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Too Human No Longer an Unreal 3 Title?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the unreal dept.

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.

6 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. Here's a Stat I'd like to know by Kardall · · Score: 4, Interesting
    From people in the industry using UE3, how many of you have had problems developing it for each console? What were the problems experienced? How did you overcome them or did you?

    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.

    1. Re:Here's a Stat I'd like to know by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      As a games programmer who has been using UE3 for some time now I can say that this decision doesn't surprise me at all. The performance of UE3 on 360 is pretty bad and a lot of people where I work are getting pissed off with that and with Epic's attitude to licensees. People might point to GoW as an example of a UE3 game running well on 360 but in recent months Epic have been scaling back their lighting pipeline just to get GoW to run at 30 fps. You can absolutely forget about running at 60 fps. There are some very nice things about UE3, but there are a lot of question marks about its performance. It isn't helped of course by the nature of the hardware and the fact that UE3 is a PC-centric engine. It would be possible for SK to just rewrite the renderer and keep the rest of the engine. At this stage in development that seems a lot more sensible than a complete engine change, but I guess it depends how much leeway they have with their publisher. :-) We are considering rewriting the renderer as well and will probably make a decision on that within the next month.

  2. What about Mass Effect? by dgg3565 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:What about Mass Effect? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      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.

      I'm the lead gameplay programmer at a company which has licensed the unreal engine, and is developing several titles using it. You will not hear anything public from me either praising it or dissing it, because we're under NDA. I just can't talk about it.

      I imagine every licensee has a similar policy in place. (Notice how any devs posting in this thread who have anything to do with it are posting as anonymous cowards). That's why you're not hearing loud agreement or loud disagreement regarding what these guys did - we all just can't comment on it. That's it, end of story.

  3. Re:NDH Syndrome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting
    Exactly, I think they'd be better off obtaining permission to highly modify the UnReal engine. No reason to completly scrap usable code you've already licensed.


    If you pay for the Unreal license, you can modify it however you like without further permission. You can replace, remove, or rewrite any part of it you want.

    Several licensees have done just that.

  4. Not as bad as it sounds by Rayonic · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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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