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

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.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

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.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

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.

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

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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