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Epic's Rein and the Unreal Engine's Long Arms
Gamasutra is covering comments made by Mark Rein, of Epic Games, at the GDC London event. He had some choice words on just about everything, slamming Sony's arrogance and Intel chips, showing off Gears of War while quieting detractors, and discussing the huge number of licensees for Epic's new engine. From the article: "Rein also commented on some of the most notable third-party Unreal Engine 3 titles from this year, from Bioshock through Mass Effect, but was particularly interested in Lost Odyssey, the Hironobu Sakaguchi-created Xbox 360 RPG. 'Lost Odyssey was a little lost for a while - it took the developers a little bit of time to find out how to use Unreal Engine 3,' said Rein. He noted the problem in getting Japanese developers to change their pipeline to UE3, but that it is something developers are getting much better at."
I'm glad companies have started to realize building an engine from the ground up isn't very feasible anymore with increased development costs. Now some companies can concentrate on making wonderful engines (Source, Unreal, Doom 3) that run on a huge variety of hardware whereas game developers can worry about making the games. Not to mention it makes it very easy to tell if a game will run well on your PC or not.
So why does Mr. Rein hate intel chips? Is he talking about GPUs? *a bit confused* Clarification would be appreciated. (Note: "Because AMD OWNZ U" is not really clarification.")
if this mindset becomes more prevalent, perhaps we can expect more games coming out in the future to be better? i would much rather have to choose between games based on which is more interesting and not which looks like crud. if the use of existing engines starts to become the norm, i think we can expect to see companies making better games because they don't have to spend so much on developing some of its foundations.
seriously, warcraft 3 was a really neat game, but building a modern rts with roots there would be a bad idea now.
thq had a good idea with company of heroes, i just hope it's not too much like warhammer (haven't played it yet).
considering the doom3 engine utilizes dual core (unless i'm mistaken), i think it has a lot of mileage left in it. i'm incredibly interested to see what happens with crysis, i get the impression that it won't be a straight-forward fps. even if it's a generic fps, assuming it follows suit with far cry, it won't be totally linear (like call of duty, blech) and may have a lot of replay value.
I have a complaint about all game engines.
I've noticed that when the same game engine is used over and over again, the characters and environments tend to look quite similar. They even move similarly. Take Unreal2/UT2004 vs Gears of War - you can tell right away who the "fathers" of those characters are (lol). (It's all in their huge chins!) After a while playing tons of games under the same engine, takes away from the fun factor, unless there is a MAJOR deviation in the UI and such. (Say, if Unreal 3 was uber-modded to create TES 4 Oblivion or GTA: Liberty City, etc.) Another good example is whatever engine was behind Baldur's Gate. I've seen its likeness in console games like X-Men Legends 1/2, Fantastic 4, Champions of Norrath, etc. The games are fun as all get out, but I can recognize the interface. Also, see Doom 3 and its children Quake 4 and Prey: you can tell right away who their game engine daddy is.
However, I understand how much it costs to make a new game engine; how about this... developers, can you please do more to make your modification of (game engine du jour) look and feel dramatically different?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I hope the game is more interesting than recent demos which make it look like most of your life is spent running from one pillar to the next. Bioshock looks far more interesting that Gears of War.
Ever since I first saw footage of Unreal3 tech, coincidentally three years ago, I've been blown away at the technology. Ever since, Unreal3 tech has only evolved and matured into a truly impressive movie generator. From the recent Gears of War shorts, to the surreal and stunning Bioshock short film, no other technology has been so widely accepted and used to generate authentic movies that look just like videogames.
I look forward to many more years of high quality, high definition films coming from this amazing technology. There are rumors that a future version may in some way be interactive, but for now they're just rumors. It is truly a great time to be a videogame viewer.
If developers just go along and create products based on a licensed engine, that would dilute the market and competition on a few levels. Imagine if FarCry was based on the Q3 engine...you wouldn't have the hype that is Crysis due to the fact that the CryEngine brought something original to the table that people want to see more of; gameplay, graphic, and community-wise. Another aspect of this could be illustrated through F.E.A.R, if F.E.A.R was built using the Doom3 engine, granted you would probably get the same game, but the following would not be as strong because you the customer has already marginalized their experience of the new game, with the old one. To Monolith's credit though they are more versed in building engines than games so that would never happen. My point is that recycling engines in *lots* of different licenses may speed up getting the product to the door, but it would slow down the overall level(s) of creativity in the approach(s) taken towards building more sophisticated game engines. It's kind of like having only 3 take-out restaurants in your neighborhood and deciding where your gonna order out for the next 3 days....
You're right in that the heavy lifting of porting the game engine has been done, but including Mac and Linux involves a whole separate QA architecture with significant overhead--every test case has to be repeated three times, every change to handle a Linux quirk has to be retested to make sure it didn't screw up something in Windows, etc. That's the cost that fails to be offset by an increase of a few percentage points of marketshare.
I work for a company that sells a component that integrates with the major web and app servers, and there are several significant versions of certain platforms that we don't support, because no customer has complained loudly enough to justify the formal QA process that we use for all our software, even though we know from a quick smoke test that it works.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
I dunno why, but no one ever seems to remember the Torque engine. I suppose that's because, it's quietly been building a base of games, that aren't as well known or popular as some of the other game engines. About the best well-known games using Torque are the Tribes games, but I think they have declined in popularity over time.
Once upon a time, just out of curiousity, I did quite a bit of 'casual' investigation (I didn't try to create my own games, but took a look at a few different games all built on it, and read some of the developer docs to see what kind of features and things it supports) of the Torque engine, just to see what it was capable of. It looks like quite a solid, state-of-the-art, cross-platform game engine, that has been designed from the beginning to be useable by other developers.
I've been quite surprised that you don't see more 'big-name' titles created with Torque. Anyone have any ideas why it isn't one of the predominantly licensed engines?
"Stupid Developers!"
Yeah! Stupid developers!
Case in point: the Thief series. 1+2 had a specialized engine (Dark, IIRC) that didn't focus so much on graphics, but allowed huge, sprawling levels and wonderful sound cues. 3 used some variant of the Unreal engine, and suddenly you were stuck with *tiny* levels and loading zones. No more sneaking across the rooftops of an entire city to enter a huge, sprawling fortress- instead, you were stuck warping through five zones for a building smaller than the first level of Thief 1. I played through Thief 1+2 multiple times: I never made it past the first few levels of 3- the engine limitations just plain destroyed the fun for me.
It didn't even look all that good- the increased realism (especially in shadows) just pointed out how bad it was compared to real life. At least with 1+2 I could ignore the graphics since I knew they were cheesy.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Depends on the engine. Painkiller (2004) could do sprawling levels. I believe the Serious Sam (2001) engine could as well. Same for GTA III (2002). Of course the graphics for the latter two were "cheesy". But then the same could be said for Morrowind (2002)
That is indeed a notable exception. I feel that game should be declared official story canon. American McGee is very innovative.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!