Epic's Mark Rein insists Unreal Engine is still "the best" engine technology.
When asked by Edge if he's getting fed up with being asked about Crytek's impressive CryEngine, he responded: [laughs] "Let's skip that question.
"I'm very happy with where we are today. We have really great engine technology, the best tools. We've explored the future with Samaritan and delivered that technology already today. We're running on all the best mobile platforms and there'll be more coming. We have UDK which broadens its availability to virtually anybody at a really great price.
Crytek told CVG earlier this year that its CryEngine 3 could have fuelled the development of "pretty much any other game" - but claimed that its rivals, including Epic's Unreal Engine, would struggle to power Crysis 2.
Comments
18 comments so far...
BenThomasFoster on 1 Jul '11 said:
essentially what he's saying is. "If you want the best at any price go for cryengine.. expect to be developing for a while and not have the experience we've got or choose UE3 and get the best product you can get for the money (which is kida true)
justforkicks101 on 1 Jul '11 said:
yea.. yeah, rubbish trees man.
StonecoldMC on 1 Jul '11 said:
He's right. UE3 is the goto engine for so many Devs out there. Really looking for to Batman: Arkham City & Bioshock Infinite for starters
!
TheLastDodo on 1 Jul '11 said:
Depends who's using it in my opinion.
I've seen quite a few poor looking games on PS3 using Unreal Engine for ex. Bulletstorm the latest (in certain places), Bioshock, Medal of Honor.
Rocksteady did a great job with Arkham Asylum though.
BOYD1981 on 1 Jul '11 said:
As impressive as the Unreal engines are and have been you don't really need the "Powered By Unreal Technology" logo to tell when a game uses it, the fact they have a tendancy to all look very similar (mostly applies to FPS) kinda gives it away.
kirankara on 1 Jul '11 said:
Yeah, huge part of it boils down to who using it, and often whether they porting from ps3 to 360 or vice versa as to whether it blows on ps3 or not . 360 to ps3 on ue3 ( or most middle ware engines tbh ) are not good news.
Shadows of damned was ue3 ps3 to 360 and was decent, even on small budget.
Ue3 is clearly a good middleware engine , that's beauty lies in it's simplicity to use by all accounts.
I think there's clearly better engines out there when they been developed from ground up, but as a " go to " engine it's great for devs, but as others have said, it's kinda distinctive in terms of way games turn out on it. U just know a games on ue3. It's also prone to certain issues like screen tear and texture loading issues.
StonecoldMC on 1 Jul '11 said:
I dont like these comments. If you are seeing screen tearing or texture loading problems then its the fault of the Dev, not the Engine. Gears 3, Batman: Arkham City, Aliens: Colonial Marines & Bioshock Infinite are 4 of the best looking Games on the horizon, Mirrors Edge, the Mass Effects & Lost Odyssey are Games that have looked great in the past, there all being made on UE3
MrPirtniw on 1 Jul '11 said:
And the new Alice game was done in the Unreal engine! ... but that looks epic one minute then a bit crap the next.
kirankara on 1 Jul '11 said:
I dont like these comments. If you are seeing screen tearing or texture loading problems then its the fault of the Dev, not the Engine. Gears 3, Batman: Arkham City, Aliens: Colonial Marines & Bioshock Infinite are 4 of the best looking Games on the horizon, Mirrors Edge, the Mass Effects & Lost Odyssey are Games that have looked great in the past, there all being made on UE3
ermmm no, the slow loading textures is a commonly accepted as a problem associated with ue3 and even Gears 2 made by epic themselves has the issue. Its not huge issue, its just something associated with the engine. So dont get all defensive, when its actually just the truth.
http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/938611-g ... 2/46454244
http://gamerlimit.com/2008/11/gears-of-war-2/
http://gamerlimit.com/wp-content/upload ... attack.jpg
El Mag on 1 Jul '11 said:
Just to add to that, heres the slow texture loading problem on Mass Effect.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTkbvZpsOfA
kirankara on 2 Jul '11 said:
To further add to this , a quote from recent EG analysis of shadows of the damned
you might notice what looks like pared back texture details on both versions at various points. But in reality this has more to do with the game having a few asset-streaming and LOD (level of detail) issues than anything else: again, standard fare for the UE3 tech".
"Grasshopper offers up a native 720p image with no anti-aliasing on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 - pretty much the standard for Unreal Engine 3 in recent times. "
"The only nagging issue we found with the PS3 version is something of a standard problem with UE3 titles: torn frames are much more prevalent in comparison to the same game running on 360."
"In this scenario, tearing is both more frequent and heavier on the PS3 - though the Xbox 360 version clearly has some issues of its own in this regard too. "
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digit ... d-face-off
In this regards it's a reference to mainly screen tearing on ps3 version , but clearly the engine has issues in regards to screen tearing when working with ps3 architecture, as they've highlighted it as a recurring issues, and also noted the screen tearing is there on 360 too.
This could be the devs fault on 360 though right? So let's look at screen tearing in 360 beta of gears 3 , which is priduced by epic, the creators of ue3 engine and still screen tears with average of 4% over 4 clips in lot analysis
http://www.lensoftruth.com/head2head-be ... -analysis/
Think it's fair to say , i was right lol
liveswired on 2 Jul '11 said:
Unreals a fine engine - but its strengths are in linear FPS or 3rd Person environments that require bulky characters
ricflair on 2 Jul '11 said:
Are there better multi platform middleware engines? I don't know. As a lot of devs use it I assume it must be, unless it costs next to nothing to license. They wouldn't just use any old s**t surely? Although it doesn't bring the best out of the PS3.
Most engines are there for one dev, or maybe even one game, so to release an engine that can be used in various genres (even though first/third shooters are obviously the most common), by any developer, across multiple platforms is quite an achievement.
Best is pretty ambiguous anyway, if you can get to say 90% standard with Unreal, but you can get to 100% with another engine, but it takes 20% more time and money, then that could be seen as being the best (I'm not saying this is the case at all). But obviously some devs struggle with it more than others, or at least struggle with it on certain games more than others.
A few performance issues aside, I thought Crysis 2 looked great on my 360, so perhaps the new CryEngine engine is better. Whether that will apply to other devs and other games using it remains to be seen.
lordirongut on 2 Jul '11 said:
It's definitely the best middleware engine I think - some great results have been had from it in the right hands. I honestly think that it's better than CryEngine, too, at least on consoles. Of course, dedicated engines made for specific games produce even better results, but not every dev has the budget for that and Unreal works great for them. Square Enix Japan should never use it again, though *cough* The Last Remnant *cough*.
kirankara on 3 Jul '11 said:
Re: Epic: Unreal Engine 'still the best'
by ricflair Yesterday, 23:26
"Are there better multi platform middleware engines? I don't know. As a lot of devs use it I assume it must be, unless it costs next to nothing to license. They wouldn't just use any old s**t surely? Although it doesn't bring the best out of the PS3."
The understanding I have of ue3 , is that it's simple and efficient to get working at basic levels , as the tools are there to just do these basic things very easily, and this is why it's so popular. It provides decent, quick results, and thus is cheap. However, it requires a lot more work to get it performing at higher levels, and often devs have to out a lot of work into optimising it to get more out of it, and sometimes devs put that much optimisation into the engine, they don't even bother referring to it as unreal engine anymore, as it bares little semblance to the original. EG castlevania.
Whether there's better , I'm not sure, I think EA are hoping frostbite 2 can be a contender, as they using it for few games.
Deinsleaf on 3 Jul '11 said:
The best? I don't know. Mostly used? Probably. There are other budding engines out there. The Frostbite 2.0 and CryEngine might be threatening to dethrone the Unreal Engine but I doubt they will ever do that in terms of flexibility. But the again, it depends on what kind of game we are talking about. For First person/3rd person shooters those engines might be at the cutting edge. But what if we're talking about racing games? Codemasters Ego engine have proven itself with solid releases such as Grid, The Dirt franchise and with F1 2010. In the end of the day, it really depends on the genre of the gaming you are making. Some engines out there are better than others in some genres.
LiqzZ on 3 Jul '11 said:
The fact UDK is free also helps make it the best engine, as young games designers can actually learn the software that they'll most likley be using in the industry.
Jensonjet on 3 Jul '11 said:
I hate the Unreal game engine.
On consoles, at least. It's clearly incapable of running at 60 frames a second, and to me that's important for some types of games. The Unreal engine is like a Ford whatever. It's cheap and it gets the job done.
I wish id software would do more to get their latest engine out there. I'm sick of games running like sh*t because of that Unreal engine.