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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.
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 don't know for sure, but given the timeframe of that Splinter Cell title I would think it was running on a heavily modified Unreal2.5 rather than Unreal3.
Speaking as someone working with UnrealEngine3, I can see the reasoning for moving away from the UE3 engine. There are significant problems with workflow, for artists but more significantly for programmers, and there are fundamental problems with the engine itself. It is quite obvious that the guys at Epic aimed far too high when they designed the engine and assumed that the next-gen platforms would have significantly more grunt, both on CPU and GPU, than they actually do have. Recent work on the engine has yielded some improvements, but there are intrinsic, architectural problems in both the rendering system and the object management system that essentially equate to throwing performance away.
There are also extra problems on the next-gen consoles because the engine uses a lot of C++ language constructs that benefit from running on a CPU with an out-of-order core, which neither the 360 or PS3 have.
Having worked with UE3 for some time I would encourage other developers to consider very carefully whether licensing the engine would really benefit your project. If I were in charge of my project then I would definitely be moving the team over to another 3rd party engine or even an in-house solution. While UE3 is good at allowing a team to get shiny things on screen really quickly, something that always seems to impress management, but it is not a good fit for the consoles and not mature or stable enough currently to develop a AAA title on. For any team wanting to compete with the next-gen big names (Halo 3, MGS 4 etc) UE3 would not be a good choice for the engine.