its their program so they are free to modify it. If they need help they can call Epic and Epic will send out a few guys to help modify it or teach you how to use the software. My community college has UE3 installed in the PC Programming class. They had a guy from Epic there Tuesday. 

Actually, yes, Square's games did go downhill after the SNES.  People just kept buying them anyway. 

I grow weary of this generation's future with all the emphasis people are putting in matterial standards of gaming such as engines and what not. I just pray this doesn't turn into a contest of who can make the prettiest games rather than the most enjoyable.

New from Kotaku today,

http://kotaku.com/gaming/whistleblowers/developers-get-chatty-over-unreal-engine-3-issues-281611.php

Some developers look to have chimed in on this.

-"UE3 isn't perfect by any means, but I don't feel Epic misrepresented it in any way when we licensed it."

-"It is true that Epic was very late in delivering key features to UE3 during the development of Gears of War. They had promised one of the most important feature of UE3, the multi-threaded renderer, many many months before it was finally delivered. Since the key to having fast performances on the Xbox 360 is multi-threading, it made the engine somewhat subpar if you wanted to run your game with good graphics on a console."

-"We have been following the news of this lawsuit since it broke. Our team has been working with Unreal technology for several years and have been using Unreal Engine 3 exclusively for the past two years. We have found Epic to be an extraordinary partner and the UE3 engine to be exceptional. Epic has always been very supportive of our efforts and their technology has been instrumental in allowing our company to develop high quality products."

OK, I guess I will have to be the only one coming to the aid of Silicon Knights.

Lets look at Epic Games first. Epic is a studio that is supposed to have about 2 development teams, as well as a group to work on the engine. Problem: Epic is a company with only 75 people. 75 people for two development teams, and an engine team just doesn't work. In reality, Epic only has one real development and engine team, with a few guys working on down the road things, and others working on the engine. They are just not a big company.

Gears of War, which was supposed to have used the same engine as Too Human and all the other UE3 games, was using a more up to date engine than was available for the licensees of the engine at E3 2006. Epic had failed to deliver on their contract to deliver the 360 build and the PS3 build at the time stated. Normally in contracts, there are penalties for this conduct.

Silicon Knights is a company roughly twice the size of Epic with 140 employees, though from their development projects you would never know it. They sound like they were working on a PS3 project, and due to the excessive delay of the UE3 engine delivery time, have had to either A) abandon that project B) adapt the new engine that they replaced UE3 for 360 to this project.

The reason that SK named the profits for GoW as what they wanted is because that is the maximum amount that the judge can give in case of victory. If they named a lower price, the damages that they could be awarded would be limited to what they named. This is standard legal practice, its not something absurd or uncommon.

Ssj12: Read the claim. Part of the issue at present is that Epic did not provide adequate support. If Epic had been willing, or staffed enough as it were, this claim would probably not have occurred.

IllegalPaladin: Its called picking your battles. Epic has usually been consistent with their development, and have usually been good to developers, so they aren't willing to be dragged into a costly court battle for what they will likely see as no benefit even if they win. A big victory for SK would most likely put Epic out of business, and a loss will pretty much end any business alliance that they would have had with Epic. Its a tough situation for anyone involved.

What is more telling for their comments is that they agree that Epic took way too long to deliver their engine. As of now, it sounds like that Epic screwed up with their engine, and did indeed divert resources to GoW at the detriment of the engine development as a whole, and have tried to keep most of their partners satisfied since that time. With SK, they had gotten so fed up with the delays that by the time Epic got around to this, SK was already in the process of developing their own engine.

The lawsuit probably stems from the fact that SK was already in a tough spot this year. They needed to have this game get out this year for profitability sakes, and to boost their chances of turning a profit on this game at all, have brought the lawsuit either in hopes of A) forcing Epic to settle, or B) get enough out of a victory to turn a large enough profit to support the company.

Too Human is hemorrhaging money for Silikon Knights, Already 80-100 Million$ have been spent on creating the assets for the the first game in the trilogy. Ubisoft did make great use of UE3 with Rainbow Six Vegas, lets wait and watch if other dev's join SK. So far most dev's find epics delay as acceptable and are not looking to burn bridges. Koei has also had troubles with UE3 on PS3, but they have not gone ahead to sue Epic.

Any links to the 80-100M on Too Human (not being accusatory, just generally interested in their financials)?

I agree Silicon Knights are bumbling fools, but this is honestly not their fault, they were screwed over and are entitled to compensation for damages. Dyack wasn't even the one who went public with this to begin with, he wanted to keep it quite and deal with the matter discreetly, it was Epic who broke the story in an attempt to smear Silicon Knights image when talks started to favor Dyack more and more.