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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."
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.
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
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!
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
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.