Game Engines

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CyberMatix

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Anybody here know anything about game engines. If I wanted to develop a game for the XBOX 360, PS3, and PC that will be ready in about 3-4 years time, what game engine should I use.

Remember PC's in 3 - 4 years time will have at least the same processing power that the consoles have today, maybe more.

I had a look at Unreal Tournament 3 and Trinigy Vision engines so far. I will be developing in MS Visual Studio in C++ and C. CGI will be mainly in 3DS Max and Maya.
 
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I was REALLY impressed with the F.E.A.R demo. physics was great. looks good. ran well..
 
CyberMatix said:
Anybody here know anything about game engines. If I wanted to develop a game for the XBOX 360, PS3, and PC that will be ready in about 3-4 years time, what game engine should I use.
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Well the next generation Unreal Engine has been licensed by Sony for the PS3 so you should get solid support in that area but how it will work on the rather oddball architecture of the PS3 is another matter altogether.

Another overlooked cross platform 3D engine is Renderware from Electronic Arts (they bought it) which is used in GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas and works on the PS2, XBOX, PC and GameCube.

Another factor is the licensing costs of the engine i.e either a million or more dollars upfront for the Doom engine or a percentage of retail sales.
 
nrg_wp said:
I was REALLY impressed with the F.E.A.R demo. physics was great. looks good. ran well..
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Cool, they used the Havoc Physics Engine.

For starters, the Havoc engine is at work here, meaning that the game can throw rag dolls around, create visual filters for obscuring smoke after explosions, and clip bits off walls, all of which have direct effects on the tactics you’ll use. Heads will fly, and arterial sprays can patter the ground with crimson.
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The standard Reactor plugin for 3ds Max is written by Havoc, so this looks like it is worth investigating.

Source: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_zdcgw/is_200504/ai_n9522219
 
tibby.dude said:
Well the next generation Unreal Engine has been licensed by Sony for the PS3 so you should get solid support in that area but how it will work on the rather oddball architecture of the PS3 is another matter altogether.
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Do you have a link for me?

I see the Unreal Engine is also on the list for XBOX 360 as a tool developer.

tibby.dude said:
Another overlooked cross platform 3D engine is Renderware from Electronic Arts (they bought it) which is used in GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas and works on the PS2, XBOX, PC and GameCube.
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I've heard about it, I'll have a look, thanks.

tibby.dude said:
Another factor is the licensing costs of the engine i.e either a million or more dollars upfront for the Doom engine or a percentage of retail sales.
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It'll have to be a percentage of sales. I don't have a spare million dollars lying around right now. :D
 
tibby.dude said:
http://www.scei.co.jp/corporate/release/pdf/050721ce.pdf

Afaik Electronic Arts is going to use it for all their internally developed titles in order to make games quicker and cheaper.

"Today 1 in 4 console titles in pre-production or development is using RenderWare technology."

See also

www.cyberloonies.com/game-engines.html
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Cool. :D

What worries me a bit is that the new game consoles all have this multiprocessor architecture, and all the current game engine development kits are all very much based on the single processor architecture of the current consoles. So what I think might happen is that in a few years or so there will be "super" game engines that's optimized for the new architectures.

So if you choose a game engine development kit today you are dooming yourself to obsolescence.
 
ummm stupid question

so your telling me consoles are more powerful than an amd 4000+ 2 gig ram and 7800 gt?

or even sli with 2 7800?
 
it might very well be more powerful yes, since the Cell CPU has multiple cores (how many, 9?) along with a powerful GPU.

The pc's saving grace would have to be the rate of GPU advancement and the fact that it doesnt depend on multiple cores yet. When multiple cores come into the mainstream (become cheap) the consoles will be doomed, but then we will have a PS4 or 5 and an XBOX 69360
 
Well, technically the PS3 graphics engine is quoted as being slightly more powerful than the 7800, but not the SLI, and all indications are that the CPU performance is not that different to current high end CPU's.

Jon Carmack is quoted as saying that the next gen consoles will be pretty much equivalent to modern high end PC's.
 
CyberMatix said:
What worries me a bit is that the new game consoles all have this multiprocessor architecture, and all the current game engine development kits are all very much based on the single processor architecture of the current consoles.
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Well the next-gen Nintendo Revolution is an upgraded GameCube design still sticking to a single PowerPC CPU coupled to a very powerfull GPU.

Perhaps Nintendo is much smarter and realize people could care less about hardware and how many cores you have as long as the games fun and compelling hence why their DS and "Nintendogs" game bitch smacking the technically superior P2P.

Another problem is that most of programmers are not really skilled in developing multi-core programs.

Actually rather way back in the 90's we had the Sega Saturn had two CPU's to make up for it's poor 3D capability which flopped partly because programmers could not extract maximum performance (the only guys who could was the Sega inhouse teams) out of it compared to the then PSX with it's rather simple CPU and GPU combination.

CyberMatix said:
So what I think might happen is that in a few years or so there will be "super" game engines that's optimized for the new architectures.
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I reckon the 3D engine will become more part of the hardware and all you would do as a game programmer is load the polygon and AI data and boom your game runs ;).
 
isnt that what happens when they buy/lease game engines from epic or id? they buy the engine (including physics) and slap on new models with new meshes and put in appropriate AI. like with the quake2 engine (spawned many games), quake3 engine, unreal engine (almost all incarnations of it) and now finally the doom3 engine. bought the engine, sold the tshirt, game, coffee mug and poster :P
 
oh yes, another thing. Microsoft (while being a greedy entity) did provide us with managed directx in the .net environment. it makes 3d development quite easy using directx 9 sdk...

on the other hand, opengl dev has been around for a long time and doom3 proves that it is powerful and relatively easy. if MS can improve on opengl and cut dev time in half, while still producing the same quality, then they should be able to convince a lot more people to switch to .NET directx, but somehow i doubt it.

in the meantime, there are some interesting opensource 3dengines for the PC available. i think one is called purplesharp or something like that, and it has been used to create at least 1 commercial game, and several non commercial games. velly nice and flee. should keep you busy while looking into other possibilities and also a good platform for creating a prototype game...
 
CyberMatix said:
what game engine should I use
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The engine of the moment is Unreal 3 Engine. It has already been confirmed for XBOX, XBOX360, PS2, PS3, and PC. From what you want to do the Unreal 3 Engine may be the way to go. There are also a few very talented (read: award winning) people in SA with the Unreal Engine

nrg_wp said:
I was REALLY impressed with the F.E.A.R demo. physics was great. looks good. ran well..
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Unreal Engine with Havoks physics

eye_suc said:
they buy the engine (including physics) and slap on new models with new meshes and put in appropriate AI.
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Not in all cases. Physics is most often seperate unless it is built into the engine. A lot of coding goes into making a game, even on someone elses engine. Take Deus Ex 2 for instance that was built on the Unreal 2 engine. They re-wrote the AI, graphic rendering, and sound rendering from the ground up to get what they wanted. Not to mention a number of other areas we likely tweaked. If you scale down to a small thing like a UT2k4 mod, then you have to do things like code custom menus, custom AI, custom effects and so on.
Some games have just used what was given though and did very little work, but I guess it comes down to how tight your vision of a game is and how hard you are willing to work to get there
 
I have an internship in the UK later this year with a company called IdeaWorks3d who make games from mobile devices, from your ngage sort of game phone to normal phones to fully fledged mobile consoles (psp)

To get the internship I had to pass a test and since then I have been asked to mess with the XForce engine so I am up to speed to join a development team on arrival. I must be honest I thought it was just implementing someone elses classes but it is alot more involved.

For instance I can draw a simple spline on the screen with my code and hand control over to xforce but when I want to track movements of an entity on that spline I need to have the code myself, if the entity is not ON the spline but I need to follow its progress in relationship to the spline (so say its hovering over the spline and i need to track its movements) I need to control all of that myself.

In the end all a game engine is, is a toolkit and in modern development (OOP principles) the less time the developer has to spend reinventing the wheel or creating a basic framework the more time they can spend on stuff the user might actually notice.

I don't think developers are lazy its just that say unreal is the biggest game on the planet and you want to make a FPS set in a cartoon world people will ussually make their code try mimmick unreal (even though the engine is capable of much more) just because they know thats what people want now and they wanna get something that sells out as quickly as possible.

I can assure you everyone of these games using a licensed game engine still have alot of code and alot of graphics code too, its just that for something like rendering its a little tedious to go reinvent something that works well.

It's the same with protection schemes, you get companies who ONLY do protection schemes and thus have expertise and experience and loads of time/people to dedicate to this one problem (take starforce for example, splinter cell still hasnt been cracked in 7 months) and then you get companies that bother with making thier own copy protection that gets cracked before it hits the stores.

Modern software development is just like this these days and its to our benifit, and I can assure you ALL gameplay is coded by the development team, thats one thing all game engines make sure of, that whomever licenses it has complete control and freedom to create somethign that hasnt been done before (it just so happens that hardly any companies try)
 
I also think OpenGL is a lot simpler than Direct3D and just as powerful, but that is maybe because I can program in OpenGL, but not in Direct3D. Direct3D needs a lot of code to do the same thing a small bit of OpenGL can do.
 
CyberMatix said:
Anybody here know anything about game engines. If I wanted to develop a game for the XBOX 360, PS3, and PC that will be ready in about 3-4 years time, what game engine should I use.

Remember PC's in 3 - 4 years time will have at least the same processing power that the consoles have today, maybe more.

I had a look at Unreal Tournament 3 and Trinigy Vision engines so far. I will be developing in MS Visual Studio in C++ and C. CGI will be mainly in 3DS Max and Maya.
Click to expand...
unfortunatly its not that easy, you see to develop for concoles you need to get a development kit which is ussually only handed to companies consisting of 10 people or more and at a price. Most development kits for consoles do not support MS visual Studio products except you do get some that let you build debug binaries but not release binaries, this is largely because these companies dont want to be tied in with microsoft and do not want to pay licenses when borland or codewarrior will do.

I'm not sure if when you say game engine you mean 3d engine, I'd say you either go get a commercial engine ($$$) or you use something pretty common place like open GL.

The mane problem is that each device has a different command set and API and ussually different architecture so you cannot really code a game till you have real world devices. XBOX360 developers kits are available to game companies already (I think its like $2000 for the setup and support)

For PC you can use open GL and at worst some functions become depreciated and you have to update the code a little.

And tibby, NINTENDO REVOLUTION MAKES ME CREAM MY PANTS, thats gonna be a hot console, nintendo are great at developing innovative games and I appreciate that way before I appreciate nerf textures
 
i keep thinking witth the cell technology that amd and intel would have been in this game a long time ago. they keep saying the consoles are gonna be so good, ill believe it when i see it!
 
dude at e3 they showed the chip of the new NGAGE (I'll hopefully get to code a few things for it before it is even out) and basically... its hot,

intel and AMD don't make risc proccessors (as far as I know) which is what you need use in a mobile device because of power and memory limitations. With the new ARM chips and Symbian OS with better memory (symbian is probably the most memory efficient OS in the world) you can do a whole lot of stuff, the main problem now with mobile devices is power, even with a low power processor like ARM ones you still need to power the LCD screen and backlight and ussually tertiary data sources (extra mem cards, hard drives, cd/dvd/umd drives)
 
I'm looking forward to the release of the NGAGE (and the day that I get to go to E3)...

The power issue you mention is something I've always wondered about. I can't imagine how these mobile processors are going to run (for any reasonable time period) on a simple Cell battery especially as they become more and more complex. Surely there is a limit to the amount of power available?
 
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