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TIGSource ForumsPlayerGeneralSilicon Knights sues Epic Games over Unreal Engine
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« Reply #40 on: July 21, 2007, 12:07:19 PM »

I love Prey
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« Reply #41 on: July 21, 2007, 12:13:55 PM »

I heard about this lawsuit in the middle of trying to optimize some retarded code in the Unreal 3 engine, it was pretty entertaining. No beef against Silicon Knights or Too Human though, it could be a pretty decent game.
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« Reply #42 on: July 21, 2007, 12:16:52 PM »

Has there ever been a game that took forever to make that actually turned out good?

Max Payne and Half Life 2 took their sweet time.  I loved the Payne.  Smiley
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« Reply #43 on: July 21, 2007, 12:24:02 PM »

ocarina of time anyone?

prey was such a let down.
it could have been soooo much more.
it had sooooo much potential.
its a damn shame.

some of the old footage looks better than what we ended up getting.
they had a portal gun something like 8 years ago!
a portal gun! like in portal!

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« Reply #44 on: July 21, 2007, 12:32:28 PM »

The whole Prey vs. Quake debacle is when I learned that most designer PR speak is fud.
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Mike Kasprzak | Sykhronics Entertainment - Smiles (HD), PuffBOMB, towlr, Ludum Dare - Blog
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« Reply #45 on: July 21, 2007, 03:24:58 PM »

IMO they made these outrageous claims because they want to find(force) an agreement with EPIC.
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« Reply #46 on: July 21, 2007, 09:09:01 PM »

Guys, I'm sensing a lot of negative energy in this thread!
                             \




To stay on topic, it's really hard for me to come to any real conclusions about the lawsuit, because the information is so limited.  However, my initial impression is that SK is trying to point fingers when really it's their fault that Too Human isn't getting the press it deserves?  Perhaps if it was a joint lawsuit with other licensees of the Unreal Tournament 3 engine... but other big 3d games that are made with it, like Bioshock and Mass Effect, seem to be doing well in the press.

Even Roboblitz, which is made by indies, came out without any (public) trouble.

Now, if Epic was really holding back support on the UR3 purposefully to hurt Too Human, then that's one thing, but I don't see anything wrong with them spending money on Gears of War using money earned from the license.

The game itself never caught my attention, partly because I'm not very familiar with Silicon Knights (I do have a healthy respect for them because of what Alec's told me about LoK) and partly because at first glance it does seem a little derivative (i.e. TPS with RPG elements).  The story itself seems cool, and I'm a sucker for Norse mythology, but the presentation and game mechanics didn't stand out, that's all.  Reading the Wikipedia entry on it, I'm more intrigued.  I'll check out the trailer later, too.
« Last Edit: July 21, 2007, 09:15:55 PM by Derek » Logged
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« Reply #47 on: July 21, 2007, 09:58:47 PM »

Well they jumped ship to develop their own engine from scratch in May 2006, supposedly because Epic delayed Unreal by 6 months. I guess that's where it started.
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« Reply #48 on: July 22, 2007, 04:30:44 AM »

I'm quite surprised when I see games using the UE3 tech because without exception they seem to have shittier framerates than Gears Of War and it makes me think that either the UE3 engine was incredibly tailored to presenting maps of the kind that GoW used, the developers simply ain't using it well (this was true of some Renderware games) or they ain't getting the same creamy codey goodness as Epic used internally.
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« Reply #49 on: July 22, 2007, 05:00:21 AM »

The fact is, the more you try to use Unreal 3 tech for what it's implicitly designed for (FPS/TPS games), the less friction you will have. That's why things like Bioshock and Mass Effect are fine, and Too Human (weird angled beat 'em up?) and Hoop\/\/orld take body blows.

U3 is a middle ware solution for people who want to work inside of its possibility space (case in point: Bioshock is a very different take on FPS games, but on the whole it works to the strengths of the engine). Stretching to new paradigms is far, far more work.
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« Reply #50 on: July 22, 2007, 05:28:09 AM »

The fact is, the more you try to use Unreal 3 tech for what it's implicitly designed for (FPS/TPS games), the less friction you will have. That's why things like Bioshock and Mass Effect are fine, and Too Human (weird angled beat 'em up?) and Hoop\/\/orld take body blows.

U3 is a middle ware solution for people who want to work inside of its possibility space (case in point: Bioshock is a very different take on FPS games, but on the whole it works to the strengths of the engine). Stretching to new paradigms is far, far more work.
Sorry, I'm not that familiar with this sort of thing -- what's the difference between an FPS/TPS game and a weird angled beat 'em up, engine wise?  It sounds like just a difference in the code used to control the camera?
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« Reply #51 on: July 24, 2007, 10:25:37 PM »

his name...is Balder.

Balder

Hahaha, what are you getting at?
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« Reply #52 on: July 29, 2007, 01:16:45 PM »

The fact is, the more you try to use Unreal 3 tech for what it's implicitly designed for (FPS/TPS games), the less friction you will have. That's why things like Bioshock and Mass Effect are fine, and Too Human (weird angled beat 'em up?) and Hoop\/\/orld take body blows.

U3 is a middle ware solution for people who want to work inside of its possibility space (case in point: Bioshock is a very different take on FPS games, but on the whole it works to the strengths of the engine). Stretching to new paradigms is far, far more work.
Sorry, I'm not that familiar with this sort of thing -- what's the difference between an FPS/TPS game and a weird angled beat 'em up, engine wise?  It sounds like just a difference in the code used to control the camera?
(Note: This is all regarding Unreal 2.x (for the original XBox), which has since lost any support. Dunno how much Unreal3 tech is improved).

Kind of, yes. It sounds like a simple fix, but the problem was, this "simple fix" was amidst a bunch of crazy spaghetti where, for instance, (IIRC) each human controller was implicitly assigned to a camera... so if you're doing a sports game in unreal, you had to do a surprising amount of work to disassociate controller from camera - having one camera per controller makes sense for an FPS/TPS (one view each), but not for a game where players share views. Those sorts of assumptions were all over the place in the code. One programmer said that the code base was "Started with the best intentions in mind for extensibility, but was short changed by too many hacks and rushed coding jobs - one assumes due to crunches. These temporary fixes were never ultimately repaired, so there's a lot of junk in there to clean out before starting your own game." - Naturally, for any game engine, you're going to get some stuff which is hard coded for the game it was originally used to make, but there were quite a few cases where game code and engine code mixed inextricably, and lots of work had to be done to separate the two - i.e. it wasn't a "ready to go" modular engine.

A lot of assumptions were made/hot rigged into unreal tech... or atleast, there were a load when we were using Unreal 2.x. I can't tell you details particularly (two reasons: I didn't have to unjumble the code personally, but heard complaints from coders who did, and also, NDA I guess), just that there were a lot of shortcuts and obviously rushed bits of code which served Epic's games and deadlines far more than they served their licensees... which, I hasten to add, is understandable. Engine licensing is their "side" thing.

I don't mean to come off as too critical toward epic. Considering what they've achieved, it's all very impressive. Certainly better than I could ever do.

It's just that it sounds like SK went through similar pains to us, so I can see where they're coming from, even though I'm not a big fan of sueing. Seems like they were slightly washed over by the hype of the engine (fucking excellent artist/LD design tools - which you can SEE, but not the best code base, but you can't see that until you license it) and hoodwinked into thinking it's all proper win. Mark Rein clearly does his job well Roll Eyes

Hindsight's 20:20 and all that, but I think that they made the wrong choice choosing that engine for the kind of game they wanted to make.
« Last Edit: July 29, 2007, 01:21:06 PM by Bezzy » Logged

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« Reply #53 on: July 31, 2007, 12:52:33 AM »

Interesting -- thanks for writing all that out, Bezzy!  The way all the little details spiral into hopeless problems as a code base grows ... I guess I should learn not to underestimate it Sad
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