Bioware Licenses Unreal Engine 3.0 (tm)

Good... hopefully it isnt as cpu intensive as the morrowind engine.. that engine seems pretty horrible to me, but I know jack about engines, just that it has horrible fps and the quality leaves more than a little to be desired.. low res textures, with a few effects= laggy, but its with my 8500 and 2500+, but i assume those were top end specs when it was released:D
 
The Morrowind engine (which had nothing to do with Bioware btw) was messily adapted from the Dark Age of Camelot engine, and so ended up being asked to do things it wasn't designed for in the first place. You're right that it ran alot worse than it should have, but I think the square peg/round hole issue is partly to blame.
 
Cool stuff, though I sincerely hope that Bioware is not planning on making a MMOG.

Fodder said:
The Morrowind engine (which had nothing to do with Bioware btw) was messily adapted from the Dark Age of Camelot engine, and so ended up being asked to do things it wasn't designed for in the first place. You're right that it ran alot worse than it should have, but I think the square peg/round hole issue is partly to blame.
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It uses the same engine as DAoC, but both companies licensed the engine from yet another company.

http://www.ndl.com
http://www.ndl.com/customers_overview.cfm
 
Mordenkainen said:
Ostsol said:
Cool stuff, though I sincerely hope that Bioware is not planning on making a MMOG.
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Heh, that's the exact vibe I got from that interview.
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The interview I read at HomeLan indicated an RPG, but not a MMOG. The closest it'll get in terms of scale will probably be like Neverwinter Nights. Otherwise, it looks like another story-driven RPG.
 
I hang out on the Bioware boards often. More then one of the dev's has said Bio isn't interested in a mmo at this time. But I suppose that could be a cover story... ;)

Here's that HomeLan interview. Lots of "teaser" info about what Bio's doing and some solid facts. I really like Bioware's rpg's and there's neat stuff to look forward to.
 
Ostsol said:
The interview I read at HomeLan indicated an RPG, but not a MMOG. The closest it'll get in terms of scale will probably be like Neverwinter Nights. Otherwise, it looks like another story-driven RPG.
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Yeah, I'm hoping that they'll essentially modify the engine to make the game modular like NWN, but damn, they could at least use triangular or hexagonal building blocks instead of squares....you can do so much more if you're allowed to use angles other than 90 degrees....
 
Chalnoth said:
Ostsol said:
The interview I read at HomeLan indicated an RPG, but not a MMOG. The closest it'll get in terms of scale will probably be like Neverwinter Nights. Otherwise, it looks like another story-driven RPG.
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Yeah, I'm hoping that they'll essentially modify the engine to make the game modular like NWN, but damn, they could at least use triangular or hexagonal building blocks instead of squares....you can do so much more if you're allowed to use angles other than 90 degrees....
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Shouldn't be -too- much of a stretch to make the Unreal Engine do that. Given the existing support for static meshes and their collision hulls, most of the work should be modifying the editor.
 
Ostsol said:
Shouldn't be -too- much of a stretch to make the Unreal Engine do that. Given the existing support for static meshes and their collision hulls, most of the work should be modifying the editor.
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Yeah, I would expect it'd be dirt easy, actually, just modifications of the editor and an additional level of abstraction in the editor where geometry is inserted for you depending upon how cells intersect.

Now, what would be really exciting is if they could augment the engine (over the NWN style) so that one level could use more than one tileset, so that there's no more transitions between inside and outside, just seamless interactions.
 
Chalnoth said:
Now, what would be really exciting is if they could augment the engine (over the NWN style) so that one level could use more than one tileset, so that there's no more transitions between inside and outside, just seamless interactions.
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Heheh. . . That was somewhat of an amusing point with games like NWN and Morrowind. You could potentially have this tiny little hut with a mansion inside. ;) It's understandable, since it solves alot of terrain caching and occlusion issues extremely easily -- but it puts a world of hurt on imersion.
 
My problem with NwN was not indoor/outdoor transitions, actually. It was the lack of true 3d. Because their colision map was basically 2D you couldn't stand above a bridge and then go below said bridge. For that, they might has well kept the 2D prerendered backdrops of BG.

That also meant that gameplay barely improved from BG. At least in Dungeon Siege with its true 3d world you had lifts, firing arrows from atop a castle to the goblins in the ground floor, etc.
 
Ostsol said:
Did NWN even have bridges that weren't over water or some other impassible terrain types?
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No, the engine doesn't support that. They wanted to make building modules as simple as possible. That part worked... building a map with the 3d tilesets is extremely easy. Unfortunately, the tilesets can be very limiting.
 
Ostsol said:
Did NWN even have bridges that weren't over water or some other impassible terrain types?
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Yep. There were bridges over ditches/shallow water. Meaning you'd have to crawl to get under the bridge....
 
Ostsol said:
Heheh. . . That was somewhat of an amusing point with games like NWN and Morrowind. You could potentially have this tiny little hut with a mansion inside. ;) It's understandable, since it solves alot of terrain caching and occlusion issues extremely easily -- but it puts a world of hurt on imersion.
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Yeah, that's a good point. If they're using the UE3 engine for a NWN-type game,there would be no reason to have that limitation, since the UE3 engine will take care of all those caching and occlusion issues.

Now, the question is: is it feasible to have a modular environment while at the same time offering "True 3D" for motion?

Of course, we do have to accept that it's really not necessary for the game that is to use UE3 to be modular. Is it even confirmed that it'll be an RPG, though? Remember that Bioware was the developer of MDK2 games (a great action game). It's possible that Bioware decided to license as a way to get back into the 3D action game market (hell, maybe they managed to wrestle the MDK license from Interplay??).
 
Chalnoth said:
Now, the question is: is it feasible to have a modular environment while at the same time offering "True 3D" for motion?
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Yes. Dungeon Siege had true "room-above-room" (and seamless indoor/outdoor transitions), and had a modular environment. It's just that DS's "tiles" were smaller than NwN allowing you to have finer control over your level (and less repetitiveness).

Of course, we do have to accept that it's really not necessary for the game that is to use UE3 to be modular. Is it even confirmed that it'll be an RPG, though?
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Well, in the interview Bioware said they were developing a "rpg layer" for their UE 3.0 powered game and (if I understood correctly) Epic could license that back from bioware.
 
Ah, really? Well, that definitely sounds like they're going the direction of a UE3-powered NWN-style game, then. Great!

I just wouldn't expect that it need be based on D&D, or any D20 format, for that matter. Hell, I'd like to see a return of the SPECIAL system :)
 
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