Tim Sweeney Talks Unreal Engine 3 42
An anonymous reader writes "Following the recent unveiling of Epic's Unreal Engine 3, Beyond3D has interviewed Tim Sweeney of Epic about the next-gen videogame engine. The discussion is mainly about the 3D requirements, but they also touch on other technologies that are used or required: 'Off-the-shelf 32-bit Windows can only tractably access 2GB of user RAM per process. UT2003, which shipped in 2002, installed more than 2GB of data for the game, though at that time it was never all loaded into memory at once. It doesn't exactly take a leap of faith to see scenarios in 2005-2006 where a single game level or visible scene will require >2GB RAM at full detail.'"
Re:Technology goes forward... (Score:2)
Re:Technology goes forward... (Score:1, Insightful)
Or maybe realistic physics somehow makes games more FUN?
Me, I think people are impressed by realistic physics (especially with regards to PC games, and within that group, especially FPS) because that's what developers tell them to look forward to. I
Re:Technology goes forward... (Score:4, Insightful)
"If you enter water while strafing, your movement speed while you are in the water will be 300% normal"
but that's not usually very much fun because people can't relate to it. More realistic physics allow more fine-tuning of strategy with a minimum of annoyance incurred by adding more rules, since it's an approximation of what people are already familiar with.
Re:Technology goes forward... (Score:1)
Re:Technology goes forward... (Score:2)
Re:Technology goes forward... (Score:4, Insightful)
Think of the great games of the past. Donkey Kong- realistic physics? Nope. Good game? Yup. Mario- realistic physics? Nope. Good game? Yup. Zelda- same. Even other genres of games: Street Fighter 2, NBA Jams, etc. None featured realistic physics, but all were great games.
Realistic physics is a crutch "feature" that developers claim do to the current realism push. Its the same thing that makes them claim 1st person and 3D are better because "its more realistic", when truthfully most games would be better without them. The truth is that it makes all games indistinguishable- you can play any FPS of the last 5 years and have a hard time telling them apart. Its why the industry is in a rut right now- gameplay has been ignored at the expense of "realism" and graphics.
Re:Technology goes forward... (Score:1)
Don't forget Tetris!
Re:Technology goes forward... (Score:3, Insightful)
I bet Epic and ID Software are making these new engines just to license them to other companies.
Re:Technology goes forward... (Score:5, Insightful)
the Quake3 engine gave us Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast
The Unreal engine gave us Deus Ex and America's Army
We all know that even if Doom 3 sucks as a game, the engine will licensed and used in an even better game
Re:Technology goes forward... (Score:2)
My point (sorry it wasn't clear) was that they focus on the engine and then let other people worry about the gameplay. That's why the unreal games are lame.
Speaking of Unreal-based games, how about that Duke Nukem Forever game
Re:Technology goes forward... (Score:2)
Re:Technology goes forward... (Score:2)
So, uh... what you're saying is that you never played Unreal Tourney 2004? Because that what it amounts to.
Deathmatch, although in the game, is one of the less popular modes. Much more popular is Onslaught and Assault modes, neither of which is like Deathmatch at all and
Re:Technology goes forward... (Score:2)
Check out the mods for UT2004 - that's where real gameplay innovation seems to occur.
Memory and Windows (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Memory and Windows (Score:2)
Not for us Dual Processor owners.
Re:Memory and Windows (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps you are thinking of PAE [microsoft.com] on 32-bit systems?
Windows is fully capable of providing real 64-bit addressing. It even causes driver problems; you can't use 32 bit drivers in 64 bit Windows.
Current versions of OSX, OTOH, can't. They use memory windowing similar to PAE.
Well.... (Score:2, Funny)
That might help explain DNF [3drealms.com]
(ducks...)
RAM Inefficiently Used (Score:5, Interesting)
This makes sense. I was able to run UT2K3 without a problem, but after installing UT2K4 I've been playing less solely because the game is a bit jerkier, takes forever to load initially, and is less reliable (I get "hardware failures"). I have a suspicion that this is very much related to RAM usage. I'd love to see an accurate depiction of how detail settings affect RAM usage-- ie on such and such a detail level, you use X amount of RAM. How about a patch for the UI to optionally show this? I know it would be useful for about, oh, a thousand users tops, but knowing how much leeway I have in my detail settings would be a damn nifty thing to have.
Re:RAM Inefficiently Used (Score:5, Informative)
From Planet Unreal [planetunreal.com],
You probably want to use memstat. While in the game, hit the backquote key (often called the tilde key, ~) to bring down the console. Type in the command, hit enter.
I tend to avoid stat all because it just crowds the screen, but stat fps is useful for determining the effects of display settings as well (for performance)
Re:RAM Inefficiently Used (Score:4, Interesting)
I did this with Quake 3 a couple years ago and it worked great. I didn't exactly see a huge gameplay performance increase, but the levels loaded instantly.
Tim Sweeney and... Unreal ZZT? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hercules: You moved onto to other, bigger projects long ago. It must be good to know that the first thing you ever created is still used/played a lot. Does ZZT still cross your mind, sometimes?
Tim Sweeney: Yes, one of the interesting things to do is contrast ZZT and Unreal, and look at how incredibly far we've come in graphics quality in that time. But also to see how little the industry has progressed -- or maybe even gone backwards in some respects... So, how will game development be 10 years from now? If levels take six months to build, and compiles take 5 hours each, and it costs $20 million to develop a game, then developing games won't be fun or even possible anymore.
I'm a fan of creation tools that are accessible to anyone who can play the game. (Casual players who may not be technically inclined.) As a developer, I'm hoping that we [dejobaan.com] will be among the first to offer something that lets even the most casual user plink around. As a player, I'm hoping that Sweeney has retained this philosophy, and that future Epic offerings let us build -- at least a little bit -- with the same ease that ZZT did.
Bah, I can't resist. (Score:2)
<Insert obligatory Microsoft Longhorn joke here>
Kidding aside, this really isn't surprising in the slightest. Games and memory have all been exhibiting 'Moore's Law'-like performance. Heck, most high end rigs nowadays could easily install and play, in memory, an entire game less than a few years old.
--LordPixie
Re:Bah, I can't resist. (Score:2, Interesting)
Taken the HL engine is highly outdated, it was still very funny for me to see.
Re:Bah, I can't resist. (Score:2)
Lets face it. By 2008 PC games will need 10GB of RAM, quad itanium 5s, DVD Blu-Ray drives, 3D Monitors, sidewinder joysticks, headset and a credit card for each and every play. The gameplay will be just as shallow as it is now, but the graphics will be 'unreal', heh, and we will all flock to buy them.
While all this is going on the 14 year old Super Mario World is still stellar, Quake is still being played, and Micro Machines 2 is STILL
Who's gonna make that? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is going to hurt gaming. We're already seeing shorter games and copied&pasted rooms simply because the effort to make those rooms is too high.
I have a feeling that despite having lower sales, making a 2d game with a tiny team in a few months might actually have larger profit margins than top-end development.
Also, as always, higher costs mean more need for the games to actually sell means publishers won't allow as many risky games to be made since taking a risk on one could blast ther entire company.
Re:Who's gonna make that? (Score:5, Informative)
2D and 3D artists make the content that fills that space. The thing to remember is that it isn't necessarily a linear relationship between how much arist time is needed and how much RAM is being taken up. Using 2x the texture size, for example, doesn't take twice as long to generate. A lot of time spent on making 3D art is in shrinking things down to meet the requirements.
Check out this image I made here [reflectionsoldiers.com]. (Note: That's not a game model.) *All* of the textures were originally generated at 3072^2 resolution. They were too high for my tiny gigabyte of RAM, so I had to knock them down to 2048^2. If I had started at 2048, it wouldn't have been much faster to generate them. The source imagery was big enough in either resolution, so short of the extra processing time it'd have taken, it would have been pretty much the same.
The real time spent will be in making something more ambitious. Twice as long? I doubt it. Maybe one day when the game machine has specs that exceed the artist abilities, but we are generations away from that. The tools we have today are pretty darned cool, and they're only going to get better as each generation goes by.
In short, these companies already have the talent *today* to put 2 gigs worth of content on the screen.
Re:Who's gonna make that? (Score:2)
I don't think it'll be quite that bad. Nowadays you already have game designers making large levels that have to be subdivided into smaller levels with load screens in between, and things like textures and models start off as highly detailed but are reduced down significantly for the final game.
Re:Who's gonna make that? (Score:3, Insightful)
You do raise some better points at the end of your post. A good 2D team could have a larger profit margin, if they're lucky to make any money at a
Re:Who's gonna make that? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm a single-player mapper for Half-Life in my spare time. Stuff I've done has been fairly well received [telefragged.com]. And I can tell people this - map design for single-player games is difficult. I can spend a week perfecting something that'll last the player ten seconds. A simple room can take days to build, and this in on the original Half-Life where a suitably textured cuboid can be just about anything.
In
Re:Who's gonna make that? (Score:2)
Even more so, if you write the engine to a solid, expandable, and powerful (while easy to build upon, ofcourse) 2d game, then have multipl in-house, independent teams write games off of it, and lease the engine to other companies... You could have a team of 7-10 people, using an engine your company wrote, acting as their own independent gam
well, uh... (Score:2, Funny)
OSS Engines? (Score:2)
Is it because it's freakin' hard?
Re:OSS Engines? (Score:4, Informative)
It is being used for a couple of commercial level games from what I understand.
Re:OSS Engines? (Score:4, Informative)
Hey Tim! (Score:5, Funny)
Intense (Score:2, Funny)
Woah! (Score:2)
I think while game developers a whining about rediculous resource limitations the creative developers will be doing sensible things like creating algorithmic game assets using iterative fractals or some other more advanced techniques. In the end you'll have products that are smaller, faster, and cheaper to produce.
I guess the lack of creativity isn't surprising considering that Epic is still making the same old FPS games.
I've only got 512 megs of ram now... (Score:1, Insightful)
They're nuts. I develop games. I don't see any need to use that much ram for textures. Look at what games like Metal Gear on the PS2 look like, and they've only got a fraction of the ram that PC game developers have.
Before they switch to high res texture,s maybe they