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

Fantastic.

[tarun713]

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.

Re:Fantastic.

[Warbringer87]

I figured this was inevitible, good to see it happening now, with graphics really getting pushed with every new chunk of game releases, now they can just let the big companies handle the engine. I wonder wat the negative side of this is, there has to be.

Re:Fantastic.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really.

UE 2.5 runs on pc, mac and linux as well as being able to run on the consoles. I'm sure 3 will follow suite.
Doom 3 runs on pc, mac and linux as well as being able to run on the consoles.
Source only runs on pc. BUT it does have console ports.

So I'm not sure what your pointing at? Source not being crossplatform? Doom 3 not looking as good(Quake Wars looks excellent)? UE being more modern?(All the engines are being updated constantly).....

Re:Fantastic.

[AcidLacedPenguiN]

The negative side (off the top of my head) would probably be in not knowing the engine inside and out (because company X didn't write it from the ground up.) Though I imagine in a 2 to 3 year project they could learn the engine's ins and outs.

Re:Fantastic.

[Chosen Reject]

The problem is that people aren't using the full capabilities of those engines. For example, the Unreal engine works on Windows, Mac and Linux. I've played UT 2003 and 2004 on all three without any emulators so I know it works. But then you have alls sorts of companies that make games using it and they do something to make it only work on Windows. Epic goes through all this work to give them easy access to Mac and Linux users and they go and blow it. A lot of developers might say it's not worth the effort to increase market share by a few points, but that's not what this is. They are effectively saying that they don't want that market share since all the effort has already been done for them. The whole thing is ridiculous. You might be singing happy diddly day for more development houses using premade engines, but that's been going on for a while now and they still don't bother taking advantage of the efforts already put forth. Stupid Developers!

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.

Much as I adore the Unreal Engine

[Travoltus]

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?

Unreal 3 best game movie engine ever

[searchr]

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.

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.

Re:Intel Chips?

[ctid]

Correct. He gave a talk at the Develop Conference at Brighton in the UK earlier this year. And there he spelled it out that he believed that the Intel integrated graphics systems were killing gaming on the PC. His view was that that most consumers had no intention of ever opening up their PCs and so would never install a more capable graphics card. Therefore, it would be hard to achieve a mass-market for "modern" games on the PC because "modern" games need significantly more than the integrated graphics systems that Intel offers. This caused a bit of an argument with some people saying that many casual games don't need sophisticated graphics hardware and that casual games are more likely to form the mass-market.

Incidentally, he also got into an argument when he said that episodic games would never be really successful because he couldn't see a business model - but perhaps that view is for the discussion on episodic games from yesterday!