Tim Sweeney Interview -- Level Design, technology and more!

[Intel17]

Well, Tim was kind enough to answer all my emails tonight, so I should share his responses with everyone, to make Tim feel that the interview served a large scale purpose (instead of just me reading it), well here it is!


Intel17:
For the next Unreal Engine game, do you guys use a lot of BSP geometry, or is almost everything a high poly mesh, because lighting and shadowing effect them uniformly and quality cannot be discerned?

Tim Sweeney: By object count, the levels are about 25% BSP. By polygon count, they're around 1% BSP. Mainly, BSP is for high productivity in building the shells of levels, and for a small speedup indoors using cell/portal culling techniques.

Intel17: Since the new tools for Unreal Engine 3 really take away lots of programming tasks, does that give you guys more time to focus on the engine?

Tim Sweeney: Definitely there is a clearer separation between engine and game with UE3, and this has proven to be a very healthy thing. Previous generation engines have had way too much interdependency between engine and game code.

Intel17: How long does it take a mapper at Epic to complete a map? Is it significantly harder than the previous generation?

Tim Sweeney: Level building isn't significantly more time consuming than previous-gen. Art and modelling is, because the detail has gone up by 10-100X.

Intel17: Also, I've noticed you've really stepped back from direct involvement on the rendering side of things, could you tell me what your current involement in the engine is?

Tim Sweeney: Mainly I've been doing "technical director" type work here, working with the ever-growing engine team to assure that we're doing the right things and doing them optimally, plus various next-gen (and even next-next-gen) R&D projects we're not talking about, and travelling around the world to meet with folks using or considering UE3 as well as keeping up to date with the GPU and CPU folks. Definitely I'm doing a lot less coding these days than past years, but that changes cyclically (I did very little programming in 1993-1994 between Jill of the Jungle shipping and beginning on Unreal too.)


I’d like to say thanks to Tim Sweeney for taking time out of his day to let me interview him!

 

[Wunderchu]

cool

 

[Ostsol]

Pretty much the answers I expected. Still good to read, though.

 

[Reverend]

So, technically, Tim is technical director?

 

[pocketmoon66]

"next-next-gen"

 

[Diplo]

So, technically, Tim is technical director?

Well, as the founder of Epic Games, he's whatever he wants to be

 

[Mindriot]

So, technically, Tim is technical director?

Well, as the founder of Epic Games, he's whatever he wants to be

I wonder what his business card looks like. Probably something like this.

"Founder...Guru...God"

 

[BlueTsunami]

I like that fact that a general base map can be created with ease, so this will alow more detail and just give a artists a bigger and better quality lump of clay to work with!!!

 

[JoshMST]

You know, you always hear about who is the better programmer, Carmack or Sweeney?

Well, my opinion on that one is that Carmack has an amazingly deep understanding of programming, and that Tim is not at that level. Not saying that Tim is a 2nd rate programmer, because he most definitely isn't. I think the one area where Sweeney excells at is as an administrator and director of people. He is able to get his team to work in a unified manner, and he delivers a much mroe well rounded product than what Carmack and Id can do (just look at the amount of licenses Unreal Engine 2.0 has as compared to Doom 3). When you take a look at the basic philosophies behind the companies, I think that Tim is putting out a much more marketable product than Id. Sure, Carmack's lighting engine may be simply sublime, but Sweeney can deliver a product that will allow 95% of the effects with 50% less overall work for the programmers and developers just because they include some amazingly powerful tools with their product.

Just my opinion of course, but I think that both of them have some very different strengths, but Sweeney is better at the business end.

 

[_xxx_]

Well, Carmack is definitely crazy. I remember him reprogramming Matrox drivers for Linux in order to fix some issues. Now that's something , you know.

 

[Gabrobot]

(just look at the amount of licenses Unreal Engine 2.0 has as compared to Doom 3).

That's not a particulary fair comparison since UE2 has been around a lot longer...a better comparison would be Quake III and UE2, and Quake III held its own pretty well against UE2.

 

[Reverend]

I think perhaps this is not the thread for any Carmack-vs-Sweeney discussions. I certainly wouldn't offer any opinion on this. Because nobody really knows. Not even John and Tim themselves.

 

[Intel17]

I think perhaps this is not the thread for any Carmack-vs-Sweeney discussions. I certainly wouldn't offer any opinion on this. Because nobody really knows. Not even John and Tim themselves.

I think there is a clear answer, but I'm not going to support discussion of this.

Please, stay on topic you guys! I thought this Q&A would spur interesting discussion.

 

[Reverend]

Please, stay on topic you guys! I thought this Q&A would spur interesting discussion.

To be blunt to the point of possibly being impolite, there is nothing interesting to discuss based on Tim's answers.

UE3 tech has been beaten to death in various discussions. Better to ask Tim deep, thought-provoking questions (like, what are his favourite pizzas while working, why developers won't spend the time programming pixels for anti-aliasing, what are his thoughts now on TBR in the PC industry re the Sega/PVR partnership, the top five criterias for PC games to remotely look like, say, Final Fantasy-like rendering quality, his favourite actress, etc.).

 

[Diplo]

Well, my opinion on that one is that Carmack has an amazingly deep understanding of programming, and that Tim is not at that level. Not saying that Tim is a 2nd rate programmer, because he most definitely isn't. I think the one area where Sweeney excells at is as an administrator and director of people.

It's true that Tim is less of a 'hands-on' programmer nowadays but you are forgetting that he virtually single-handedly wrote the original Unreal engine (with James Schmalz and Steve Polge [AI]) , which was revolutionary at the time. No game looked as good as the original Unreal when it was released. However, Tim's main skills were probably in writing the editor (UnrealEd) and, later, UnrealScript.

Carmack is probably sitll involved in the renderer side of the engine, but even he doesn't do it alone anymore (Robert A. Duffy was listed as Lead Programmer on Doom 3 credits). The fact is no games are made anymore by the one lone programmer genius maverick - those days are long gone.

 

[Arun]

The fact is no games are made anymore by the one lone programmer genius maverick - those days are long gone.

Except when the guy's called Sam McGrath I guess (Offset Software). I'd expect him to maybe hire one or two programmers for the gameplay side of things, but I wouldn't be surprised if he kept the engine in his own hands.
But yeah, in all big studios, "solo programmers" are a thing of the past - which makes sense, really. I'm not convinced it's such a good thing when it comes to the first months of the project though.

Uttar

 

[Sunday]

The fact is no games are made anymore by the one lone programmer genius maverick - those days are long gone.

Except when the guy's called Sam McGrath I guess (Offset Software). I'd expect him to maybe hire one or two programmers for the gameplay side of things, but I wouldn't be surprised if he kept the engine in his own hands.
But yeah, in all big studios, "solo programmers" are a thing of the past - which makes sense, really. I'm not convinced it's such a good thing when it comes to the first months of the project though.

Uttar

Amazing work!!
If I had a credit card I would paypal to this trio funtastico some money!
Amazing!
http://www.projectoffset.com/technology.html
BTW
what's wrong to have one Timeee vs. JC tread
mine vote for JC!

 

[DegustatoR]

"next-next-gen"

I think he's talking about SM4 considering that "next-gen" are new consoles which are SM3+.

 

[Intel17]

Please, stay on topic you guys! I thought this Q&A would spur interesting discussion.

To be blunt to the point of possibly being impolite, there is nothing interesting to discuss based on Tim's answers.

UE3 tech has been beaten to death in various discussions. Better to ask Tim deep, thought-provoking questions (like, what are his favourite pizzas while working, why developers won't spend the time programming pixels for anti-aliasing, what are his thoughts now on TBR in the PC industry re the Sega/PVR partnership, the top five criterias for PC games to remotely look like, say, Final Fantasy-like rendering quality, his favourite actress, etc.).

If you find those topics interesting and/or worthy of discussion, why don't you ask them of Tim and share them with us?

I asked Tim questions I thought to be interesting, and was hoping some people may benefit from these answers. Besides, Tim has expressed to me that interviews that only I read wouldn't be a very good use of time.

In anycase, I'm sure some people found this somewhat interesting, even if you don't, Reverend.

 

[squarewithin]

Personally, I think a more pertinent question is why so many people spend time bothering people like them. It seems like we've gotten to the point where we need Tim Sweeney or John Carmack's blessing and lead in order to form opinions on things.

They know so much because they spend so much time investigating the state of the art. I think threads like this have gotten ridiculous. They were bad enough when we argued about whether or not what they thought was accurate. Now we just argue about them.

I'd love to see more people working to actually see what they can learn on their own. While I may not agree with everyone's results, I much prefer threads where people are actually trying to test the cards and methods. I'm as guilty of slacking on this as anyone. The combination of little free time and lots of things I'm not allowed to talk about hold me back, but I try to post informative replies on things I conside myself knowledgable on. But if we could turn 10% of these threads into threads where people actually try and implement something and report their conclusions or try to research a new technique, followed by a meaninful discussion, I think these forums could become a much richer resource.

Alright, that's my rant.