http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=15168

August 20, 2007

Digital Extremes Weighs In On Unreal Engine 3 for PS3

Digital Extremes Weighs In On Unreal Engine 3 for PS3 Digital Extremes’ Steve Sinclair, game director on the forthcoming Dark Sector, has spoken out against the company’s long time partners Epic Games, with further criticism of the Unreal Engine 3 middleware.

Canadian developer Digital Extremes have been long time partners of Epic Games, co-developing the original 1998 Unreal game and the subsequent Unreal Tournament titles for PC and console. With Dark Sector, though, the company has elected to develop its own proprietary graphics engine, rather than using Unreal Engine 3.

Speaking in a new interview with consumer website Gameplayer, Sinclair commented that: “A lot of promises were made about the Unreal III engine [sic], particularly on PS3. But as we see now, the time frames haven’t been met and now a lot of games using it are being held up.”

Public criticism of Unreal Engine 3 began last month with Too Human developer Silicon Knights filing a lawsuit against creators Epic Games, claiming that they were “sabotaging” the efforts of Silicon Knights and others to develop their own games while using licensing fees from the middleware to fund the creation of Gears Of War. In response Epic Games issued a countersuit against Silicon Knights.

Their not talking about framerate, Their talking about a timeframe on using Unreal Engine 3 on the PS3. Not framerate, look in the post and tell me if they said anything about framerate.

Sorry if I misread. So this is a different problem then the framerate problems of other games? Oy.

@FishyJoe

This has to do with how developers are using the Unreal Engine in a timeframe and its messing up other games that are in development too. So in a right way to say it Unreal Engine 3 is hard to program for in comparison of what Silicon Knights is saying and now Digital Extemes is saying the same thing.

It's interesting that Bioshock used a "heavily modified" unreal engine and turned out some pretty impressive graphics. I wonder what, exactly, was modified... That said, I played the stranglehold demo last night all the way through and there are a few things in there I recognize from the Bioshock demo graphics-wise. Some of the textures in the game are very shiny -- so much so that they look kind of plasticy. I did notice some of that in Bioshock.

It could be, though, that this particular dev wants to sell their own engine and there is no way they could get more press about their own than to trash the Unreal 3 engine...

 It's mainly a matter of staff.  Irrational (or whatever they're called now) had a staff of tools programmers already available to take what they had of the Unreal Engine and modify it as they saw fit.  Silicon Knights expected the engine to be more or less given to them without the need for a large tools team (and no fault there, that is one of the advantages of using another engine, same idea as outsourcing art).  Silicon Knights didn't have the manpower to make the engine usable and they suffered and consequently had to hire a team of tools programmers.

@ FishyJoe )

The article basically says "EPIC was way too slow with finishing the Unreal Engine 3 for PS3 and that's why many games have been postponed for PS3 "(like Rainbow6:Vegas , GRAW2 , Stranglehold , Fatal Inertia - all of 'em use the UE3). It doesn't say anything about the technical aspects of the engine.

So you're saying that because they couldn't finish their engine, they screwed a bunch of developers out of the lucrative holiday season. Ok, that makes sense to me now. Thanks.

This is the kind of overpromise/underdeliver situation that can make or break a developer hoping for holiday sales.

I guess that begs the question, why was the PS3 development so slow.

At first I thought that Silicon Knights suit wasn't warranted but more and more it seems like Dyack wasn't just whining. Epic may end up having to settle their suit with SK after all.

as more and more information comes out it seems that alot of ps3 games using unreal 3 are delayed, some are not-most particularly epic's own game.

now the question is, why.

i know a few game devs and a few people in the business and when the SK case came out a game dev- who is using unreal 3- said that there are daily builds avail from epic with the latest stuff.

shrug.