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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?"
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.
Unreal Tournament 3
they would get laughed at if anyone was insane enough to try when games like Killzone 2, Heavenly Sword, Ratchet and Clank, and so on are there to have to compete withAnd why is that? Because Unreal Engine 3 runs inferior technology compared to those games? Go get a clue, or better yet, go get a job working with graphics engines all day and you will realize that *all* of the above games use practically the same technology, with only slight variations. Everyone's got parallax mapping and cubic shadowmapping, etc etc. Some have slightly smarter implementations, but overall UE3 has it nailed down pretty well. There's really nothing that's seen in the Killzone trailer that can't be realistically done on UE3.
nightmare of doing 360 developmentYes, because strong support, an extremely complete documentation set, the availability of an industry-standard API (DirectX), as well as the availability of a common OS API (Windows) is such a nightmare? If anything I've heard that PS3 development is a nightmare. The Cell is a beast that requires a ludicrous level of low-level assembly just to get working, much less high level code for you to run your game.
have you even played gears of war? the game is gorgeous, and while i pretty much only played it in single and co-op, i've not had any of these issues you're complaining about. does your display suck? is your xbox configured properly? on my setup, the game actually looks *better* than the promo shots and commercials (perhaps because the still promo screenshots don't convey how smooth it looks when in motion, and the commercial, being on a channel which doesn't come in on HD, weren't capable of outputting the same resolution as the game.)