Reasonable said:
99% of the time a modded Unreal engine delivers worse performance. Always have and probably always will. Epic always produce better performing games because they understand every byte of the engine. Other developers mod on top of the base and invariably they don't do as good a job. There's some interesting reads on this going right back to early Unreal engine days where Deus Ex devs wondered if the money saving in using an off the shelf engine actually made sense due to the extra work they had to put in modding it and the challenges of keeping unfamiliar code stable. Personally, as the consumer, I prefer custom engines - they almost always outperform a devloper working on someone elses engine. But I understand commercial drives make using something like Unreal Engine attractive. |
Maybe that's the reason they used Unreal 2, it's an old engine and they're familiar with it. And with only the PC and 360 in mind for development they could have taken more advantage of the 360's hardware. And looking at how good Splinter Cell looks, they probably had to rework the code a lot. So I stand by my statements; Splinter Cell's engine is a custom one.
