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Silicon Knights Says Unreal Engine is Broken
Yesterday we discussed Too Human's absence from this year's E3 event, and briefly mentioned the just-announced lawsuit between Silicon Knights and Epic. Today there's a bit of a clarification. Silicon Knights is suing Epic because, according to Kotaku, Epic failed to 'provide a working game engine' to SK causing them to 'experience considerable losses.' Essentially Knights argues that the Gears of War version of the Unreal engine was withheld by Epic so that Epic products could show up competitors at trade events. For a deeper look at this, the blog runs down the allegations in detail, and concluded by noting that a slew of next-generation titles slated to use the Unreal Engine have been delayed several times. This includes Stranglehold, BioShock, Lost Odyssey, Mass Effect, Rainbow Six: Vegas, Turok, Frame City Killer, Fatal Inertia and Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway ... a somewhat persuasive list, when it's all laid out in front of you.
Read the pdf on Kotaku. They lay out a number of claims (more than one instance of missing a code deadline, removing parts of the engine, flat-out lying about what it can do). The main things they want are a nulled contract and the ability to make any and all modifications to UE3.
I remember the issues the Vampire: Bloodlines folks had with the HL2 engine. The problem is that the HL2 folks kept making engine changes while Troika worked on theirs. Integrating updates was a big deal. When Obsidian made Neverwinter Nights 2, they had Bioware's code base, but there were some broken functions even though the first NWN had been out for a long time.
Like you say, the U3 engine likely went through a lot of changes and neither they nor the licensee understood how much work is involved in using a piece of software that's still being developed.
One: Middleware (and just about any production software) is constantly in a state of flux, and there is never a "final" version of it. People who licence the Unreal Engine technologies are given secure access to Epic's CVS repository, where daily engine builds and patches can be checked out for use by the game developers.
Yes, and how often is this repo updated? All HL2 modders (you don't even have to be a licensee!) are given read access to their Perforce repos, but those are updated only once in a blue moon for good reason. As a licensee you expect builds from your engine provider to be relatively bug free and at the very least stable - I don't want Epic's daily changes for GOW sneaking into my code base until they're sure it's solid. It's entirely possible that Epic failed to update said CVS on a timely basis, or even if they did, they failed to address discovered critical issues in a timely manner (which sounds like what the lawsuit claims).
Three: if you read up on it you will find that SK is looking to claim that all of the modification work that they are doing on the game constitutes an "entirely new engine" and that they should retain all rights to it. In other words, they want the benefits of using UE3 technology without having to pay for it.
I read the same document. It sounds to me like SK developed its own in-house engine without any UE3 code, and they want a court to acknowledge that fact on paper in order to cover their ass from any inevitable counter-moves by Epic. I don't think they were implying at all that their modifications to UE3 should grant them a free license.
The fault is with SK, not Epic.
Maybe it runs a bit both ways. But in any case, if it's true that Epic failed to deliver an acceptably stable version of the 360 and PS3 code bases as dictated by the contract, Epic is guilty of either incompetence or fraud, in either case SK is entitled to refund/compensation. Whether or not SK's developers were competent enough to produce a game from it is rather irrelevant. If Epic failed to provide code, or held back code from licensees, or failed to provide the level of support dictated by their contract, then SK has a case.
Four: SK is seeking damages - they want the complete profits from Gears of War.
Yeah, I'm not comfortable with that part. I think it's just a display by SK to get attention, there's no chance in hell they'll get ALL the profits from GOW even if they won, nor do they deserve it. They deserve their license fee back PLUS interest, and also damages maybe amounting to a year's worth of dev time, I would say. Maybe on top of that it'd be justified to roll in some punitive damages if it can be proven that Epic knowingly and flagrantly disregarded their licensing contract.
Five: Epic has licenced its technology to a rather vast collection of developers, including some of the biggest in the business. No one else has complained, just Silicon Knights
Really? I've heard from several developers working with UE3 that it's a load of junk. Is it also any surprise that *all* of the UE3 games that have been announced for either next gen console has either been delayed or cancelled? Even Rainbow Six Vegas took forever to come out and suffered long delays, though it did in the end make it out the door.
Six: Epic has a long history of supporting developers, from the corporate level all the way down to the hobbyist modder at home. Epic provides tools and help free of charge to anyone who wants them. If SK gets their way, this could have severe ramifications for the entire gaming industry and engine middleware licencing in general.
You seem desperate to make Epic sound like the good guys here. Okay, they made Unreal, and Unreal Tournament, those were great games, but that doesn't mean much about them as a middleware vendor. From my experience, licensing technology from a company producing its own ga
I'm not sure where that quote came from -- IdTech 5 as a whole is not a clean sheet of paper design, there are some good sized chunks that have clear heritage to Doom 3 / Q4 / ETQW. The rendering engine is certainly from-scratch, but that is a rather small chunk of a complete engine today.
I was always somewhat hesitant about broad licensing because I feared something exactly like this, where a developer thinks they see something in an engine, but it doesn't turn out the way they expected, and they sue. It is possible that explicit promises were made and broken, but it is also possible that the licensee just failed for the same reasons that most game development project fail, and is looking for a scapegoat. Game development is hard, engine license or no engine license.
During Doom 3's development, our licensees had access to our source control server, so there was never a question of them not having access to what we are using. They would have been foolish to try to use daily builds, but the option was available to them.
John Carmack