your collision/sound/networking/whatever else libraries, but there are a few engine frameworks springing up around it. It's fast, very clean, and capable of a lot of current generation effects (well, it has full shader support, so I guess it supports most anything you can code a shader for). If C# is your flavor, Ogre has a cousin called Axiom that is just as functional. Axiom is intended to be a game engine, but is very much in its infancy, so there isn't too much besides (rock solid) rendering in place there yet. Still, though, both are very clean and excellently designed, and are both well worth a look.