Rumor: Silicon Knights "We're dumping Unreal Engine 3"

[Acert93]

After watching the clip of Mass Effect that just went up at 1up.com, I'm prepared to lay the entire animation shortcoming squarely at the feet of SK. Go watch it if you don't believe me. Besides the excellent facial animation, the accuracy and weight of Shepard walking and turning is spot on.

I watched it about an hour ago and the framerate is pretty choppy and the bar scene was pretty sprase in many ways, so I would hate to see what happens when you are running in huge areas with dozens of enemies attacking on screen. As for the animation, I don't think lip sync/gestures on characters talking can be compared directly to interactice combat. When people are moving their hands 6-18 inchesand small gestures with their face that is one thing, getting smooth animation while swinging a sword around in a very, very fast manner while chasing down enemies is another. Part of TH's problem in the videos is how the animation was so un-dynamic and how the collission detection was off. UE3 is focused around FPS--shooting projectiles--so I would have expected SK to needed to rewrite the entire segment of the engine. Who knows though... the game has been a mess in motion.

As for framerate, that could be a shortcoming inherent to UE3. But SK had a rather stable framerate prior to E3, so I rather doubt it cannot be overcome.

TH had poor framerates before E3 as well--they only got worse before E3. The stolen footage before E3 had an unstable framerate and long, long pauses where the game froze.

 

[Farid]

I added the mandatory "Rumor" word to the title of the thread, if you all don't mind.

Man maybe they read the bad stuff people said about the game at E3?

From what I heard, the bad framerate and the technical shortcomings weren't the main issues with Too Human as a game. It simply wasn't remotely fun to play at all.

 

[SugarCoat]

Wouldnt mind a sequel to Sanity’s Requiem personally. I never finished it (sitting at the very end), but it was very well done. I still dont think its that well known of a title outside of mature Gamecube owners.

 

[pegisys]

Wouldnt mind a sequel to Sanity’s Requiem personally. I never finished it (sitting at the very end), but it was very well done. I still dont think its that well known of a title outside of mature Gamecube owners.

I couldn't agree more, I would say that game would be in my top10 for last gen, but unless they just scrap the Too Human series, I doubt it will be a sequel any time soon

 

[swaaye]

Wouldnt mind a sequel to Sanity’s Requiem personally. I never finished it (sitting at the very end), but it was very well done. I still dont think its that well known of a title outside of mature Gamecube owners.

Loved it. Not sure how they could do a sequel though....

 

[Titanio]

1up is saying they've confirmed this with their own sources independently:

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3152834

I'm amazed if this is true.

 

[scooby_dooby]

So, Xmas 2007 it is??

 

[czekon]

I wish to know what they exactly mean by does not work well with X360 hardware

 

[Acert93]

I'm amazed if this is true.

Uh yeah, ditto. Of course it could just be a poor fit for them as a developer and for their vision for the franchise. I never quite understood the "use UE3 for MS exclusives" mentality. A few, yeah that makes sense, but UE3 really is PC middleware. Good tools and works with next gen consoles, but for an exclusive title on a closed platform with substantial funding it makes less sense unless time is not on your site. With the TH delay SK probably got the time they needed. My guess is that SK, like many devs, already had some inhouse technology being developed behind the scenes to start with. Hopefully they can retain most of their art assets.

 

[AlNom]

I never quite understood the "use UE3 for MS exclusives" mentality. A few, yeah that makes sense, but UE3 really is PC middleware.

I would have thought it'd be geared towards Vista-Xbox360 releases, but so far the titles include Alan Wake and Shadowrun. Alan Wake is an in-house engine. Fasa Studios haven't discussed what their engine is, but it's probably in-house as well.

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

I wish to know what they exactly mean by does not work well with X360 hardware

Could mean a million things. For instance, we found from experience that multiple lights over multiple passes (which makes sense on the PC) is a total dog on the 360. Besides which, Xenos has a host of niceties that make it much better suited to several lights per pass, including shadows.

Other things may include things like the original UE3 demos talked about dual cubemap shadows for point lights (specifically that you have a source shadowmap and a blurred one which is progressively blended into), which sounds like a bad idea on consoles in general... given that one 1024x1024 cubemap is potentially 24 MB.

UE3, mind you, was demoing on the PC back when the next-gen consoles were barely talked about (back when 360 was still called XboxNext, Wii was still called N5, and Cell had 32 SPEs). That pretty much says it's a PC game engine that happens to support the next-gen consoles. And it's no big surprise that Epic has been worrying about UE4 in the meantime.

Unreal has traditionally had everything very deeply integrated with the core systems of the engine itself at various levels of a massive hierarchy. There's a double-edged sword to this in that it makes tool interfaces to the core systems straightforward (so you can have your wysiwyg and live editing), but it makes it costly and time-consuming to make a change in the core system. It may just be that Silicon Knights doesn't see it as reasonable to make all the changes they wanted to make.

 

[scooby_dooby]

My guess is that SK, like many devs, already had some inhouse technology being developed behind the scenes to start with. Hopefully they can retain most of their art assets.

Hopefully this is the case, that they have been working on a custom engine for use with the sequel of the game, and UE3 was just a stop-gap solution to get part 1 out the door, which they've now decided to ditch entirely.

It would be nice if they would update the release date so we can put this to bed though.

 

[Siraris]

From what I heard from people who have had hands on with Too Human, it's a big dissapointment all around.

On another note, a few people mentioned Gears of War on here, and people all over the net talk about how gorgeous it is, I just don't see it. I mean it's got a very nice art style, some good normal mapping, but nothing else I've really seen that's impressed me. Anyone who thinks this is such a gorgeous game, can you tell me why?

 

[Inane_Dork]

I wonder how reasonable it would be to plan on using UE3.0 to get started but transition to a custom engine for release. If one engine is good at toolset and getting things running while another is good at running the final game, will we ever see an engine made just for development purposes?

Anyway, this is about the most prima donna news I've heard about TH so far, and that's saying something. I really don't understand changing engines this late in the schedule, regardless of how much of the engine they already have duplicated.

 

[Titanio]

I wish to know what they exactly mean by does not work well with X360 hardware

I'm thinking that may just be a scapegoat..well, maybe not entirely, but only because Epic admit themselves that the engine is still in a state of flux, and that really things will only settle down and get mature once they've released a game themselves on the platform (i.e. GoW). They talked about this on the last 1up podcast, for example - they warned that they didn't think it's the brightest idea to use UE3 for a time-critical launch window title or anything like that.

 

[scooby_dooby]

From what I heard from people who have had hands on with Too Human, it's a big dissapointment all around.

On another note, a few people mentioned Gears of War on here, and people all over the net talk about how gorgeous it is, I just don't see it. I mean it's got a very nice art style, some good normal mapping, but nothing else I've really seen that's impressed me. Anyone who thinks this is such a gorgeous game, can you tell me why?

It looks almost like CG in motion.

Anyone I've ever showed GOW to always has the same question: "Is that realtime?"

 

[expletive]

From what I heard from people who have had hands on with Too Human, it's a big dissapointment all around.

On another note, a few people mentioned Gears of War on here, and people all over the net talk about how gorgeous it is, I just don't see it. I mean it's got a very nice art style, some good normal mapping, but nothing else I've really seen that's impressed me. Anyone who thinks this is such a gorgeous game, can you tell me why?

If you need someone to explain why its impressive then yeah its just not your cup of tea. What game have you seen played that actually does impress you? What about that game do you find impressive? That may help you figure out why GoW isnt doing it for you...

AFA Too Human goes, well if it means 60 fps with all the goodies then go ahead and tear it down. To be honest, the gameplay that i saw during E3 looked boring with long distance camera angles and very simplistic. I think they had a few more problems than just the engine imo...

 

[Siraris]

If you need someone to explain why its impressive then yeah its just not your cup of tea. What game have you seen played that actually does impress you? What about that game do you find impressive? That may help you figure out why GoW isnt doing it for you...

AFA Too Human goes, well if it means 60 fps with all the goodies then go ahead and tear it down. To be honest, the gameplay that i saw during E3 looked boring with long distance camera angles and very simplistic. I think they had a few more problems than just the engine imo...

Well, I mean there is very little media on GoW that I have seen. IGN has all of 12 ingame screenshots and 3 movies for the game. I think the game looks good, but it doesn't blow me away. I haven't seen many games lately that really blow me away... the only one that really has would be the Heavy Rain demo from E3, and I don't know how that will look at this point.

I just feel like the media I've seen from GoW doesn't blow me away like the UE3 demo's did. It's nothing I can pinpoint specifically...

 

[mckmas8808]

Maybe they will use the Project Offset engine. Do you guys think it's possible?

 

[Siraris]

It looks almost like CG in motion.

Anyone I've ever showed GOW to always has the same question: "Is that realtime?"

What from GoW have you shown them? You may well have been showing them cut scenes. Most media from GoW is not ingame.