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."

Comments

Re:Fantastic.

[Corwn of Amber]

Anyone intelligent and dedicated enough can program a graphics/physics/whatever game engine.
I personnally know two guys doing just that (separately). See this and this.

It's not dev, it's QA

[jjohnson]

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.