Unreal Engine 3: Now Official For Playstation 3

[Borys]

Everyone's favourite next generation engine - The Unreal Engine 3 (http://www.unrealtechnology.com/html/technology/ue30.shtml) has now become the official part of PS3's SDK.
You can read the short story at TotalVideoGames (http://www.totalvideogames.com/pages/articles/index.php?article_id=7766).

Epic has announced that its cutting edge toolset Unreal Engine 3 is to be offered as part of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.’s development package for PlayStation3. The deal means that the engine, which is currently being used to develop Gears of War on Xbox 360, is set to feature in the development of games for two of the three next-generation consoles as well as next-gen PCs.

Making the announcement, Tim Sweeney, CEO and co-Founder of Epic Games, “We are committed to making Unreal Engine 3 the best game engine for the “PLAYSTATION®3…We plan to offer it to our licensees as soon as the program is underway and we are very excited about the level of performance and visual quality we will be able to deliver on this platform. In addition Unreal Engine 3 should be an excellent fit for the platform and our licensees will benefit immensely from the experience we have been able to gain thus far working with it.”


PC, PS3 and 360 - all bases covered.
Epic guys = smart guys.

[bapenguin]

Epic guys = rich guys

[amusedtoe]

Smart indeed. They offer a RenderWare like solution and just rake in the royalties.

[kokyunage]

Rolling in the money? I think so.

Too bad Gears of War is being published by Microsoft. We would probably see it on all 3 platforms (PC, PS3, Xbox360) otherwise.

[carneconcarne]

Poor Valve. I get the feeling they were hoping the Source engine would bring in some significant revenue, and Unreal3 kind of came out of nowhere, with all the features a developer could want. Not too many Source games coming out.

[XxSATANxX]

Well Valve wanted control right? Anybody doing a doom 3 engine thingy???

[fitbabits]

How long before Nintendo announce they are using the Unreal 3 engine to power their new action game titled Mario Revolution - Blow Shit Up?

[Mason]

Unreal Engine 3 didn't "come out of nowhere". I've been predicting for the past year that Epic was poised to dominate, as they're the only guys out there with a really great philosophy when it comes to game engines. Anyone who's done much work with UE2 would understand this.

UE3 could definitely clean things up a bit, and fix a variety of UScript language features (nobody I've seen can get importing enumerations across class hierarchies to work, for one). But even UE2 is a hell of a lot cleaner than Source. Epic sat down smart guys to design language elements that'd effectively describe complex procedures, like network replication of data. That's a lot better than having to hand-code every interaction using C++ macros, and if you're off by a byte in your message contents it'll crash out the client.

The big question is when the PC version of UT2k7 comes out, so that we all can get our hands on this thing.

[Fonz]

Poor Valve. I get the feeling they were hoping the Source engine would bring in some significant revenue, and Unreal3 kind of came out of nowhere, with all the features a developer could want. Not too many Source games coming out.

Yes I agree, the Unreal 3 Engine is the most beautiful engine so far.
I seriously doubt the Source engine is dead in the water, its still being updated with things like HDR. You forget the new unreal engine hasnt been tested on any current gen hardware for PC, weve seen the tech demos yes, but those are being run on developement boxes, at E3 last year the representative said, only with the Geforce 6800Ultra were they able to do the graphics in real time. I want to see how the game runs in a 12 man Pub server with 5 rocket launchers going off. Also most games today, under current gen, use the ut2k3 engine still, games like Republic Commando, Pariah, Pain Killer etc. Anyways, alot of the nextgen engines are not really fully being exposed, for example, the crytek engine for farcry, this is a "next gen" engine, only one game has come out of it, Splinter-Cell:Chaos theory, Doom3 engine, weve only seen: prey and quake VI, these are also considered next gen games. I would also like to wait and see what they can do with the Alan Wake Graphics engine, it looked amazing at E3, although theyre not releasing much information on it.

[bapenguin]

Yes I agree, the Unreal 3 Engine is the most beautiful engine so far.
I seriously doubt the Source engine is dead in the water, its still being updated with things like HDR. You forget the new unreal engine hasnt been tested on any current gen hardware for PC, weve seen the tech demos yes, but those are being run on developement boxes, at E3 last year the representative said, only with the Geforce 6800Ultra were they able to do the graphics in real time. I want to see how the game runs in a 12 man Pub server with 5 rocket launchers going off. Also most games today, under current gen, use the ut2k3 engine still, games like Republic Commando, Pariah, Pain Killer etc. Anyways, alot of the nextgen engines are not really fully being exposed, for example, the crytek engine for farcry, this is a "next gen" engine, only one game has come out of it, Splinter-Cell:Chaos theory, Doom3 engine, weve only seen: prey and quake VI, these are also considered next gen games. I would also like to wait and see what they can do with the Alan Wake Graphics engine, it looked amazing at E3, although theyre not releasing much information on it.

Thing is, the Engine itself is close to a year away yet. Tech has a lot of time to mature yet. I'm sure the engine is scalable at well, no need to run it as full detail on ALL pcs.

[Varsity]

Something important to remember is that Source will be updated incrementally as time goes on, and the games that use it (the ones on Steam at least) will get all those upgrades automatically or with minimum effort. UE2 games won't benefit from UE3 unless someone goes out of their way to redevelop each one to whatever extent is neccessary. Towards the end of UE3's life cycle Source will be looking be looking a whole lot better, then UE4 will come out and things will cycle back to how they are now. The only thing I'm worried about right now are the tools, but Valve have said they are making a big push this year to streamline them so don't count your chickens just yet.

It's not all that different from PCs vs. Consoles, if you think about it.

[Hellstorm]

How long before Nintendo announce they are using the Unreal 3 engine to power their new action game titled Mario Revolution - Blow Shit Up?

Sooner or later, I don't doubt that it will be available for the Rev. Wow. Sucks to be Id.

[RMan]

Yea, the Unreal engine has been around for some time, that's why it has a 3 after it. It's been steadily building for a time second only to id's engines on the PC, and it's not much newer than that. They’ve done very well marketing the engine, but don’t think that just because they’re making their biggest push recently that it hasn’t been a long road for them, they’ve been at it for a very long time.

In fact, it's foolish to think that no matter how good the Source engine is that it could make a significant dent since it's been out for so short a period. If the Source engine, or any other new one is to make any real progress, it will take time, just releasing the spectacular Half-life 2 will not buy an instant following in the market. Also, the older an engine is the less likely their current licensees will switch to another one (unless they’re 3d realms :)), so Unreal as an example can announce developers licensing the U3 technology, when in fact they’re re-upping with the Unreal engine, and even if U3 wasn’t available they’d be re-licensing the U2 engine because it’s not worthwhile to switch engines. I’m not saying the U3 engine doesn’t deserve the licenses it’s getting, but the idea that it’s getting them because it’s new and great technology shows a fundamental lack of understanding of software development. The engine’s quite old, and that’s a big benefit.

[dr_wily]

now if theyd only nerf the flak cannon and bring back the shock rifle to its former majesty..

[Pumped'Up]

wow, 360 fanbois must be pretty pissed about this. but really, who cares.

more power to Sony PS3. absoulutely stunning product.

[pomeroy]

wow, 360 fanbois must be pretty pissed about this. but really, who cares.

more power to Sony PS3. absoulutely stunning product.

Hehe. He said "fainbois," followed with his own fanboyish quote. And I'd thought I wasn't going to get my irony in for the day.

[Mason]

Something important to remember is that Source will be updated incrementally as time goes on, and the games that use it (the ones on Steam at least) will get all those upgrades automatically or with minimum effort. UE2 games won't benefit from UE3 unless someone goes out of their way to redevelop each one to whatever extent is neccessary. Towards the end of UE3's life cycle Source will be looking be looking a whole lot better, then UE4 will come out and things will cycle back to how they are now. The only thing I'm worried about right now are the tools, but Valve have said they are making a big push this year to streamline them so don't count your chickens just yet.

It's not all that different from PCs vs. Consoles, if you think about it.

That's incredibly false on many levels.

Source doesn't magically upgrade visuals on things over time. I mean, HL2 textures won't increase in resolution or something unless someone specifically goes back and makes new textures. Steam lets them apply such changes if Valve wants to, but then so do patches for any game.

All engines upgrade with future releases. So? Those changes are never applied backwards unless someone does work to remake the old game. Have a look at HL:Source; sure it's technically running on the Source engine, but it sure looks the same as classic HL. New rendering features really don't matter much with old art assets.

Valve makes great games, but given that they were a year late with their last title, it isn't like they've had a ton of time to screw around with making their engine/tools fun and easy to use.

[mister_slim]

The HL2 does seem to scale to hardware well, and it sounds like Valve is working on some sort of PPC compatibility. I'd like to see how well the UE3 facial animation is, since I considered that the best part of HL2.

[Varsity]

Source doesn't magically upgrade visuals on things over time. I mean, HL2 textures won't increase in resolution or something unless someone specifically goes back and makes new textures. Steam lets them apply such changes if Valve wants to, but then so do patches for any game.

All engines upgrade with future releases. So? Those changes are never applied backwards unless someone does work to remake the old game. Have a look at HL:Source; sure it's technically running on the Source engine, but it sure looks the same as classic HL. New rendering features really don't matter much with old art assets.
Half-Life: Source is in fact a good example of where you are going wrong. New feature areas will need work, of course they will, but bugfixes and improvements (even rewrites) to existing elements will slot right in. Add hardware phsyics? All games get it. Improve some networking code? No problem. Add a complete D3-style realtime shadow system? Not one line of game code needs changing (unless you chose to include a custom renderer of some sort). And that will happen for as long as Source is still being used with no break in continuity.

It helps when you think beyond pretty graphics. ;)

Valve makes great games, but given that they were a year late with their last title, it isn't like they've had a ton of time to screw around with making their engine/tools fun and easy to use.Point of bringing that up, except to reveal your bias?

[bobbler]

Games will still need to be recompiled with the upgraded .libs if they want to take advantage of it. When Valve releases an update to source engine, it doesn't magically upgrade every game using it, theres still work that needs to be done. Same with any other engine out now.

There isn't this magical entity out there called the Source engine that is looked up every time you run your game -- the source engine is precompiled into the game, it would need to be recompiled and a patch would need to be released for any previously compiled games to use any of the changes. This is all assuming that the functions, structs/classes and everything else are left completely compatible (which is often not the case when something like realtime shadows gets added), otherwise its even more work.

[bumgut]

iD software=owned.

John Carmack mis-timed his engines.

His new engine will be out when nextgen consoles will be showing their age.

[Varsity]

the source engine is precompiled into the game
No it isn't. What do you thing source engine.gcf is, if not your 'magical' entity that is looked up every time? ;) Source is designed with the principle of 100% modularity.

[Carnifex]

No it isn't. What do you thing source engine.gcf is, if not your 'magical' entity that is looked up every time? ;) Source is designed with the principle of 100% modularity.
Game engines aren't like DLL's, you can't upgrade them by replacing some files. The licensees change the engine source code to fit the needs of each game. Otherwise the engine maker would have to provide a feature set rich enough to support whatever the game makers could think of, which is not possible.

[Varsity]

Like I said, if you decide to overwrite the engine code with game code you wouldn't get any or some of the future benefits for that area. But that doesn't change the fact that Source is designed for modularity. And if that means behaving in different ways from other engines, so be it. It's one of the principles it was built on, for goodness' sake!

[bobbler]

Varsity:
Ok, I see now. The valve games (on steam) use all the same source engine code (in the source engine.gcf), so those will take advantage of some changes without any game code changes -- game code would still need to be changed if features were added though, if the game code doesn't know about added features of the engine, it won't be able to use them (code paths are not taken unless they are programmed to be taken). I'd hazard a guess and say that any engine can be adapted this way, but since most companies don't have several games out using their engine theres no reason to do it (it takes more time unless you have a few games using the engine out and have a way of controlling things). Modularity, in this respect, does nothing for most third parties who license the engine.

For games not by valve (not on steam) updating source engine will need a recompile of the game, unless I'm further mistaken. If the game isn't using steam, its not going to take advantage of it (since thats where the updates come from). Unless the third party wants to have its own updater thing and work like steam does (this is also assuming they don't modify the engine at all also), but as I said before, its not really worth the trouble for most.

It seems everyone was right, depending on the case.