UE3 everywhere!

[Acert93]

I think when developers license and engine support, documentation, and development tools are just as important as cost and features. Most developers tweak the gine to begin with to meet their art direction, but there is that magic balance of time:money where you have to ask what is best.

I think that is why Epic is doing so well. They really are hitting the development tools hard. They are really focused on content creation and I think that is the right move.

 

[see colon]

I think when developers license and engine support, documentation, and development tools are just as important as cost and features.

while i agree with this, especialy for big budget, big titles, ect you would thin smaller dev houses would use "budget" engines to save coste.

 

[Fox5]

That, and every quake 3 engine game looked like it was running on the quake 3 engine, many unreal games looked nothing like unreal.(I think both splinter cell and prince of persia were unreal engine games)

IIRC prince of persia: sands of time started as an unreal powered title, but they later switched engines to something in house, maybe the same thing that powers beyond good and evil.

i agree with you about the unreal engine games having a more varied look, though. games like deus ex 2, repubic comando and XIII look radicly different from the unreal series and eachother.

what surprises me about the industry is that lesser know, cheaper (but very competent) engines get so few licenses. amp2 was rediculously featured when it first debuted, but i don't think i ever saw a 3rd pary game ever running on it. even the serious engine spawned few licensed titles (a carnavoures title [cityscapes i think] and alpha black zero are the only two i remeber, beyond serious sam 1st/2nd) even though it was generaly more robust than anything else for it's time.

Serious Sam engine? Umm, it seemed perhaps even more limited than the Doom 3 engine. The only other game I ever saw running on it was basically a serious sam clone. I don't know if the serious engine would be good for anything besides blowing up large masses of simple enemies in wide open environments.

while i agree with this, especialy for big budget, big titles, ect you would thin smaller dev houses would use "budget" engines to save coste.

As demonstrated by the whole Linux versus Windows thing, cheaper software doesn't necessarily mean less expenses, especially when the cheaper software can't do what you want it to do, or as easily as you want it to.

 

[Rur0ni]

Was under the impression the Source was designed to be... erm, neverending, instead of making a whole new engine they could just change some things, polish up, plugin, and voila, nextgen ready. But im just a gamer, what do I know (correct meh plz).

 

[see colon]

Serious Sam engine? Umm, it seemed perhaps even more limited than the Doom 3 engine.

the serious engine (from SS:TFE and SS:TSE) wasn't really meant to compete with doom 3, but more with quake3. SS:TFE was released in the early 2001, so it wasn't even really meant to compete with the likes of UE2, but still holds it's own against early UE2 engine games. several parts of SS:TFE are indoors, so i fail to see why anything that was made on the q3 engine couldn't have been made with comparable quality on serious. in fact, i would think it would porbably look even better, considering serious's better material system and more robust particle system.

 

[Fox5]

Serious Sam engine? Umm, it seemed perhaps even more limited than the Doom 3 engine.

the serious engine (from SS:TFE and SS:TSE) wasn't really meant to compete with doom 3, but more with quake3. SS:TFE was released in the early 2001, so it wasn't even really meant to compete with the likes of UE2, but still holds it's own against early UE2 engine games. several parts of SS:TFE are indoors, so i fail to see why anything that was made on the q3 engine couldn't have been made with comparable quality on serious. in fact, i would think it would porbably look even better, considering serious's better material system and more robust particle system.

I was just trying to make a comparision to how people claim that doom 3's engine was only made for doom 3, and how every doom 3 engine game will look like doom 3.
And Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, looked nowhere near as good as Quake 3 and I believe even had lower system requirements. Maybe it could compete with the Lithtech engine of the time, which was a step behind quake 3.

 

[see colon]

And Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, looked nowhere near as good as Quake 3 and I believe even had lower system requirements. Maybe it could compete with the Lithtech engine of the time, which was a step behind quake 3.

i'm not going to argue that quake3 looks better or worse than serious same: second encounter because that an opinion based purely on perception and preferance (art direction plays more of a role than technology in a situation like this, for example). but SS:TSE definatly had higher system requirements and supported many feature out of the box that weren't in quake3.

serious sam TSE
cpu: amd K6 400mhz or intel pII or celeron A 300mhz
video: 64MB opengl or DX8 complient 3D accellerator

Quake3
pentium 233mhz MMX cpu with 8MB video card
or
pentium II 266mhz cpu with 4MB video card

serious sam: second encounter had support for truform, cube maps, macro/micro textureing, and a slew of smaller features that quake 3 didn't support (right out of the box). hell, it even had realtime, multi-light projected shadows on the characters if you wanted to turn them on.

and the lithtech engine for that time (the one that powers NOLF and AvP2) was even a tad more robust than quake3 in a few ways (overbright textures, macro/micro textureing). lithtech's problem is that it's too clunky and inefficient to be really usefull for fast moving "twitch" games (like quake3), but it was extreamy versitile.

neither lithtech or serious were "made only for one game" like you argue doom3 was. both engines were advertised as licensable, and SS and SS:TSE were both budget priced, and were basicly tech demos for potential licensees.

 

[AlNom]

I was just trying to make a comparision to how people claim that doom 3's engine was only made for doom 3, and how every doom 3 engine game will look like doom 3.

GameSpy: The Quake 3 engine has been licensed a number of times since its creation, and many developers have built their own special additions to the engine for their games. Raven Software, in particular, has built technology like the GHOUL II system -- do you take any of these systems into consideration or talk with these developers as you develop the new DOOM engine, or is the game basically being built with one game in mind and a specific set of goals?

Carmack: I try to keep us focused on building our particular game, rather than trying to solve all the world's problems. There are some tough judgement calls to be made during development about whether something is an elegant extension of our chosen technical paradigm, or if it is unjustified work. Having the inclination and authority to just say "no" to feature requests has been an important aspect to being able to write quality code. Too many programmers agree to random feature requests without thoroughly considering the impacts. I try to err on the side of elegance in implementation, rather than feature coverage.

 

[JF_Aidan_Pryde]

I think the 1 year delay with Doom 3 has really hurt the engine.

If you think about it, there was really a very short window for an engine based on stencil shadow + unified lighting tech without any shader focus.
That timeframe was the post DX7 - mid DX8 timeframe.

The delay really hurt D3 engine's competitiveness. Instead of competing against non-unified stencil shadow engines, D3 is comparing against DX9 style shader engines. For most developers who want more flexibility and options, it's just not very compelling.

 

[PC-Engine]

Does anyone know if the D3 engine can do soft shadows? If it can't then it's a major disadvantage compared to the upcoming UE3.

 

[cthellis42]

I think the 1 year delay with Doom 3 has really hurt the engine.

Wait... The one year delay?

 

[AlNom]

Does anyone know if the D3 engine can do soft shadows? If it can't then it's a major disadvantage compared to the upcoming UE3.

For the retail -> Only when taking screenshots.

Otherwise, you'd have to ask JC about his own unreleased modifications.

 

[Fox5]

I think the 1 year delay with Doom 3 has really hurt the engine.

Wait... The one year delay?

Man, doom 3 would have been so incredible back in 2001. Come on, which would you choose, Doom 3 or Jedi Knight 2?

 

[AlNom]

According to the "Making of Doom 3" book, they were targeting 2003.

 

[ShootMyMonkey]

Does anyone know if the D3 engine can do soft shadows? If it can't then it's a major disadvantage compared to the upcoming UE3.

I'm fairly sure it cannot and probably never will if used as is. It uses extruded shadow volumes, after all. While you can do some things with shadow volumes to fake soft shadows in realtime on relatively simple scenes, it's still way too slow to be practical in a commercial game. UE3 uses shadow maps and interpolates between sharp and blurry maps based on distance, so soft shadows are well within reach. The main reason Carmack chose shadow volumes is because they don't suffer the aliasing artifacts that low-res shadow maps have.

 

[pegisys]

alot of modders say its soft shadow fragment shaders in the engine but not put to use I don't know what that means exactly

in one of the old videos for UE3 they said they were using cube maps to do soft shadows one bold and one blurred and the calculate between the two depending how close you are to the light. did they change something? that way gives good results and performance but I think it's still kind of a hack

 

[sunscar]

This is just a response to something said yesterday. I'm not sure about which engine Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time development originated on, but I do know which one it finished on for fact. That engine would be the engine driving "Beyond Good and Evil", which was a proprietary engine built specifically for that game. Hope that clears things up a little.

Later

 

[Johnny_Physics]

To the extent of my knowledge:
Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Beyond Good & Evil and Splinter Cell were three different engines, but they all shared some technology between them.

I have a vague memory that the devs talked about this in a video that came with the game.

 

[Fodder]

PoP was originally going to use UE2 (Splinter Cell), ended up starting development on JADE (BG&E), and part-way through was shifted to a custom engine developed by Ubisoft Shanghai. Good read on it all here.

 

[sunscar]

Very odd, I stand corrected... To my knowledge (from all information that had been given to me) it seemed as though it was completed on a heavily modified BG&E engine. You learn something new every day.

Later and g'night... it's 5:30 in the morning here, so I'm calling it a night and getting some winks..


Edit: Looks like it's still the JADE Engine as I thought... they yanked out the rendering module and replaced it with a new one though (The one from the Shanghai development team).

Later again and good night