Epic's Rein and the Unreal Engine's Long Arms

Gamasutra is covering comments made by Mark Rein, of Epic Games, at the GDC London event. He had some choice words on just about everything, slamming Sony's arrogance and Intel chips, showing off Gears of War while quieting detractors, and discussing the huge number of licensees for Epic's new engine. From the article: "Rein also commented on some of the most notable third-party Unreal Engine 3 titles from this year, from Bioshock through Mass Effect, but was particularly interested in Lost Odyssey, the Hironobu Sakaguchi-created Xbox 360 RPG. 'Lost Odyssey was a little lost for a while - it took the developers a little bit of time to find out how to use Unreal Engine 3,' said Rein. He noted the problem in getting Japanese developers to change their pipeline to UE3, but that it is something developers are getting much better at."

Fantastic.

[tarun713]

I'm glad companies have started to realize building an engine from the ground up isn't very feasible anymore with increased development costs. Now some companies can concentrate on making wonderful engines (Source, Unreal, Doom 3) that run on a huge variety of hardware whereas game developers can worry about making the games. Not to mention it makes it very easy to tell if a game will run well on your PC or not.

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[Warbringer87]

I figured this was inevitible, good to see it happening now, with graphics really getting pushed with every new chunk of game releases, now they can just let the big companies handle the engine. I wonder wat the negative side of this is, there has to be.

Re:Fantastic.

[AcidLacedPenguiN]

The negative side (off the top of my head) would probably be in not knowing the engine inside and out (because company X didn't write it from the ground up.) Though I imagine in a 2 to 3 year project they could learn the engine's ins and outs.

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[Warbringer87]

Yeah, but it gets signifcantly easier with good documentation. I am pretty sure there'd be communities of developers for a specific engine sprining up, especially with the cluster of games now using the Unreal engine. Maybe the shorter overall development time means a lower quality product. Usually when theyr'e making an engine, they make a game to go along with it (Cry Engine, Farcry, Doom 3, Half Life 2). Then again, I guess it's no surprise my three examples are the same examples used in the summary abo

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[XO]

One of the things about Unreal, is that if you have experience with UE1, that mostly transfers to UE2, and UE2 experience will supposedly transfer to UE3. Although I hear that the editor for UE3 is rather different from previous versions of Unrealed, you'd have to talk to someone who actually has used it to confirm that .. I've only really used the version that came packaged with Land of the Dead.

I do hope that my experience in producing a rather large addon for Land of the Dead will transfer to getting so

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[Warbringer87]

it better be a very large addon, otherwise, you'll have a hard time. Nowadays, you need industry experience, or a bachelors. Thats why schools (like mine) are popping up, teaching game design and junk. Good luck, cya in the industry

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[Corwn of Amber]

Anyone intelligent and dedicated enough can program a graphics/physics/whatever game engine.
I personnally know two guys doing just that (separately). See this [ploksoftware.org] and this [dreamingprophet.com].

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[mgblst]

Hey, make sure they don't ever meet. They collaborate or something and build something better. That is not really in the spirit of Open Source.

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[default luser]

I wonder wat the negative side of this is, there has to be.

The negative side is, you're competing with companies that not only make the engine, they also publish their own games using the cutting-edge engine before anyone else.

ID Software is one of the big culprits when it comes to this. Each major engine release is almost completely different from the previous, and includes many new features. If ID releases a new engine (game), games in development (using the previous engine) are instantly outclassed.

Tak

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[Ant P.]

Source, UE and Doom3.

Can you spot the odd one out?

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[Anonymous Coward]

Not really.

UE 2.5 runs on pc, mac and linux as well as being able to run on the consoles. I'm sure 3 will follow suite.
Doom 3 runs on pc, mac and linux as well as being able to run on the consoles.
Source only runs on pc. BUT it does have console ports.

So I'm not sure what your pointing at? Source not being crossplatform? Doom 3 not looking as good(Quake Wars looks excellent)? UE being more modern?(All the engines are being updated constantly).....

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[UnderDark]

SDL?

Garage Games' Torque Engine?

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno why, but no one ever seems to remember the Torque engine. I suppose that's because, it's quietly been building a base of games, that aren't as well known or popular as some of the other game engines. About the best well-known games using Torque are the Tribes games, but I think they have declined in popularity over time.

Once upon a time, just out of curiousity, I did quite a bit of 'casual' investigation (I didn't try to create my own games, but took a look at a few different games all built on it,

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[Chosen Reject]

The problem is that people aren't using the full capabilities of those engines. For example, the Unreal engine works on Windows, Mac and Linux. I've played UT 2003 and 2004 on all three without any emulators so I know it works. But then you have alls sorts of companies that make games using it and they do something to make it only work on Windows. Epic goes through all this work to give them easy access to Mac and Linux users and they go and blow it. A lot of developers might say it's not worth the eff

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[RingDev]

Prey runs on Mac, and I think they have a patch for native Linux execution also.

-Rick

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[Chosen Reject]

Yes, AFAIK, all the Doom 3 based games do run on more than Windows. So that is a sign of hope. But we'll see if Unreal Engine licensees [wikipedia.org] can ever figure out that the Unreal Engine gives them an easy in for a few more sales.

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[Ash Vince]

As someone who actually played UT2005 (or whatever, the latest one anyway) under both Windows and Linux I would suggest that most developement companies dont bother with linux for another reason. The games look crap compared with when they run under direct X.

If you compare UT2005 under windows to UT2005 under linux, there is a very noticable drop in quality (or there was on the 6800GT I had to play it on). An awful lot of the really pretty visual lighting effects were just not supported under Linux. The net

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[illspirit]

Last one was UT2004, and they eventually did fixed the lighting/shadow issues and implemented the render-to-texture functions (Hellbender license plates, video monitors in a few maps). The game looks identical on Windows and Linux now, and I for one get better frame rates and faster loading in Suse 10 than in XP.

While DirectX may be easier to work with, OpenGL can do all the same eye-candy with the right shaders. DX10 does bring some funky new things to the table (geometry shaders, single-pass cube maps), b

It's not dev, it's QA

[jjohnson]

You're right in that the heavy lifting of porting the game engine has been done, but including Mac and Linux involves a whole separate QA architecture with significant overhead--every test case has to be repeated three times, every change to handle a Linux quirk has to be retested to make sure it didn't screw up something in Windows, etc. That's the cost that fails to be offset by an increase of a few percentage points of marketshare.

I work for a company that sells a component that integrates with the majo

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[XO]

Agreed, I mod Land of the Dead, and I think it'd be great if it ran under Linux. I don't have a Linux box currently, so I haven't tested it under Wine, but I imagine it runs just as it should, as most other UE games also run just fine under Wine.

The one thing is that although the vast majority of the dev work is done by Epic, the individual house devs and testers still need to spend their time on that stuff.

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[rabiddeity]

Don't blame the devs. Blame the publishers and the management teams.

Management looks at it from this perspective: "It will take 2 weeks of extra work to get it working on platform X. Expected profit from sales for platform X is $10K. It costs us $15K per month to pay our team. We won't make much extra money, and we have to get the game out by Q4 so don't bother."

Much as I adore the Unreal Engine

[Travoltus]

I have a complaint about all game engines.

I've noticed that when the same game engine is used over and over again, the characters and environments tend to look quite similar. They even move similarly. Take Unreal2/UT2004 vs Gears of War - you can tell right away who the "fathers" of those characters are (lol). (It's all in their huge chins!) After a while playing tons of games under the same engine, takes away from the fun factor, unless there is a MAJOR deviation in the UI and such. (Say, if Unreal 3 was u

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[XO]

Check out Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler's Green. Check out the Harry Potter games. Both of those use the Unreal Engine 2, and neither of them look at all like Unreal (or much like each other) .. Also check out Postal 2, which was an early version of UE 2.

That's a fault of the modelers, and designers, that GoW and UT look like the same damn game, and I'm not impressed by anything I've seen from them over their previous incarnations. GoW and UT2007 look like the same thing as UT2004, but with better de

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[Muhs]

Man, you have to go and do some research on Gears of War, it really looks like it is shaping up to be a killer game. They are using some unique gameplay elements that I have seen in some videos (reload skill system, context buttons for cover/environment, full co-op). Things like that. Sure, the graphics are better, but I think the actual gameplay (which frankly, is the only thing that matters) in Gears of War looks very promising. I remember back before Halo came out everyone was talking about the graphics

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[XO]

Admittedly, the only thing that I've seen is basic shoot and run gameplay, like every other FPS. I agree that in general the graphics don't matter - there are already some damn spectacular looking games, even within my meager hardware range (2.0ghz, NV 6200) . . but the 2k7 engine doesn't look to me to have all the improvements that people say it does, from the videos I've seen. One thing that probably is nice, is that they are using the additional horsepower of today's computers to go back and do things

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[JFitzsimmons]

Splinter Cell Chaos Theory also uses UE. I wouldn't have known if it wasn't for wikipedia.

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[reanjr]

I've noticed the same thing. There's something about the lighting system I think in an engine that makes all games that use that engine look like they were made in the same studio. I originally noticed this with OpenGL implementations (looked the same) vs. DirectX (varied), but that seems to have gone away.

I think if a company is developing YAFPS, it's not a problem. But if a company is trying to market a game that is different in gameplay or theme, they should seriously think about using their own engin

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[WhoBeDaPlaya]

American McGee's Alice and Quake 3 look nothing alike... ;)

Point taken

[Travoltus]

That is indeed a notable exception. I feel that game should be declared official story canon. American McGee is very innovative.

Can I disagree?

[edremy]

While it's great that modern engines allow lots of neat tricks, you end up limiting games to just those tricks which may not be the best for your game.

Case in point: the Thief series. 1+2 had a specialized engine (Dark, IIRC) that didn't focus so much on graphics, but allowed huge, sprawling levels and wonderful sound cues. 3 used some variant of the Unreal engine, and suddenly you were stuck with *tiny* levels and loading zones. No more sneaking across the rooftops of an entire city to enter a huge, sp

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[Sigma 7]

Case in point: the Thief series. 1+2 had a specialized engine (Dark, IIRC) that didn't focus so much on graphics, but allowed huge, sprawling levels and wonderful sound cues. 3 used some variant of the Unreal engine, and suddenly you were stuck with *tiny* levels and loading zones.

That's actually a single game issue.

The small loading zones were caused by trying to fit the game on an XBox while maintaining good graphics. The same applies to Deus Ex: Invisible War - the levels had to fit within 64MB or RAM.

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[LarsWestergren]

While it's great that modern engines allow lots of neat tricks, you end up limiting games to just those tricks which may not be the best for your game. Case in point: the Thief series. 1+2 had a specialized engine (Dark, IIRC) that didn't focus so much on graphics, but allowed huge, sprawling levels and wonderful sound cues. 3 used some variant of the Unreal engine, and suddenly you were stuck with *tiny* levels and loading zones.

Most of that was actually not due to the limitations of the engine, but the fa

Intel Chips?

[marshallbanana6]

So why does Mr. Rein hate intel chips? Is he talking about GPUs? *a bit confused* Clarification would be appreciated. (Note: "Because AMD OWNZ U" is not really clarification.")

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[Fallen Andy]

The article doesn't make it clear, but I think he means the Intel graphics support for notebooks e.g. GMA950 and friends (which are kind of acceptable with Core Duo and the *ORIGINAL* UT) but horrid for modern games (quake 4, F.E.A.R and friends).

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[ctid]

Correct. He gave a talk at the Develop Conference at Brighton in the UK earlier this year. And there he spelled it out that he believed that the Intel integrated graphics systems were killing gaming on the PC. His view was that that most consumers had no intention of ever opening up their PCs and so would never install a more capable graphics card. Therefore, it would be hard to achieve a mass-market for "modern" games on the PC because "modern" games need significantly more than the integrated graphics sys

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[OK PC]

He doesn't like the intergrated graphics chips that Intel do. Says they are holding back the industry.

See here http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid= 18292 [gamesindustry.biz]

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[Lonewolf666]

Ah, thanks for the link.

Of course, people who are seriously interested in gaming already know to get a capable graphics card. So the problem is much smaller than he claims. Mark Rein is an idiot.

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[space_jake]

Maybe, think of someone that just got a Dell and wants to try some new PC game, it runs like crap on their "new" computer because they have the Intel integrated crap. Another console gamer is born...

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[reanjr]

Not really the case. Dell has a line of gaming machines. If you want to play games, Dell is going to sell you one of those. And they're going to have an NV or ATI card in them.

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[grumbel]

Of course, people who are seriously interested in gaming already know to get a capable graphics card. So the problem is much smaller than he claims. Mark Rein is an idiot.

The problem is that you are not born as a gamer and if you try to enter PC gaming these days you have a very hard time with casual non-gamer hardware, especially when the hardware doesn't even allow you to upgrade (lack of AGP port, laptop, etc.). So I think the problem is very real, however I also think that Mark Rein is fundamentally w

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[Khakionion]

Yeah, he's talking about the GPUs. You basically have to support software rendering in order to "support" said chips, because they're featureless also-rans next to real graphics solutions.

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[Lonewolf666]

I guess he is talking about Intel's integrated chipset graphics, which are (like all integrated graphics) NOT on the same performance level as separate GPU cards. From TFA:

Finally, Rein touched on software rendering support for Unreal Tournament 2007 on the PC, revealing that the company has been talking to a third-party about providing software rendering again "so we can support those crappy Intel chips," commenting that: "If it's possible this time, Epic will do it."

I wonder, however, what he expects to a

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[angrymilkman]

Well I can understand it from his perspective but I can also understand it from the pc vendors perspective. Not everybody wants lots of heat generating and power consuming GPU especially when you are using a laptop, and prefer battery life over top notch graphics.

better games in the future?

[CaptainNerdCave]

if this mindset becomes more prevalent, perhaps we can expect more games coming out in the future to be better? i would much rather have to choose between games based on which is more interesting and not which looks like crud. if the use of existing engines starts to become the norm, i think we can expect to see companies making better games because they don't have to spend so much on developing some of its foundations.
seriously, warcraft 3 was a really neat game, but building a modern rts with roots ther

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[XO]

That sounds like developer imagination issues, really. I'm building a big addon for Land of the Dead, and I'd love to have it not be a Point-A-to-point-B-to-point-C game, but that's so much easier to design . . .

Gears of War demos look really boring so far

[DrXym]

I hope the game is more interesting than recent demos which make it look like most of your life is spent running from one pillar to the next. Bioshock looks far more interesting that Gears of War.

Unreal 3 best game movie engine ever

[searchr]

Ever since I first saw footage of Unreal3 tech, coincidentally three years ago, I've been blown away at the technology. Ever since, Unreal3 tech has only evolved and matured into a truly impressive movie generator. From the recent Gears of War shorts, to the surreal and stunning Bioshock short film, no other technology has been so widely accepted and used to generate authentic movies that look just like videogames.

I look forward to many more years of high quality, high definition films coming from this amazing technology. There are rumors that a future version may in some way be interactive, but for now they're just rumors. It is truly a great time to be a videogame viewer.

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[Shadow99_1]

What makes your comment even funnier is that their has been a actual feature length movie made using the Unreal engine (in this case the first one, though only because no neweer versiosn were available then). Much like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within or Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children in style that was made in France.

All the same...

[hrrY]

If developers just go along and create products based on a licensed engine, that would dilute the market and competition on a few levels. Imagine if FarCry was based on the Q3 engine...you wouldn't have the hype that is Crysis due to the fact that the CryEngine brought something original to the table that people want to see more of; gameplay, graphic, and community-wise. Another aspect of this could be illustrated through F.E.A.R, if F.E.A.R was built using the Doom3 engine, granted you would probably get t

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[TLCWasatch]

If the 3 take-out restaurants had massive and diverse menus, I would I need a fourth?