Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
There was also that Namco GTA-alike that got canceled. Coincidentally, it was also one of the first to announce they were using UE3.
If by development process you mean "two guys with day jobs", then yes, there's something wrong.
Everyone was making games in the early 90's, even I managed to churn out some colorful fun thingies back in the day (and made a bit of money selling them too). Unless they're creative geniuses that take 5 years to produce something mind-blowing (not the case), then they're just a handful of guys with delusions of grandeur. Game houses in the 21st century have to keep busy, it's grown far too competitive a market to be sitting on your ass whining about features, which, by the time the court case runs its course, will be long-obsolete anyway! If you lose, you're in big trouble. If you win, well you get an aging engine to plug into your already stagnant project.
It's called development hell, and lawyers only make it worse. We don't need another Daikatana.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Now that made your whole stupid little fanboy tantrum worth my day. Can't wait for the certain someone who is, ahem, intimately involved with KZ dev to read that bit o tech insight!
There are very few real differences left between engines, graphically speaking. In the end you've got endless oodles of parallax maps, specular maps, diffuse maps, and all that nonsense. These tools are available to anyone, and they are everywhere. In the end the deciding factor between a game looking damned sexy vs. load of crap comes down to target hardware and artistic talent.
There are some interesting and exciting ideas floating about, but as far as I know none of the truly impressive ones have made it into a production game that's been announced yet. In the end the line drawn between different engines are almost entirely dependent on lighting technique, and the vast majority of games simply use the standard set by Doom 3 (aka parallax/normal maps, direct lighting, with hacky ways to predict an ambient value which Doom 3 sorely lacked). GOW (and by extension UE3) uses a very interesting hybrid precomputed radiosity + dynamic lighting solution that is akin to the method used in HL2, though avoids some of the larger mistakes Valve made with their implementation. It looks great, and it is probably the state of the art for lighting technology at this point.
The next step in the holy grail of graphics will be real-time radiosity and global illumination. We're not there yet. I've seen some interesting papers on the subject, but AFAIK neither Heavenly Sword nor Killzone 2 are going to be using that kind of tech. I don't know of any production game that has that type of tech rolled in. Indeed, I don't know of any hardware that is capable of running that type of simulation at playable framerates!
In a roundabout way, what I'm saying is that in this shader age, the "graphical capabilities" of an engine are really measured with the shaders, and in that arena there are very few techniques being employed. Some devs make optimizations and changes that make their results look marginally better, but often times this is not a one-size-fits-all solution and will only look good with whatever it is they're working with, content-wise. This is the source of my "all engines are created equal" comment. The true difference between engines now come down to data organization - how large you can balloon your maps while remaining manageable, how good your netcode is (this varies greatly between engines, truly). As you can imagine, a lot of what sets each engine apart from another is incredibly niche, and that is also why I object to any labeling of any engine as inferior or superior. Those two terms are simply not valid for describing game engines. Depending on the effects you want to achieve, there are different engines that suit your needs. To evaluate engines graphically, however, is foolish. Often times my non-graphics-coding buddies would comment between two screenshots, claiming that one looks far better than another. In 99% of these cases what they're noticing is the quality of the art, not the capabilities of the code running underneath. I've taken incredibly "poor" looking engines and made them look on par with Quake 4 (which granted is no longer truly state of the art) within hours. Any engine that supports HLSL/GLSL in the end can look just like any other, and even fancy shadowing techniques are very homogeneous across the industry.
LOL! It's been seven fucking years and the stupid little fanboys are still trying to get the world to believe that bullshit.
Last I checked, the PS3 came out in 2006, and the existence of Cell in the machine was only known, what, a year before that? Unless you're a time traveler from the year 2012, check those numbers.
Not to mention that there is still no threading support in the PS3 SDK. All those SPUs are not much good on their own, and Sony's massively advertised throughput for the processor assumes peak efficiency in all SP
well, it's a small industry, after all. you sign an NDA as an epic licensee that includes that you do not badmouth their product. and you sure as hell don't want to publicly show how your company has difficulties internally.
i suppose the reason for SK to come forward with this is to survive an inevitable legal battle with epic because they chose to develop their own product, inspired by or derived from their evaluation of epic's technology.
for me, it has been a few years since working with UE2 (on the art-side of a project) and i can only anonymously say that:
- epic has favoured some developers over others and it was known that the amount of support varied from company to company
- they made a number of demos, showing UE features that we later discovered as cheats, far from what was originally promised (GDC 2002 demo, anyone?)
- they promised features for UE2 that only showed up in UE3 later
and generally, i remember the support was a bit weak and you were more or less at their mercy as far as timing went. sometimes you'd wait for weeks or months for that promised stable build, green-flagged for a release.
needless to say, i have since avoided working for companies that choose to license their core technology from someone else and it has worked out noticeably better.