EA Announces Multi-Title Unreal Engine 3 License 54
An anonymous reader writes to mention a Gamasutra article about a surprising announcement from EA. They've made the move to license the Unreal 3 Engine for a series of next-generation titles. "The brief announcement states that EA 'employs a variety of engines, tools and technologies to best serve the needs of each game and development team', but raises interesting issues regarding the Criterion-authored Renderware engine, purchased by EA in 2004 alongside the Burnout developer, and its intended global EA rollout."
Cool. (Score:2, Funny)
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I know that if anyone can make a game engine its their engineers, but do you suppose it's really THAT robust?
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The original XBox was designed much faster than any other console has ever been designed (went from an idea to a full fledged system in 12 or 16 months IIRC); the problem with this was that Microsoft had to stick to (mostly) over the counter components. Microsoft didn't bother to get decent licencing terms from either Intel or nVidia
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And no, architectural registers is largely irrelevant also because of techniques like register renaming.
So yes, the anti-x86 trolls should move along. x86 is here
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No, not at all. They know when they release their new "bumpy shiny armor" FPS it will sell x amount of copies for x amount of money making them x amount of profit. As long as X > Development costs, they will keep doing it.
AC I think you have more problems to worry about then EA though. You seem to have some weird
The engine isn`t that important anymore (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I think that it is time that someone focuses on generating an open source java framework that is designed around splitting a game engine into its smaller components (Graphics, Physics, Scripting and AI); this would allow for smaller (more focused) open source projects to exist which (should) produce higher quality results.
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There are good opensource component C++ frameworks - there is Ogre 3D for graphics (or Crystalspace 3D); Bullet engine for physics (or ODE); Python for Scripting (Or Ruby; Or
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I worked as the lead programmer on a game [vampirebloodlines.com] that used Python for scripting, at a company where another team [atari.com] was also using Python for scripting. From a bugcount and quality-assurance perspective, Python worked out very badly for both games.
The dynamic nature of the language bit us in the ass over and over and over. Suppose early in the game, based on what someone does, there's a script that states:
globalFlags.killedRedDragon = true;
On a quest much later in the game, there
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Re:The engine isn`t that important anymore (Score:4, Informative)
Between Sun's marketing department and B-grade university CS programs that work like Java trade schools there is a disturbing number of people out there that think that: Java is comparitively easy to use, Java is flexible/powerful and Java is fast enough to do state of the art techniques on computers that currently exist.
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Microsoft thinks different and provides XNA [microsoft.com]. Now I don't expect the next Doom or Halo3 to use Java or C#, but for a lot of games its really a non-issue these days, computers are fast enough and the most grunt work is done by the GPU anyway, which doesn't care if the rest of the programm is written in Java or C# or hand optimized assembler. There is of cour
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Unfortunately I think this is true. The future may come when we can't tell the difference between the graphics & performance of a 10 year old game vs a current game, or we can't tell that a game with the same features written in Java is running slower, but I certainly don't think it's on the horizon.
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You are probably right that games will end up being written in an easier language than C++ and with critical and difficult-to-write components such as AI and Graphics as seprate components.
However, it seems hard to separate AI and for instance physics. For an AI to be smart it has to know how the physics component work or no? I mean is game development going to end up like BizTalk hehe (components "brokering" over XML basically). :)
Also, for games to have an "edge" creativity in all diverse areas hav
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Game engine consolidation (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not sure whether this is bad or good. I was thinking it might make future games feel generic, but then I thought... more than now? Let's hope not. But maybe the generic feel of today's FPSes is that the oft-reused game engines are not quite flexible enough, so the player "recognizes" the engine underneath. Maybe in the future they will fix that.
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Good for EA as a company (quicker game releases/more game releases), bad for the EA employees (most of the "smart" coder get the axe since they are no longer needed). Still up in the air about how it will be for consumers, but we will just have to wait and see what EA does with this standardized engine.
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Re:Game engine consolidation [+Interesting parent] (Score:2)
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Yeah, it seems pretty clear that their acquisition of Renderware was not so they could use the engine, but rather to hinder the ability of other developers to easily create cross-platform titles. In other words, EA probably bought Renderware so they could kill it.
Re:Game engine consolidation (Score:5, Insightful)
I own many of the titles, and the game play is very different. There is a little "sameness" in some titles (CS/TFC/HL) but this is mainly just consistancy, not generic blandness. The content is different as is the overall gameplay. Then again, HL1 itself was a licensed engine from Quake.
So you can develop some unique games on the same platform. EA will probably do it closed. Valve does it fairly open. The public will decide who does it better.
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Aside from the Mythic acquisition, EA hasn't been purchasing companies.......