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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."
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.
Regardless of the usual crappy Slashdot story summaries, SK has laid out a extremely damaging specific facts of promised but unimplemented features, promised but missed by huge margin deadlines, supporting evidence from other developers having the same problems with Epic's engine, even some apparent public statements from Epic where they made it clear that they were putting a priority on their own internal games over devoting time to licensees - in other words getting features and bug fixes ready for their own games for E3 while letting other developers wait until after the show for the fixes and features to propagate.
If even a tiny amount of what SK claims is true, Epic deserves to get slammed hard in court.
SK's original lawsuit is actually rather detailed: They lay out the case well and describe specific instances of Epic's breach of their agreement. I recommend actually reading SK's filing; it makes for interesting reading. The /. summaries are lacking in details, yes, but the linked articles/filings do provide a vast amount of detail. Try reading TFA next time.
I dunno but I have a hard time beliveing its just coincidence that every single game using the ue3 engine due to be released this year has hit at least one delay.
Aliens -- (2009) Gearbox Software
America's Army 3.0 -- (2008) US Army
APB -- (2008) Webzen
Black Powder Red Earth - (2007) Echelon Studios
Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway -- (2007) Gearbox Software
BioShock - (2007) Irrational Games
BlackSite: Area 51 -- (2007) Midway Austin
DC Comics MMO -- (TBA) Sony Online Entertainment
Earth No More -- (2009) Recoil Games / 3D Realms
Elveon -- (2007) 10tacle Studios[35]
Fatal Inertia -- (2007) Koei[36]
Frontlines: Fuel of War -- (2008) Kaos Studios
Fury -- (2007) Auran
Gears of War -- (2006) Epic Games
Global Agenda -- (TBA) Hi-Rez Studios
Hour of Victory -- (2007) Midway Games
Huxley -- (2007) Webzen Games
The Last Remnant -- (2008) Square Enix
Lineage III -- (TBA) NCsoft
Lost Odyssey -- (2007) Mistwalker
Mass Effect -- (2007) BioWare
Medal of Honor: Airborne -- (2007) Electronic Arts
Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia -- (2007) Artificial Studios
RoboBlitz -- (2006) Naked Sky Entertainment
Rogue Warrior: Black Razor - (2007) Bethesda Softworks
Stargate Worlds -- (2007) Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment
Stranglehold -- (2007) Midway Chicago
The Scourge Project -- (N/A) Tragnarion Studios
To End All Wars -- (2008) Kuju Entertainment
Tom Clancy's EndWar -- (2008) Ubisoft
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas -- (2006) Ubisoft
Too Human -- (2009) Silicon Knights
Turning Point: Fall of Liberty -- (2007) Spark Unlimited
Turok -- (2008) Propaganda Games
Undertow -- (2007) Chair Entertainment
Unreal Tournament 3 -- (2007) Epic Games
Upcoming Mortal Kombat 8 Game -- (Unknown) Midway Games
The Wheelman -- (2007) Midway Games
HEI$T -- (2007) InXile Entertainment
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.
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.
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