Silicon Knights Says Unreal Engine is Broken 109
Yesterday we discussed Too Human's absence from this year's E3 event, and briefly mentioned the just-announced lawsuit between Silicon Knights and Epic. Today there's a bit of a clarification. Silicon Knights is suing Epic because, according to Kotaku, Epic failed to 'provide a working game engine' to SK causing them to 'experience considerable losses.' Essentially Knights argues that the Gears of War version of the Unreal engine was withheld by Epic so that Epic products could show up competitors at trade events. For a deeper look at this, the blog runs down the allegations in detail, and concluded by noting that a slew of next-generation titles slated to use the Unreal Engine have been delayed several times. This includes Stranglehold, BioShock, Lost Odyssey, Mass Effect, Rainbow Six: Vegas, Turok, Frame City Killer, Fatal Inertia and Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway ... a somewhat persuasive list, when it's all laid out in front of you.
Delays? (Score:2, Insightful)
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I don't mean to pick on Nintendo, I'm just pointing out that even exclusive, blockbuster releases are often delayed.
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I think you mean last year. It was briefly slated to be a launch title in 2006 before being pushed out to March 2007. Right before it was supposed to be released, it was again pushed out to later in 2007. Now we have a firm release date of August 27th.
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Nintendo, releasing someth
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Vanguard? (Score:1)
Oops. Bad example.
I admit my bias as a Bioware fanboy, but I was bummed when they announced Mass Effect when the 360 was launched. Didn't have one and didn't plan to get one. A year passed and I broke down and got a 360 end of last year (actually two if you count the returns). I pre-ordered ME when I bought the thing and it was supposed to launch in January. Looks like it will be September. It'd would be interesting to know if it was issues with the engine was behind some of the delays. I prefer to think
Epic In Deep Doodoo (Score:4, Interesting)
At best Epic is incompetent in taking on the massive task of engine support for major commercial products without the staff or resources to be able to handle the job.
At worst Epic is outright guilty of fraud.
Why anyone would be crazy enough to entrust a AAA console title to a pc developer like Epic is a completely separate question.
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Except the UEngine has been shipped for Consoles numerous times in the past.. some examples, the Rainbow Six franchise, Unreal championship, shadow ops: red merc, Red Steel, and the Brothers in Arms franchise...
As for UE3 specifically, Roboblitz shipped ok iirc.. didn't Rainbow 6: Vegas ship ok?.. Bioshock doesn't seem to have any major issues with the engine, do they? (I'd be
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When a developer decides that they want to make a competitive 3D game nowadays they have 2 options: write your own engines -or- license an engine from someone else. On the one hand, writing your own cutting edge, competitive engine is going to take a hell of a long time and money, just look at the guys who do it primarily: Id, Valve, Epic. These engines take several years, a lo
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Thats odd (Score:2)
I always thought this was odd. What if your game is going to directly compete with a game made by the people you license your engine from. They make money from the engine being listened and from whatever royalties system they implement, but in the end they still make wa
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I was told that because of rising costs for making games that making a custom engine in house was a costly waste of time when you could go out and license a working engine from someone like Id, Epic, or Valve (I'm not going to name them all.)
True
I always thought this was odd. What if your game is going to directly compete with a game made by the people you license your engine from. They make money from the engine being listened and from whatever royalties system they implement, but in the end they still make way more money from there own games. They sell more if your game looks bad.
While it is true that when games made by the developers of the engines themselves do better, the company as a whole does better, yet at the same time when the engine shows signs of failure, people stop requesting the engine for license which can cause a total meltdown of the company producing the engine. Also there's this little crime called fraud which, if they deliberately provide a faulty product for their own personal gain, they can be charged of.
Unlike a middleware developer like the guys who make Havok or Kynogon they have a possible conflicting interest. hmm
Not particularly. The developers work like mad on
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It might not be the engine, it might be the implementation. Besides, have you seen all the features [unrealtechnology.com] the engine has? It's bound to have a few bugs in it. Windows, Linux, and OSX all do. And if there's so many problems, you'd think more of the companies that licensed it would complain. There's lots of companies using it. [epicgames.com]
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That they have more information than you is a given. They have pretty much direct access to the gurus that brewed the engine. Probably their devs even have access to the source, and certainly they have a much easier time trying
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I'm pretty sure that engine licenses for game developers tend to come with full source code and that game developers can and do tweak the engine code that goes into their games.
Re:Thats odd (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, for a company that puts a lot of time and resources into an engine, if they just had their own game to make that money back, they could be in real trouble if that game tanks for whatever reason. But if they've got the engine set up for licensing, that's some extra insurance that they'll recoup their investment.
Naughty Dog (Score:2)
Naughty Dog's game engine for Jak and Daxter was also used for the Ratchet and Clank series from Insomniac, and (I believe) for the Sly Cooper series from Sucker Punch. The three franchises definitely competed with each other; Jak & Daxter were often directly compared to Ratchet and Clank.
For my money, R&C was by far the best series of games, followed by SC, with J&D coming in third. Naughty Dog did a great job of building a game engine, but their game
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Epic and Valve might make their money from their games, but from what I've heard, id makes most of its money from its engine licensing deals.
Just the facts ma'am (Score:4, Insightful)
IANAL but my guess is:
The simplest and most likely scenario here is that Epic promised to ship some code out, and missed their deadline. It's not very unusual for this to happen, deadlines get missed all the time, particularly in the gaming industry. SK is covering their bases (which is the smart thing to do) by making the claim include the possibility that Epic did it intentionally, which would be considerably harder to prove, but is in there just in case that's what happened.
If it was just a missed deadline, it looks like whatever clauses were already in the contract's terms and conditions for this scenario will be invoked(why the HELL would they not include a late delivery clause? There has to be one in there already), or failing that, just a nulled contract, possibly with some compensation for the inconvenience. Slashdotters probably already know that there's very little chance of the Gears profits being handed over. People claim whatever they want, that doesn't mean the court will decide to award it to them.
Re:Just the facts ma'am (Score:5, Informative)
Sounds like 80% of all software projects (Score:5, Insightful)
So, id software is going to get a lot of business in the coming years, huh?
To me, this sounds like a typical software development fuckup. Epic probably underestimated what it would take to get GoW out. So they decided to take development resources away from the engine to the game. Then, they fixed the engine specifically for the game, because that is easier than fixing it in a generic fashion - but this leads to a kind of merging of the two code bases. Obviously, they didn't want to give out the code for GoW, so they ended up with a crappy version of the engine - which they did give out - and a good version of the engine married to the code of GoW - which they didn't want to give out (at first).
I have absolutely no insider information, but I could easily see something like this happening. As always, Hanlon's Razor applies: "Never ascribe to malice, that which is adequately explained by incompetence."
This is typical with licensed software (Score:5, Informative)
Like you say, the U3 engine likely went through a lot of changes and neither they nor the licensee understood how much work is involved in using a piece of software that's still being developed.
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Intentionally sabotaging licensees is pretty extreme, and unlikely since it carries so much risk for a business since the fallout would be so severe. Epic probably just failed to meet their promises. I'm suprised that the contract didn't have any late clauses already embedded in the terms and conditions.
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On the flip side, it does seem weird that SK could even get themselves in this
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On the flip side, it does seem weird that SK could even get themselves in this situation. If the engine sucked as much as they claim, why develop against an unstable engine for so long?
Seems they claim they started with the unstable version 3 because Epic promised them to have a workable version on the 360 soon, and then didn't deliver. Who knows what really happened, but those of us working in software programming know how these thing can go. Once you've made an investment into something, you're awfully quick to make all kinds of stupid decisions rationalising that investment. In hindsight, a lot of these thing look obviously stupid, but at the moment they happen, not so much.
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Ermm ... how much do you think a decent developer costs? Even if you payed $500,000 for the engine, if you got two core engine developers for two years that could easily be half of what you payed (note, I'm talking about what it costs Epic, not what
Except (Score:2)
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SK claims that they did not get the updates they were promised.
As I said, I have no insider information, so I don't know what really happened.
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Could the PS3 be part of the problem? (Score:4, Interesting)
"Epic once again supposedly missed a deadline for an Engine Silicon Knights was going to use on a PLAYSTATION 3 game. Epic missed this deadline by six-months. A functional UE3 for the PS3 was supposed to be delivered by February 2007. It wasn't.
According to SK, the Engine apparently caused the game to "slow down significantly" due to lengthly load times and "memory-spikes" during loading. Epic apparently had known about this problem with the Unreal Engine since 2004 and promised a solution by 2005. It never came. "
I am not a big console gamer but didn't I hear that many of the "Hot must get" titles for the PS3 will not be out until March 08?
I have heard on Slashdot time and time again that the PS3 programing model will not be a problem because everybody will use game engines that will deal with it for you. Seems like the game engines are having some issues now.
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In other words, I doubt this is a PS3 thing.
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Before you insult the guy, maybe you should have RTFA?
From Kotaku:
Of course, if the grandparent had read the article, he'd also know that this lawsuit relates to general problems with the engine across th
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Notice the title of my post.
"Could the PS3 be part of the problem?"
It wasn't "The PS3 is the problem."
Or "It is all the PS3"s fault!"
They do seem to have some issues with the 360 as well. Not really surprising since it is also multi-threaded but not as asymmetrical as the PS3 is.
Epic has x Developers working on the UE3 engine. Back in the good old days porting form the PC to the XBox was simple and then porting to the PS2 was harder.
How it would
This Is Rumor Control - Money Grab In Progress (Score:5, Insightful)
One: Middleware (and just about any production software) is constantly in a state of flux, and there is never a "final" version of it. People who licence the Unreal Engine technologies are given secure access to Epic's CVS repository, where daily engine builds and patches can be checked out for use by the game developers. SK's claim that they didn't have access to a "finished" version is a load of bunk.
Two: the Engine framework is delivered "as is". It is up to the game developer to modify the engine to suit that particular game's needs, not Epic. If the developers at SK are incapable of programming the engine to suit their needs, that is their problem, not Epics. SK started receiving alpha versions of the engine right after the first X360 dev kits went out and they have access to the CVS like everyone else. The fault is with SK, not Epic.
Three: if you read up on it you will find that SK is looking to claim that all of the modification work that they are doing on the game constitutes an "entirely new engine" and that they should retain all rights to it. In other words, they want the benefits of using UE3 technology without having to pay for it.
Four: SK is seeking damages - they want the complete profits from Gears of War. Think about that for a minute. Here's the relevant part:
Five: Epic has licenced its technology to a rather vast collection of developers, including some of the biggest in the business. No one else has complained, just Silicon Knights - a company that has been pushing Too Human (the title in question) since 1999 (when it was being developed for the Gamecube). Think about that - a company that has been making the same title for 8 years suddenly decides to launch a lawsuit when they find themselves unable to show the goods at E3. At least 3DRealms isn't making grandiose claims about Duke Nukem Forever all the time...
Six: Epic has a long history of supporting developers, from the corporate level all the way down to the hobbyist modder at home. Epic provides tools and help free of charge to anyone who wants them. If SK gets their way, this could have severe ramifications for the entire gaming industry and engine middleware licencing in general.
SK Business Plan
1). Licence middleware engine 6 years after beginning development. Have incompetent programmers who cannot understand simple instructions program the game.
2). Show off screenshots, brag - and then fail to deliver goods at E3.
3). Blame middleware provider for own problems.
4). ???
5). Profit.
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Re:This Is Rumor Control - Money Grab In Progress (Score:4, Interesting)
Now, maybe SK really is the only one having problems here, and UE3 as delivered to them truly is a masterpiece of an engine. Or just maybe, they've got a little bit of a real gripe.
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Re:This Is Rumor Control - Money Grab In Progress (Score:5, Informative)
I was always somewhat hesitant about broad licensing because I feared something exactly like this, where a developer thinks they see something in an engine, but it doesn't turn out the way they expected, and they sue. It is possible that explicit promises were made and broken, but it is also possible that the licensee just failed for the same reasons that most game development project fail, and is looking for a scapegoat. Game development is hard, engine license or no engine license.
During Doom 3's development, our licensees had access to our source control server, so there was never a question of them not having access to what we are using. They would have been foolish to try to use daily builds, but the option was available to them.
John Carmack
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It seems to me that Epic are trying to fill the void left by EA's acquisition of Renderware
Re:This Is Rumor Control - Money Grab In Progress (Score:5, Informative)
One: Middleware (and just about any production software) is constantly in a state of flux, and there is never a "final" version of it. People who licence the Unreal Engine technologies are given secure access to Epic's CVS repository, where daily engine builds and patches can be checked out for use by the game developers.
Yes, and how often is this repo updated? All HL2 modders (you don't even have to be a licensee!) are given read access to their Perforce repos, but those are updated only once in a blue moon for good reason. As a licensee you expect builds from your engine provider to be relatively bug free and at the very least stable - I don't want Epic's daily changes for GOW sneaking into my code base until they're sure it's solid. It's entirely possible that Epic failed to update said CVS on a timely basis, or even if they did, they failed to address discovered critical issues in a timely manner (which sounds like what the lawsuit claims).
Three: if you read up on it you will find that SK is looking to claim that all of the modification work that they are doing on the game constitutes an "entirely new engine" and that they should retain all rights to it. In other words, they want the benefits of using UE3 technology without having to pay for it.
I read the same document. It sounds to me like SK developed its own in-house engine without any UE3 code, and they want a court to acknowledge that fact on paper in order to cover their ass from any inevitable counter-moves by Epic. I don't think they were implying at all that their modifications to UE3 should grant them a free license.
The fault is with SK, not Epic.
Maybe it runs a bit both ways. But in any case, if it's true that Epic failed to deliver an acceptably stable version of the 360 and PS3 code bases as dictated by the contract, Epic is guilty of either incompetence or fraud, in either case SK is entitled to refund/compensation. Whether or not SK's developers were competent enough to produce a game from it is rather irrelevant. If Epic failed to provide code, or held back code from licensees, or failed to provide the level of support dictated by their contract, then SK has a case.
Four: SK is seeking damages - they want the complete profits from Gears of War.
Yeah, I'm not comfortable with that part. I think it's just a display by SK to get attention, there's no chance in hell they'll get ALL the profits from GOW even if they won, nor do they deserve it. They deserve their license fee back PLUS interest, and also damages maybe amounting to a year's worth of dev time, I would say. Maybe on top of that it'd be justified to roll in some punitive damages if it can be proven that Epic knowingly and flagrantly disregarded their licensing contract.
Five: Epic has licenced its technology to a rather vast collection of developers, including some of the biggest in the business. No one else has complained, just Silicon Knights
Really? I've heard from several developers working with UE3 that it's a load of junk. Is it also any surprise that *all* of the UE3 games that have been announced for either next gen console has either been delayed or cancelled? Even Rainbow Six Vegas took forever to come out and suffered long delays, though it did in the end make it out the door.
Six: Epic has a long history of supporting developers, from the corporate level all the way down to the hobbyist modder at home. Epic provides tools and help free of charge to anyone who wants them. If SK gets their way, this could have severe ramifications for the entire gaming industry and engine middleware licencing in general.
You seem desperate to make Epic sound like the good guys here. Okay, they made Unreal, and Unreal Tournament, those were great games, but that doesn't mean much about them as a middleware vendor. From my experience, licensing technology from a company producing its own ga
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I read the same document. It sounds to me like SK developed its own in-house engine without any UE3 code, and they want a court to acknowledge that fact on paper in order to cover their ass from any inevitable counter-moves by Epic. I don't think they were implying at all that their modifications to UE3 should grant them a free license.
Maybe you didn't read it thouroughly enough; the meat is here:
59. Progress on the Silicon Knights' Engine continues to date and, at this time, the Silicon Knights Engine is completely independent of Epic's Engine and certainly derives no benefit from the unworkable source code provided by Epic. In fact, at this juncture the Silicon Knights Engine should, at a minimum, be described under the Agreement as an "Enhancement" of Epic's Engine, which, as defined by the Agreement, is technology developed b
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A minor clarification here. That was actually the second unfinished/unreleased version of Too Human. It was originally under development for the Playstation at the same time as Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain (released in 1997). IE it has been in progress for a decade or more.
I have half-jokingly suggested before that the unfinished Playstation and Gamecube versions should be included in a c
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1. SK licences UE3 from Epic for a pile of money to make Too Human.
2. SK is unable to get UE3 to work. They blame Epic for bad support.
3. SK develops new in-house engine (presumably based in part on UE3) to use for Too Human.
The purpose of the lawsuit is for SK to recover the money they paid Epic for UE3, and more importantly, to allow them to legally sell their new engine (both in Too Human and to 3rd parties) which I am sure Epic would object too.
The Epic side of this woul
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In short, it sounds like SK is getting out of the game business and into lawsuits.
The Truth Is Probably In The Middle (Score:4, Insightful)
Epic is to blame because it seems to complete Gears of War with the "Unreal Engine 3" required a lot of work from Epic themselves. Or in other words, the engine wasn't as complete as it really needed to be so Epic did a lot of specific fixes for Gears to bring up the game. This seems to indicate that UE3 isn't that complete or polished and Epic is unable (technically or contractually) or unwilling to merge these changes into the basic engine leaving any ISV who got a license wondering how in the world they can make a game that is remotely close to Gears in function and quality.
Silicon Knights is to blame because their management seems to be way out there (yes Denis Dyack I'm looking at you). No engine can make a game beautiful where the performance of Too Human was entirely your ball to drop. That is the job of the artists, programmers, and ultimately the "director" where if they were not happy with the platform given they needed to voice their concerns. I have a sneaking suspicion they believed the marketing instead of their own technical assets then it is yet another bad decision by management.
So whatever. These two can hash it out where the ultimate fall out is that Too Human is probably 2009 time frame if SK goes through with this, reclaim their money, and rebuild their own engine.
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If I were on the jury, I would free SK from the contract and refund the portion they paid for the undelivered products. I'm not sure that SK deserve
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You mean RealPlayer? (Score:1)
Just one question.. (Score:3, Funny)
(not that there would be YAEC {yet another engine change}, no that'd be silly)
(very tounge in cheek, BTW)
Sakaguchi doesn't seem to have problems (Score:2, Interesting)
It's very good overall. Support has been outstanding. But the problem is, for example, Epic's Unreal Engine 3. It's developed in English, of course. And unless you've got programmers who can understand English or are bilingual...we've got numerous bilingual staff, programmers who are highly capable of speaking and understanding English, so they can understand the updated information and versions with respect to the development of UE3. But unless you've got programmers who can understand English, they actually can't read the materials. And even though translation takes place, there is a lag. Oftentimes when they read [about] a version, the very version that they read is outdated. So those are some of the challenges associated with the language barrier. That's one area that Microsoft is poor in: documentation.
Seems to me with the exception of it being in English, he had good things to say. Obviously you can't expect Epic(or MS in Sakaguchi's opinion) to have full translations of documents ready to go out the door when new code and features are done. But damn, if you've seen Blue Dragon and Lost Oddyssey you can tell Mist Walker has worked some magic with that engine. IMO, SK just wants to bitch! Too Human has been i
This sounds like a load of bullshit (Score:2)
DN4 uses this supposedly? (Score:2)
This must also be one of the reasons why DN4 still isn't ready. IIRC they switched from the Quake2 engine to the Unreal engine sometime back in the late 90's. They could claim billions of dollars in delay costs after all these years!
"Unreal Engine is Broken" (Score:2)
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On the other hand though, I think it says something about Silicon Knights that they're publicly complaining about it and others don't seem to be. Perhaps it is because other developers haven't been failing to deliver their game for 10 years. Of course it could be that they just feel they have less to lose by going public...
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I know
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Even if they
Re:Umm... If it's broken... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you've read any of the articles you would know that the issue is Epic not delivering on their contracts (assumedly) for the purpose of being able to highlight their own games (Gears of War) over competitors who had licenses their engine. It's not as simple as "don't license it."
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Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. That was the game that killed the famous Troika Studios in part due to difficulties involved in developing it with Valve's steam engine [wikipedia.org], which was under development at the same time.
Whether deliberate or not, it looks like developing a game to compete with someone else's game while licensing their technology may be a fatally flawed idea.
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Of course, since you say it's "boring," I'll give you the hint that you should skip to pages 24 ("Epic's Improper Withholding of Updates, Improvements, and Enhancements") and 30 ("Epic's Misrepresentations in Connection With the Unreal Engine 3 and the Agreement").
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