Gabe Newell on NextGen systems

[swaaye]

in these threads, it raises red flags to me that people don't know what they are talking about and are parroting what criticisms they see others tossing around.

Heh. Well my half-wit criticisms were actually designed to get you high-brainpower guys in here and start shooting the shit with we lessers. It worked! I just wanted to steer the thread away from "OMG 1400GFLOPS" to some more technical chatter.

 

[DeanoC]

It was posted on this forum pretty recently that the SDKs are going with GCC over IBM's compiler.

and AFAIK IBM is doing gcc`s Backend for Cell

IBM make a commercial compiler called XLCPP, thats not going anywhere for free. Thats what the SPU FFT example used and thats where IBM's serious money goes.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

I think Gabe's problem is Valve invested alot of money trying to write their own game engine (an engine IMHO that isn't very impressive architecturually, but is saved by its great art assets)

Their character animation engine's capabilities, especially the FACS-based facial animation, seem to remain unmatched, even by most of the nextgen engines like UE3, based on what we've seen so far. And we should perhaps separate the game engine and the graphics engine? I mean HL2 might be lacking dynamic lighting and on-demand loading, but there's more than this to a game...

 

[Farid]

Their character animation engine's capabilities, especially the FACS-based facial animation, seem to remain unmatched, even by most of the nextgen engines like UE3, based on what we've seen so far. And we should perhaps separate the game engine and the graphics engine? I mean HL2 might be lacking dynamic lighting and on-demand loading, but there's more than this to a game...

I think that the developers consensus about the Source solution, is that the engine is far from being as easy to work with as UE2 (Let alone UE3.0).

Troïka had problems with it, and from some echoes I had, Arkane Studios (Arx Fatalis) are not exactly happy with the choice they made to license Source for their next game.

 

[DemoCoder]

I am refering to the engine architecture. It's clumsy. Designing levels, scripting, etc is an exercise in frustration compared to UE. Basically, Source was written for HL2, not as an engine to be consumed by third party developers, hence the API/design lacks cohesiveness, abstraction, clarity, and the tools are hard to work with.

The facial animation system is good, but just because something has a aestheically good result, doesn't mean it is technically designed well. HL2 looks great, because Valve is great at creating art assets.

The engine itself IMHO is not impressive technically, except for the detail put into the facial system.

 

[swaaye]

Have you guys ever seen the facial animations in RE4? They are equal to HL2. I don't know about how the level of difficulty for developers varies between them though.

 

[Fox5]

Have you guys ever seen the facial animations in RE4? They are equal to HL2. I don't know about how the level of difficulty for developers varies between them though.

I thought RE4 also had more impressive character models and special/atmospheric effects too, though texture quality wasn't anywhere near as good.