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Too Human No Longer an Unreal 3 Title?
1up is reporting that Silicon Knights, makers of Eternal Darkness and the upcoming Too Human, may have decided to drop the Unreal 3 Engine from Too Human. The company is reportedly having big problems getting Epic's powerful product to work well with their title on the 360. The plan is now that they will be crafting their own rendering systems for use with the game.
they're switching to the DNF engine.
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That's just unreal! No, wait, it's not Unreal anymore! That's unreal! Aaahh, I'm so confused!
Is the Unreal 3 engine too UNREAListic to be too human?
They've already blamed the platform for the failure to complete this title more than once.
... give up ... Can't give up again!
It's like that old saying: Give up on one platform, shame on the platform.
Give up on 3 platforms
Not Designed Here syndrome. It can usually be averted by reviewing investments in 3rd party solutions, acquiring new 3rd party solutions, or by planning from the start to use an in house solution.
At this point, it will likely mean project failure. The organization's core capability is making games, not game engines. Not only is there the huge scope of creating the engine, testing, debugging, and optimizing, but there is the legal liability in it also. If their engine designers have been staring at Unreal3 engine code for the last 6 months, and now decide to create their own engine, what is the likelihood that they will borrow either code or concepts from the Unreal engine? That could turn around and bite them hard in a trade secrets and copy right lawsuit.
-Rick
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Then what about the rest of the engine. A game engine is more than just whatever you put on the screen. If you drop a complete engine you'll also have to implement the rest. Switching an engine is a bad idea when you already did a lot for the game. Dropping an engine and rolling your own is just plain stupid.
I'm sure someone might enjoy it on their Xbox 720, PS4, and Nintendo Fire-Water-Enema.
It's starting to look like too human is the title that goes from "launch window" to "end of console lifespan / close to launch of next system / garbage heap in the backalley" like dinosaur planet or True Fantasy Live Online.
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
If a company like Silicon Knights has issues with something, and decides near the end of their products pre-release lifespan, to scrap the backbone of the game and redo it, then there has to be either something very wrong with the Engine, or the platform.
It's not a light decision. That will set a game back by a huge amount of time, probably inconceivable at this point, because doing their own renderer will take time in and of itself. Then they'll have to adapt everything that they've done to it. Perhaps, they'll just take parts of the Unreal Engine 3 with them, and keep some of the basics? I dunno. Seems kinda weak to say this at the end.
This game has been in "development hell" almost as long as Duke Nukem Forever (since 1999) and reeks of the same problems, everytime there is a snag they change engines or platforms. Silicon Knights would have been better off if they had stuck with Nintendo at least then they could ride some Wii hype for a bit. As it is they are a company of talented but evidently misguided developers who havent had a hit game since Blood Omen back in the 90's. You can only ride they hype for so long before no one cares anymore. I fully expect that by the "release date draws near, the hardware will be concidered underpowered and the platform will be changed to the PS4.
Maybe they'll just focus the development effort on the Phantom console. That should give them plenty of time.
Perhaps they should talk to UBISoft, because, if I'm not mistaken, both Splinter Cell: Double Agent, and Rainbow Six: Vegas run on the Unreal engine on the 360.
Don't wait for this game to come out any time soon.
Bioware's Mass Effect is running on Unreal 3 and I certainly haven't heard anything out of them on this. In fact, I cam across one post on the ME forum where one of he developers was just talking about how one of their guys had squeezed out more preformance on the E3 demo by doing an optimization pass. It seems like everyone and their grandmother is using UE 3 at this point and yet not a peep out of any other dev team. And it isn't like Unreal is a new engine with neophyte coders behind it. This is a third generation engine that is built on a code base that has been used in titles from here to Timbuktu. Something seems fishy here.
Of course Epic can make a game with their own engine--they wrote it. Duh. Besides, it's not like they'd talk about it publicly if they DID have problems.
I'm not insinuating there's any problems with Epic's engine, just that there's a huge difference between using code you wrote and licensing it. You have to get used to what may be a completely different paradigm for developing that might not be compatible with the way you work.
IIRC, Too Human was running on a custom engine for most of its development. Then (due to publisher pressure supposedly) the game was switched to the Unreal 3 engine. Now it seems that they're switching back.
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