The Epic in Unreal Engine 3 82
CNN's Game On column has a look at Gears of War developer Epic Games. The piece goes into the company's success as a tools merchant as well as a game developer. They discuss the excitement that Unreal Engine 3 has generated, both for AAA and less ambitious titles. From the article: "Several titles, including the forthcoming 'HoopWorld' and 'RoboHordes,' will use the engine for less than AAA games. And don't be surprised if educational titles or children's games use the engine as the Xbox 360 reaches the end of its life cycle. While Epic will continue enhancing and improving Unreal Engine 3 for the next four or five years, work has already begun on Unreal Engine 4, which the company sees as a powering force for the fourth PlayStation and third Xbox machines."
Re:Use the engine on their other franchises (Score:5, Interesting)
-Rick
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:1, Interesting)
There is. Look at the game Red Faction, which is now five or six years old (I believe.) It had a thing called "Geo-Mod", which meant you could use rockets and mines to blow holes in walls. It was great in multiplayer because you could dig a hiding place to sit with a rail gun, or dig a tunnel (or destroy a bridge) to the other team's base, giving yours a tactical advantage that would be different every map. Unfortunately no other developer ever picked it up, and they're still putting out games where the details in the maps are static and painted on, except for a container here or there to check for health.
How about an engine that lets you really, truly interact with an environment? Not just to blow permanent holes in the wall, but to move the "background" objects, to set traps and barriers and use them to your advantage (and not just a few set props in a few predetermined areas, like some games do now.) Imagine a game where you could walk into, say, a realistic kitchen and use every single item as a weapon-- a fork, the refridgerator door, a mop handle, a cup of hot coffee... Or a wilderness game where you could set tripwires and poison dart traps anywhere. We have the physics of movement, projectile trajectory etc. down pretty well, now how about giving us better sandboxes to play in?
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:3, Interesting)
This sort of thing would make it a bit harder for the people playing Halo2 who seem to be able to snipe people while dodging tanks and jeeps. I know they'd eventually be able to compensate, but it would take the player just another second to figure it out. Perhaps windcurrents would make a difference eventually (probably negligable in most situations, but it would be interesting).
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:5, Interesting)
A whole lot of stuff. What excited me about early (1998) news on the Prey engine was materials reacting the way real materials do: wood catches fire and is easy to break, metal bends, bricks shatter, etc. If this can be taken care of on the engine level, this frees up designers from needing to script events where if this x-y-z space is damaged, this brush animates like this, falling in such a manner. It can also make games more, not realistic but believable.
Take Burnout for example. If I crash my sportscar into a van at 200mph, the van will pop off the ground and go flying like I swatted a ball. That in itself I don't have a problem with. But when a few seconds later I miscalculate a turn and hit a wooden newspaper stand and I explode on impact with the newspaper stand being undamaged, that I have a problem with. Putting things like these into the engine extends believability because your game world just gets a lot more cohesive.
This is just one. A whole lot more needs to be done in audio, visuals, AI, and a number of other areas. As long as we improve these while still focused on gameplay, and we should be ok.
UnrealEngine (Score:3, Interesting)
Running With Scissors has dumped Unreal, and I get this feeling that many other devs will probably follow suit, as soon as any contracts are up. I've been playing with an Engine v2 (build 2226) game and the code for it, and here's my summary:
The language sucks. LP-Mud uses a similar but FAR more powerful language, that had Epic implemented that, and added their stuff to deal with states and animations and the graphical end of things, would've been absolutely AMAZING. Unfortunatly, the capability of their game programming language is hampered by the fact that several text-game programming languages are a ton better than it is. And that's pretty damn sad.
The base classes provided: The code library that comes with the Engine, has been built as a hack on top of the original Unreal I code library, and just keeps getting hacked up since then.
Unreal isn't a horrible choice for building a game, but if you're going to make a total conversion for a game that starts with the Unreal engine, or start a new game using the Unreal engine, my suggestion:
Delete everything in the entire codebase that isn't native. Delete some of the things that are native, because if you want to improve on the junk, you'll need to not use some of it.
If UE3 and 4 show large improvements to the language, it'll be awesome.. but, as it is, it's shortcomings are