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Epic Opens Counterclaim Against Silicon Knights
You may recall the recent announcement of Silicon Knights' suit against Epic over the Unreal engine. The Escapist reports that Epic is firing back, launching a countersuit against SK and claiming this is all just a ploy to renegotiate their licensing deal. "In its counter-suit, however, Epic says that Silicon Knights was aware that the Unreal Engine 3 was still under development when the licensing deal was signed, and that new features would continue to be added as part of Epic's development of Gears of War. 'SK's lawsuit is a pretense,' [Epic's Mark] Rein said in his statement. 'SK does not have any valid claims against Epic. SK filed suit in a bid to renegotiate the License Agreement, in the hope that Epic will prefer that to the burden of responding to discovery and associated adverse publicity.' Epic is seeking minimum compensatory damages in excess of $650,000, as well as other injunctive relief."
Both the original story and this story is little on hard facts. Neither the original suit or this counterclaim by Epic has any real facts to clue in to who is right or wrong. Perhaps Epic is right, or maybe Silicon Knights are just incompetent. Personally, despite me not liking any of SK's games, I'll wait for the conclusion to the trial or the settlement to make any decisions who to flame.
"Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?"
Yep, yep, good 'ol Tim Sweeney should have stuck it out with writing new ZZT text character based engines instead. :-P ;-)
U FAIL IT - 4-EVA
Pleez 2 b l4/\/\3 315e\/\/h3r3
Every game developer has dreams of licensing their code out to other developers and racking in huge amounts of extra cash. Almost no one does because they know that supporting other developers in disparate projects is an gigantic effort that requires essentially an entire company focused on that effort and not just answering emails and putting out patches when you feel like it.
Epic was dumb to think they could get away with charging companies huge amounts of money for services they had no facility to support. In essence what Epic did was like someone writing insurance policies and taking fees without the capability of paying claims.
Unfortunately this lawsuit over the Unreal Engine 3 mess is cloaked in how people feel about the various companies. Unreal Tournament and other Epic games fans of course are trying to portray Silicon Knights as a bunch of screw ups and vice versa.
Just from the facts we already know and the huge problems and delays other UE3 projects are having Silicon Knights' case is very, very strong. Regardless of what the eventual outcome of the case(s), developers have gotten the message to stay the fuck away from Epic and UE3 if you ever want to ship a game on time and on budget.
I have some friends that work for a company that are working on a game with the unreal 3 engine. All I have heard is how horrible the support is. Also when they need to do something that the engine doesnt support, they end up writing this hack code to get it to work. Then when they get an update (since the engine is still in development), it will break what they made and they have to go back in there and rewrite it. It just sounds like a massive cluster fuck.
This is why you don't use unproven technology. You get shafted. And this isn't the first time such an incident has been out in the public eye either. Now if only Troika would have known that before getting fucked around by Valve, having to rush Bloodlines and ultimately being dissolved because of its failure.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Where are the other that are having such problems with the UnReal 3 engine? I know LOTS of other companies are using it, so how many are having such difficulties? Is this a case of one company, Silicon Knights, messing up big time and wanting their money back for their fuck up? Or is this a case of them being the only company to go public about how much UnReal 3 sucks donkey turds? I guess the courts will figure it out, but it just seems strange to me that Silicon Knights are the only ones bitching about UnReal 3, that I have heard of, and I read A LOT of on-line news sites. From Gamasutra to Gamespot(where I read about this story first actually) to GameDaily. No one else has said a word. Anyone here have links to any other stories about companies complaining about UnReal 3?
Gears will frequently draw shadows through objects. Say you're hiding behind a concrete corner on Gridlock, many times your shadow around the corner will give you away. Many other times your shadow will just be drawn through the obstruction giving your specific location away. It's not limited to obstructions in your plane. If you're on the bottom floor in one of the halls in the mansion, and someone walks above you, you can see their shadow. Then there's weapons firing blanks and appearing to have infinite ammo. Shots you fire comming out of your camera rather than the end of the weapon. And network synchronizations issuses, of which there are many.
Oh and the glitches. Weapon slides, machine guns firing sniper or shotgun rounds, or rockets, kung fu flips launching players into unreachable places, 2 minute 30 second jumps hundreds of scale feet into the air landing anywhere in the map but not the area of play, to simply walking on air.
Gears is a LOT of fun to play. Fantastic, very pretty looking game. But, it's pretty clear that even it is unfinished.
That is a little suspicious that every time an Epic vs SK story comes up, there is some AC that comes along and posts about how "very, very strong" the case is against Epic, without providing actual evidence?
I am really starting to wonder if perhaps an employee of SK isn't coming here and trying to push their side of the story. I just find it odd that while there are plenty of named posters who question what is happening, and none seem to be sure (since there seem to be next to no facts out there) there's always an AC with a fairly consistent writing style that comes in and says how fucked Epic is and how strong SK's claims are.
One would wonder why they would be unwilling to put some kind of identification to claims like that.
I can honestly say that Epics very design, with a large amount of behavior being managed in unrealscript, provides strong support. In addition, Epic provides both mod (public) and developer (paid) support that is responsive to both questions and requests for bug fixes. They also have both private and public document sets and have paid employees that support their clients.
Suggesting that Epic doesn't have facility to support developers is just plain wrong. EPIC and their mod-development contests clearly show that they are BUILT on supporting developers. Your article is FUD, unsupportable by the experience of anyone I worked with, and mostly likely anonymous because you're related to the case in question.
For the record, I do not currently work or have financial investments in the gaming industry.
I'm tired of different titles using the same engine over and over again. I played Thief 3 first and Deus Ex immediately afterwards and was constantly bothered by how everything had a similar "taste" (e.g. fires in both games were absolutely identical). Even though it probably makes a lot of business sense not to develop basic physics, graphics, AI pathfinding over and over again, I prefer the diversity since all engines have some shortcomings but in my opinion they give each game a different flavour and I appreciate that. It's undoubtedly true that games won't have as extreme cutting edge graphics as possible if they in every case have to be developed from scratch but I like the diversity more. It's sort of the same thing as if you (like I do since I'm a lazy cook) eat various frozen meals they eventually all start to taste the same no matter how different the ingredient are supposed to be.