[News] Unreal Engine 4 will focus on consoles - PCs only secondary

In this interview, Epic's Tim Sweeny unveils that their planned Unreal Engine 4, which is aimed for a release around 2010, will have a primary focus on the next generation of consoles (as in Xbox720 and PS4), with gaming PCs following in priority even after a speculated high power Nintendo console.
In times when even Squeenix licenses their engine, this comes hardly as a surprise. Still, it sure is bad news for PC gaming, but the console market IS where the most money can be made, so it sure is a good decision for Epic to make.

I'm still finding the idea pretty cool that we're more and more moving into an era, where game development becomes less a thing of what tech to produce, but more a thing of what tech to choose from. Unreal Engine, Havoc Physics, that "stuff breaking simulation" thing Lucas Arts use in Force Unleashed...
So ideally, game developers, as opposed to engine developers, can then focus more on making a good game instead of first making a viable engine.

That said, what's the latest news on id-Softs new Engine?
That real time editing stuff sounded pretty awesome in theory...

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I agree, the whole "each engine can do anything" development is a really good thing for the games industry. The less time spent trying to figure out the engine's quirks and working around them (or making your own engine even), the more time can be spent making the actual game content. And since games are becoming so unbelievably huge in terms of sheer amount of models and levels and so on that has to be put in, this is more or less a necessity at this point.

Of course there are downsides to everything, and I think the biggest issue would be that games made with the same engine have a tendency to sort of look alike... But I think that's something that developers can watch out for and avoid.

As for "focusing on consoles", I'm not entirely sure what they mean by that. I mean, I can understand what that means when you're developing a game (easier aiming, controls made for joypad, save points, bonus achievement-related content etc.), but for an entire engine I would think that there isn't such a huge difference between developing it on console or on PC. After all, the UE3 is used on PC and consoles pretty much interchangeably already. And aside from that, almost all big games are developed on PC before being brought to consoles, since there really isn't that huge of a difference between a console and a PC and I guess it's just easier to start out development on the PC than on a devkit.

I guess it won't be relevant for a long time anyway, but yeah I'm kinda curious what that means.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Well middleware has it's place as SiliconKnights eventually came to learn. Things like UE3 are great for people who want to just throw something out the door, or who has limited resources given to them to begin with and needs a means of trimming time off the R&D cycle of development. But for larger companies who have larger resources and wants to make a complicated AAA game, it's probably not the way they want to go.

More towards topic though, does this really surprise anyone? With the cost of PC hardware on one end and the amount of PC piracy on the other, the PC gaming community (companies and users) really have widdled their market into a very small group of people.

Also Epic makes the majority of their money off of licensing their engine, and there's a lot more console developers out there then PC ones. Especially considering how hard it is to create your own engine for a console compared to a PC. That's a much larger market for Epic to license to.

All in all I'm surprised that Epic didn't make this move back at the time of UE2. However I'm not that surprised that they did eventually make the move.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Slayer X

Well middleware has it's place as SiliconKnights eventually came to learn. Things like UE3 are great for people who want to just throw something out the door, or who has limited resources given to them to begin with and needs a means of trimming time off the R&D cycle of development. But for larger companies who have larger resources and wants to make a complicated AAA game, it's probably not the way they want to go.

Half-Life, Bioshock and Mass Effect would like to have a word with you.

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Originally Posted by Slayer X

Things like UE3 are great for people who want to just throw something out the door, or who has limited resources given to them to begin with and needs a means of trimming time off the R&D cycle of development. But for larger companies who have larger resources and wants to make a complicated AAA game, it's probably not the way they want to go.

Mass Effect, Lost Odyssey, both Rainbow Six: Vegas games, Bioshock, Stranglehold, Halo Wars, Frontlines, Army of Two, Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, and others were or are not just getting "thrown out the door". Some have had QUITE LARGE development cycles. None of them were small budget games.

So please, shut up? Practically everything out of your mouth is uninformed and it's usually wrong.

I was speaking idiomatically.

When it comes to wide open spaces and detailed animation systems with more then 12(or so) characters the engine begins to chug. Which is why a game has to have either condensed levels like Gears (or Stranglehold) or large areas like Lost Odyssey that have few characters within them. No my friend, I know what I'm talking about. You just wish to toss me aside instead of looking into the matter yourself because it's easier.

This is the problem with the engine that SK discovered. If you have too many characters on screen + large enviroments the engine is broken. Which is why Gears of War can only have 12 characters on screen at any given time.

Are there big games using UE3, yes. However they either have to make sacrifices to the game for the engine to work, or they have to tailor the engine to work for them. why do you thing BIH: HH among other UE3 games have been pushed back so many times?

@Qwarky
Half-Life is not a UE3 game. And MAss Effect is plagued with technical issues, which more feeds my point more then anything else.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by surasshu

As for "focusing on consoles", I'm not entirely sure what they mean by that. I mean, I can understand what that means when you're developing a game (easier aiming, controls made for joypad, save points, bonus achievement-related content etc.), but for an entire engine I would think that there isn't such a huge difference between developing it on console or on PC. After all, the UE3 is used on PC and consoles pretty much interchangeably already. And aside from that, almost all big games are developed on PC before being brought to consoles, since there really isn't that huge of a difference between a console and a PC and I guess it's just easier to start out development on the PC than on a devkit.

I'm assuming they mean that they'll focus on optimizing the engine for the closed platform instead of the PC. There has been a lot of technical hiccups or difficulties when getting UE3 to run on these current consoles at any respectable level, as I'm sure you're aware. Perhaps just a focus on hardware optimization for the consoles is what he means.

Additional Spam:

Originally Posted by Slayer X

When it comes to wide open spaces and detailed animation systems with more then 12(or so) characters the engine begins to chug. Which is why a game has to have either condensed levels like Gears (or Stranglehold) or large areas like Lost Odyssey that have few characters within them. No my friend, I know what I'm talking about. You just wish to toss me aside instead of looking into the matter yourself because it's easier.

This is the problem with the engine that SK discovered. If you have too many characters on screen + large enviroments the engine is broken. Which is why Gears of War can only have 12 characters on screen at any given time.

Are there big games using UE3, yes. However they either have to make sacrifices to the game for the engine to work, or they have to tailor the engine to work for them. why do you thing BIH: HH among other UE3 games have been pushed back so many times?

Could you backpedal any harder? Seriously?

There are technical limitations with the hardware the engine runs on, yes. This results in the issues we see with screen tearing, frame rates, and texture pop in on most of the games that use it. This is something everyone fucking knows. This is less about the engine and more about how companys can optimize it. One of the issues is that it's extremely difficult to optimize for console hardware.

Additionally, do you actually know what the lawsuit from Silicon Knights is actually about? The cited reasons were as follows.

Spoiler:

The suit initially alleges that: "Rather than provide support to Silicon Knights and Epic’s other many licensees of the Engine, Epic intentionally and wrongfully has used the fees from those licenses to launch its own game to widespread commercial success while simultaneously sabotaging efforts by Silicon Knights and others to develop their own video games."

It goes on to detail a number of specific alleged breaches of contract, particularly related to the delivery of Xbox 360 versions of the Unreal Engine 3 code. Epic's licensing document stated that a functional version of the engine would be available within 6 months of development kits being available.

Silicon Knights claims: "The final development kit for the Xbox 360 was released in early September, 2005, such that Epic was obligated to release the functional Engine for that platform no later than March, 2006."

The suit continues: "However, that deadline came and went without Epic providing Silicon Knights with a functional version of the Engine. Indeed, it was not until much later (November, 2006, far too late for time and cost-sensitive projects like SK’s videogames) that Epic ever provided anything resembling working Xbox 360 code to its licensees. Even at that belated date, though, Epic did not provide any guidance to licensees in how to implement the code it finally released."

Source: Gamasutra (Not your barely functioning brain)

I am gonna cut you off before you say it, but "functional", in this case, doesn't mean "12 character limit". If you can't figure out that they were complaining about support for an engine that actually FUNCTIONS PROPERLY on the hardware at hand, then you're even worse than I thought.

Also, uh, "tailoring the engine to work for them" is an amusing concept. Do you think purchasing the code results in them getting an FPS where all you have to do is drop in some art assets? Of COURSE a company has to actually fucking, y'know, make the game they're trying to create. This isn't RPG Maker, jesus.

However, this isn't what you initially said, at all. So no, I'm not brushing you aside as much as I'm annoyed with how completely random and retarded you are. You make shit up, lie through your teeth, and I'm just flat out sick of it.

FELIPE NO

Sounds like Epic is learning a few harsh lessons. While the UE3 engine has seen some great use and success it still is plagued by issues of being developed for a PC then ported to consoles. The main issue with the UE3 engine is memory management on consoles. It was originally designed with the idea of huge amounts of local video and system memory but narrow buses. Consoles this generation(and past generations really) were the opposite with small amounts of memory but fat buses which run at crazy clock speeds. UE3 uses a virtual texture system slapped together for low console memory that doesn't work too well which can be seen in titles like Mass Effect, Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey where the engine sometimes chunks and skips because of its poor memory management. A lot of developers have already taken the trouble to re-write the memory management of UE3 for each console but that kind of defeats the purpose of buying a 3rd party engine.

Either way, this isn't exactly bad news for PC gaming. Console engines are generally far better optimized than PC developed engines by necessity and PC developers will most likely get a better engine out of the deal in the long run since they'll be able to expand on an efficient, compact console engine core.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Originally Posted by Slayer X

@Qwarky
Half-Life is not a UE3 game. And MAss Effect is plagued with technical issues, which more feeds my point more then anything else.

Ho ho, did I say it was? It was more or less powered by the Quake 2 engine (even if they did fiddle around with it a lot) yet we know what became of it.

The point was (since you missed it), your image of game developers using a middleware engine for their game is completely at odds with the results. Neither Half-Life, Bioshock nor Mass Effect were small-time, "something to get out the door since we can't be bothered to make proper games" titles.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Exactly, there are inherent issues with the code of the engine that can hurt the games using UE3 on a console. That's all I was trying to say from the start.

@Qwarky
I didn't say that AAA games can't be made with UE3. What I said was,

"Things like UE3 are great for people who want to just throw something out the door, or who has limited resources given to them to begin with and needs a means of trimming time off the R&D cycle of development."

Basically what I said is that small games or games with short dev cycles is what it's best at. Doesn't mean that it's all you can do with it

How ya doing, buddy?

Yeah I think your concept of a game engine is off Slayer X. It's not like they have this complete engine and they just let some map makers and modelers go to town. Engines like EU3 are just huge collections of program libraries pre-coded to call on other libraries needed for 'X' feature to use. A lot of these games that claim EU3 use actually use 30% or less of the EU3 engine. They license the engine because it costs less time and money to code something themselves. I mean if you can purchase perfectly working lighting and collision code at 1/4th the cost and time of coding it yourself, why the need to code it yourself?

Not every game requires huge amounts of customization in every aspect of the engine and it has nothing to do with just throwing something out of the door. Actually the smarter thing to do is NOT to recode something that is already available and focus your attention on areas to make the game better. And actually other than extreme cases (Insomniac, etc) using some engine middleware will result in a better game because more money and time can be spent on content creation over framework creation.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

So basically instead of just buying a PhysX license a Speed Tree license and so on and tweaking it for a console they just purchase UE3 which already has thoes licenses (and more) which are also already tweaked for a console and use thoes instead of buying and tweaking it all themselves right? Well then, if they run into problems doing that then that's more their fault because they're not using Kismet and other such programs which are part of UE3 that your supposed to use to bring it all together. You're not suppose to create some frankenstein thing using 30% of engine A and 70% of engine B.

If that's the main problem at heart I definately didn't know that. And don't pretend that you did Colonel, because I'm sure that if you did know that you would have pulled that out along with every other offensive move you made against me.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Kismet is a high level scripting tool for modders, it's not a development tool. If developers are using Kismet I'd be worried.

Quote:

You're not suppose to create some frankenstein thing using 30% of engine A and 70% of engine B.

I'm just going to facepalm that one. It's pretty clear your knowledge of modern video game development seems to be some odd concept derived from the engine mod community. It's nothing like that. As I already said an Engine like UE3 is just a giant group of code libraries. It basically middleware but more complete because it contains libraries for at least one aspect needed to build an actual working game. UE3 contains stuff like shader code, collision detection code, physics code, input code, network code, etc. It's not like developers buy UE3, get some working version of Unreal The Game and then tear it down with something like Kismet. It's just a collection of commonly used code and as I already said, recoding something just for the sake of recoding is stupid.

I don't know if you are aware but a lot of engines claimed to be 'build from the ground up' actually aren't because they ARE going to borrow some code from one of their previous engines.

I was speaking idiomatically.

I think that Valve's work on their engine is just proof that its not all that hard to really cater to both groups of gamers as they seem to do alright on their PC releases of the Half Life games and then porting to the consoles. Perhaps by building better engines in the first place, things like, oh say Left 4 Dead can be huge hits without people wondering how old the technology is.

Its not how powerful your tool is, its how you use it.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

The source engine is honestly two generation old technology. It doesn't even have half the features UE3 offers and the some of the later stuff slapped on such as self shadows for Episode II comes with a tremendous performance hit. I understand what you are getting at, but for people aware of such things, Source is a really poor engine hidden behind some really, really good art assets. And those quality art assets can't be expected to come from every studio.

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I remember a not so old thread on GAF about this stuff (licensed engine vs home made engine).

Anyway, the general consensus was pretty simple... games made with the same engine DO look similar (I guess developers can avoid it, however, it isn't the norm)

And something really important, these licensed engines aren't a wonder, they are usually infested with problems, limitations and the learning curve (cant think on a better word) sometimes is unbelievable... But even then, most of the time cheaper than a home made engine.

Few words: Grey stuff~

In either case, hardware prices + piracy has been killing PC gaming for quite some time, and something Sweenie said not too long ago: "not all PCs bought today are good for games, in fact, to get a PC for games you need to know what you are doing." (far from the exact quote but it was something like that)... and if you ask me, knowledge isn't the biggest strength of the general consumer. (In other words, even less market)

It would be interesting to see the evolution of the platform market in the next 10 years... but it this tendency keeps going: AAA exclusive PC games are going to become something rare. (Unless something weird happens)

Meh, just some random thoughts... I would take Cetra's opinion on this since I'm convinced she/he/it works on the industry.

How ya doing, buddy?