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EA Announces Multi-Title Unreal Engine 3 License

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hope-that-goes-well dept.

An anonymous reader writes to mention a Gamasutra article about a surprising announcement from EA. They've made the move to license the Unreal 3 Engine for a series of next-generation titles. "The brief announcement states that EA 'employs a variety of engines, tools and technologies to best serve the needs of each game and development team', but raises interesting issues regarding the Criterion-authored Renderware engine, purchased by EA in 2004 alongside the Burnout developer, and its intended global EA rollout."

2 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The engine isn`t that important anymore by donscarletti · · Score: 3, Informative
    Ok, component based open souce game infructure, that would be really good. But where the hell did that Java idea come from? Java isn't open source, Java doesn't come by default in many linux distros, Java isn't the speediest thing out there (dispite many people who keep mentioning Java's optimised JIT compiler but completely forget about normal optimizing compilers) and a Java library is almost impossible to bind to other environments and languages. The other thing is, rightly or wrongly, java just isn't that popular with open source types. Java is almost THE WORST language selection one could make.

    Between Sun's marketing department and B-grade university CS programs that work like Java trade schools there is a disturbing number of people out there that think that: Java is comparitively easy to use, Java is flexible/powerful and Java is fast enough to do state of the art techniques on computers that currently exist.

    --
    When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
  2. Re:The engine isn`t that important anymore by grumbel · · Score: 2, Informative
    Java and C# will never be suitable for production, real-time 3D games because of their asynchronous garbage collection and runtime argument verification.

    Microsoft thinks different and provides XNA. Now I don't expect the next Doom or Halo3 to use Java or C#, but for a lot of games its really a non-issue these days, computers are fast enough and the most grunt work is done by the GPU anyway, which doesn't care if the rest of the programm is written in Java or C# or hand optimized assembler. There is of course still a speed benefit of C++, but its getting smaller and smaller and its certainly at a point where the success of a game will no longer depend on it.