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

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.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

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.

There's nowhere I can't reach.