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."
Use the engine on their other franchises (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Use the engine on their other franchises (Score:1)
Re:Use the engine on their other franchises (Score:5, Interesting)
-Rick
Re:Use the engine on their other franchises (Score:3, Informative)
You're never going to see Commander Keen in an UR3 environment, though.
The people who made that game have since moved on to other games that a few people may have heard about, games such as Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake.
(Plus I think Doom II featured a hidden dead Commander Keen anyway.)
Although they did license a GBA version of Commander Keen that was apparently terrible. Too bad, because Commander Keen 4 was one of my favorite games on the PC at the time.
I've been thinking about side-scrolling 3D
Re:Use the engine on their other franchises (Score:1)
Re:Use the engine on their other franchises (Score:1)
Jaysyn
Re:Use the engine on their other franchises (Score:2)
Re:Use the engine on their other franchises (Score:1)
Jaysyn
Re:Use the engine on their other franchises (Score:1)
Looking too far ahead? (Score:5, Insightful)
How much better? What is there left to make totally realistic?
From text adventures where you interacted with set definite objects, to games like Wolf3D, to Doom (and the beginning of the whole multiplayer craze) to the first Unreal (which made the whole looking up and down really important) to the second and third Unreal engines. Is there anyone who can really say that there is really that much more to be done in terms of physics and movement?
One would figure that once you iron out the engine and it works well, you then improve the artwork, and after that, you should really improve gameplay and build on the replay value. Too many games these days could damn well be one game with different maps and skins.
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:5, Insightful)
We will hit photo-realistic in the not-too-distant future, but we're not quite there yet. I'm glad to see that folks like Epic keep pushing the envelope.
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 compensa
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:2)
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:1)
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:2, Informative)
I believe America's Army has this
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:2)
The general rule is that if you click on their head, you shoot their head, assuming you're using a sniper rifle, which has very
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:1)
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:2)
People have been saying that for years. There is still a lot of room to grow. For example, most every game should eventually have the changable terrain that we saw in Red Faction. Also, the in-game characters still have a lot of room to grow in terms of realistic movement.
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:2, Insightful)
I think that issue is rooted in game design rather than technical limitations, just like there is no technical limit that forces RPG stories on the PS2 to be completely linear. The less variables there are to take into account the better you can predict what the user will do. Changeable terrain means you have to think of what could happen to your level design. In a game where wooden doors aren't indestructib
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 diff
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:2)
They haven't been realistic. Then again, people don't want realism. Ever tried seeing what people set their TV to? High on color, high on brightness, high on contrast. That's what people want the world to look like, and that's what Oblivion does. It's the world on steroids. But some things have gotten more realistic, like water motion (try scaring some animals into the water in Oblivion), grass waving and so on. The power is there, but that kind of realism isn
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:1)
I'd be happier seeing more effort put into making clothing and hair move naturally, or making a rope ladder that doesn't look like it's built out of construction paper, rather than advancing "glowing arm" technology.
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know, but I remember feeling the same way when DOOM first came out in 1993 - how more realistic could a video game get? But time has told that a *lot* of things could still be improved, and time will tell the same thing 10 or 12 years down the road from now again, too.
Keep in mind that in hindsight, everything's obvious - the fact that it's much easier for you to look back at the progress already made than it is to envision the progress that still lies in the future does not mean that there won't be any significant progress in the future anymore.
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:2)
Record a digital video from outdoors and compare to quality computer game graphics.
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:1)
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:1)
Not entirely accurate- they projected the Ps3 to have a ten year lifespan. for instance, the Ps1 just recently went out of production, despite being released originally in Japan in 1994 and the states in 1995. Since then we've seen the Ps2 debut and mature, and the development and (planned) release of the Ps3 later this year. If the pattern holds true, expect to see a Ps
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:1)
I thought we reached that with Black (PS2/Xbox) already?
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:1)
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.
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:2)
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:1)
The article is about the Engine... At epic, the teams workign on Unreal Engine 3 and Gears of War are seperate people. There are plenty of people working on improving the Engine, and plenty working ont he game, trying to "improve gameplay an
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:1)
How is that new? Tactical shooters require that AFAIK and you practically need to use cover if you want to survive firefights in FEAR.
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:1)
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:1)
Re:Looking too far ahead? (Score:2)
1. soft shadows; radiocity lighting; raytracing
2. real physics
3. really big maps
4. voice recognition
5. voice synthesizing
6. innovative control methods
just some of the possible improvements.
Wonder if engine 4 will still have sprites? (Score:1)
Re:Wonder if engine 4 will still have sprites? (Score:1)
Re:Wonder if engine 4 will still have sprites? (Score:2)
Re:Wonder if engine 4 will still have sprites? (Score:1)
Re:Wonder if engine 4 will still have sprites? (Score:2)
So the real question is weather or not people will continue to use them where they shouldn't.
*Hands to temples* I predict... yes.
Tim Sweeney (Score:2)
Re:Tim Sweeney (Score:2)
Re:Tim Sweeney (Score:1, Insightful)
What matters is if using the engine results in a better end product than creating your own or using a competitor's engine. To guess at the answer from our vantage point we can only consider how many and what quality of games have sucessfully shipped using the engine previously. Secondary consideration is how many
Re:Tim Sweeney (Score:2)
it has a LONG way to go before being a truly 'must have' for development though.
it's a strange dynamic - having a company large enough to support the on-going engineering effort that developing game engines requires and having a company (and code base) small enough to be flexible and innovative.
i fear that epic has moved from the second category into the first...it's the same syndrome that affects any company that becomes this
Modding Unreal (Score:5, Insightful)
Now it's not an entirely fair comparison - Doom 3 is a more complex engine to develop for. Models require more than just geometry and one texture map/shader. But that complexity seems to be denting the number of maps/models/mods being produced for Doom 3/Quake 4/etc. UT2k4 ships with a shed-load of tools for modding and maps can be created reasonably quickly from the stock models. UT2k4 also managed to provide a decent download system so that you can just log into a server and download all the parts required without having to go hunting through the many websites looking for the appropriate map/script/sound.
Unreal Engine 3 is going to require the same sort of resources as Doom 3/Quake 4 when it comes to creating completely new content. Maybe UE3 will benefit from modellers/modders having cut their teeth on the Doom3-style tech but it will be interesting to see just what creation tools come with UT2k7 and what the modding community creates.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Re:Modding Unreal (Score:1)
By visually connecting the color, alpha and coordinate outputs of textures and programmer-defined material components, artists can create materials ranging from simple layered blends to extremely complex materials and dynamically interacting with scene lights.
if you wanna know a bit mroe about Unreal
Why DOOM 3 is not up there (Score:1)
Re:Why engines aren't not up there (Score:1)
Epic says you're wrong. (Score:2)
Oh, and let's see... Quake 3 engine is no proof at all. How is its single player "not real"?
Well, of course, only normal deathmatch with bots, a couple cinematics... But, I don't see what this has to do with the engine.
And GTA has been modded for multiplayer, and it was a third-party mod, nothing at all to do with Rockstar.
So, do you have any idea what you're talking about, or are these jus
Re:Modding Unreal (Score:1)
Re:Modding Unreal (Score:1, Informative)
Visual Material Editor. By visually connecting the color, alpha and coordinate outputs of textures and programmer-defined material components, artists can create materials ranging from simple layered blends to extremely complex materials and dynamically interacting with scene lights.
Bible Thumping (Score:2, Funny)
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
Re:UnrealEngine (Score:2)
Re:UnrealEngine (Score:2)
Re:UnrealEngine (Score:2)
Re:UnrealEngine (Score:2)
Re:UnrealEngine (Score:2)
UScript would be fantastic, if it had associative arrays, or at least better array handling capabilities, and MULTIPLE INHERITANCE.
What are AAA games? (Score:2)