Amy Hennig Talks More About Struggling With EA's Frostbite Engine

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https://www.kotaku.com.au/2019/02/amy-hennig-talks-more-about-struggling-with-eas-frostbite-engine/

Tales of developers struggling with Frostbite aren't new. Back when Visceral's Star Warsgame - codenamed Ragtag - was shut down, a former employee told Kotaku that the engine was lacking basic functionality in Uncharted 1's toolset:

"It was missing a lot of tools, a lot of stuff that was in Uncharted 1 ... It was going to be a year, or a year and a half’s work just to get the engine to do things that are assumed and taken for granted."

actual interview
https://www.usgamer.net/articles/amy-hennig-interview-uncharted-4-leaving-ea-ragtag-star-wars
 
Kinda just highlights how things are somewhat taken for granted in terms of the complexity of systems required when building things from scratch, and then modifying because there were some very specific assumptions originally made that make it difficult to expand.

It's no surprise Unreal Engine/Unity are widespread (even if performance can be the worst), but it's certainly disappointing in the lack of progress for Frostbite while Bioware is on their 3rd shipped game on it.
 
Kinda just highlights how things are somewhat taken for granted in terms of the complexity of systems required when building things from scratch, and then modifying because there were some very specific assumptions originally made that make it difficult to expand.

It's no surprise Unreal Engine/Unity are widespread (even if performance can be the worst), but it's certainly disappointing in the lack of progress for Frostbite while Bioware is on their 3rd shipped game on it.
After 10 years, you'd expect these things to be done.

Just thinking out loud. Too much focus on graphics, not enough focus on world/content building
 
Pretty much. Of course, the other side of things is what choice would they have had other than to build a completely new own engine post-DAII? It's pretty clear looking back at the limitations (and through the smoke and mirrors) of all their games as far back as Mass Effect. Some folks kind of forget that ME2/3 shifted to a traditional level loading because UE3 just wasn't designed for open world (there were benefits to segmented levels in both production time and performance), and we saw how the Citadel changed over the years.

----

CDPR may take their time and have a ton of bugs at release, but that's somewhat indicative of the complexities there as well, and thankfully for them, they are in a situation where their budget is uniquely positioned vs their world wide sales.
 
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Pretty much. Of course, the other side of things is what choice would they have had other than to build a completely new own engine post-DAII? It's pretty clear looking back at the limitations (and through the smoke and mirrors) of all their games as far back as Mass Effect. Some folks kind of forget that ME2/3 shifted to a traditional level loading because UE3 just wasn't designed for open world (and we saw how the Citadel changed over the years).
Bioware and Unreal would have been fine. There was no reason to break that marriage up. Yes there is loading, but aside from some long elevators, everything else would have worked, less games would have been cancelled. I don't see frostbyte doing much better for world streaming. Lots of loading in DA:I, ME:A, Anthem
 
They certainly would have had an easier time putting Andromeda out sooner considering they were just trying to rebuild what they already had.

Anthem does feel a bit regressive with the level loading even compared to Andromeda, though I wondered if that's a networking design snafu. The variance in hardware also throws another wrench in there once folks get separated mid-mission.
 
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Yea, well this certainly goes back to the why Ubisoft runs several different engines inside their own ranks. It's more important to get the game out and not every graphical solution will work with every engine which is why it's more sensible to upgrade the engine over time than it is to port a game over and have to rebuild all that world/content building functionality.
 
mmhm... definitely can see the results there along with internal teams being somewhat independent enough not to be bottlenecked by some monolithic engine team that's on the other side of the planet.

:V
 
yea well, now you know why I'm 100% on the RT bandwagon, fairly positive that DXR can bolt on pretty well onto existing engines with less pain than a lot of these newer compute based methods - given that we've seen it added to 2 completely separate engines and shipped titles under a year, i guess 3 if you count the title from China. Just looking at Unreal and Unity, and then on whatever Crystal Dynamics uses.

I always look back at Bethesda and Fallout. They're never leaving that engine. DXR is going to be a big option for them to jump back into the graphics race.
 
And then 343i can give me a ray traced Halo Reach with a Remember Reach ad campaign that expounds upon how we remember old games differently than they actually were.


....I digress.
 
yea well, now you know why I'm 100% on the RT bandwagon, fairly positive that DXR can bolt on pretty well onto existing engines with less pain than a lot of these newer compute based methods - given that we've seen it added to 2 completely separate engines and shipped titles under a year, i guess 3 if you count the title from China. Just looking at Unreal and Unity, and then on whatever Crystal Dynamics uses.

I always look back at Bethesda and Fallout. They're never leaving that engine. DXR is going to be a big option for them to jump back into the graphics race.
Even here RT is brought up.
The problems mentioned by Hennig here were not about rendering. They are about content creation/productions, animation, assets, 3rd person camera, etc. RT helps with nothing there.
 
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I don't think RTX would of helped any with the frostbite problems. It seems to be a streaming problem and lack of a broad base of tools?
 
Even here RT is brought up.
The problems mentioned by Hennig here were not about rendering. They are about content creation/productions, animation, assets, 3rd person camera, etc. RT brings helps with nothing there.
nah, what I'm trying to say is, engines are more than their rendering abilities. You want an engine to support the type of games you build. When you make a decision to prioritize graphics (in this case, the game is about fps mainly) over functionality, you run into the issue that Amy did. It's no longer a surprise perhaps why the Fort Tarsis is first person view only...

If you choose to prioritize delivery over graphics, then you end up paying out to Unreal for instance, or you end up with Ubisofts constant upgrading of all their engines, or you end up with Bethseda, which is woefully struggling to get their graphics to match their competitors baselines.

Which is where i see RT as being beneficial, as it's a bolt-on/upgrade type path, that can resolve a lot of graphical issues your engines may compromise on for the sake of supporting whatever features your games need.
 
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