Unreal Engine 4: source code and near free

[hydexon]

jesus....

even the mighty capcom runs to Unreal .....

http://www.gameswelt.de/street-fighter- ... e-4,233340

They don't have their so over-acclaimed Phanta Rhei engine?, or it's another vaporware?

[c6burns]

And Blizz made HearthStone in Unity. I don't see why not. Even if you have a giant staff, you should have a compelling reason to maintain your own engine/tools. And if you are starting from scratch, there is no way you are going to do better than commercial middleware for the same value. You will end up spending an order of magnitude more than the source license of a commercial engine on salaries and still come out behind in terms of features.

I'm sure Capcom does have an in-house engine for 8th gen, but the Street Fighter V team might just be a small team that can't do the necessary engine / tools work for their project. Just like Blizz has in-house engines but the small HearthStone steam went with Unity.

[Klaim]

wat? But they had there own engine they developped for Lost Planet that looked very powerful, why would they do this??

[c6burns]

Because X tools programmers plus Y engine programmers to repurpose the in house tech to include features X, Y and Z costs more than the Unreal license. And Capcom has worked with Unreal in the past.

Edit: wait are you talking about Lost Planet 3? Because that was outsourced development done in Unreal 3 and Capcom just published it. Or you mean some new Lost Planet that I don't know anything about because I don't keep up on this stuff

[Klaim]

I was talking about the first lost planet, they even made a GDC talk I remember where they detailed how they managed to exploit multi-core systems, how they organized concurrency etc. It was in the beginning of the PS3 era if I remember correctly.

[c6burns]

Ah OK yes they released a lot of games using their 7th gen engine MT Framework, but then started dev on a new 8th gen engine which is what hydexon mentioned. The new engine is being built to power Deep Down and future titles, which has no release date yet... so maybe it just isn't feasible for Capcom to integrate 8th gen tech into MT 2.0 or use Phanta Rhei for SFV.

Must be awkward that their in house 8th gen engine isn't ready to roll at this stage. But Capcom is a monstrosity and my understanding is that development for a given title often gets compartmentalized within a single office. Like Dead Rising 3 was done almost all in Vancouver using in house tech specific to that particular office, then published by MS instead of Capcom itself. So yeah ... I won't even try to understand Capcom as a whole

[frostbyte]

capcom...just mention of the name give me shivers...
back in the good old arcade days capcom, sega and to some extent nintendo and atari were just about the only real players in the gaming industry...capcom undoubtedly ruled the scene...didn't realize they still exist till this talk ...nice to know...
now days japan gaming industry seems somewhat disconnected from the westren scene, wonder what goes on over there...
maybe we should open a thread on "what happend with japan gaming industry?"

to tell the truth i think the whole unreal 4 hype just got out of proportion - sure its a great engine( if you have a beasty hardware ) and affordable but i think its far from perfect and soon other engines will catch up( ogre included )
so i vote no on unreal becoming an "industry standart" ...
btw this comes from a guy that predicted that facebook wouldn't take off

[c6burns]

hehe you forgot Namco, Midway, Konami ... prob there's more I'm forgetting!

[frostbyte]

namco and konami, how could i forget...
any way quoting wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_gaming_in_Japan

In recent years, Japanese companies have been criticized for long development times and slow release dates on home video game consoles, their lack of third-party game engines, and for being too insular to appeal to a global market

guess somebody at capcom did some reading in english...

[c6burns]

What I know of Capcom is mainly the games I played as a kid, and Capcom Vancouver. The Vancouver office used to be Blue Castle Games and is like 3 blocks away from EA Games Canada (and poached a bunch of their employees )

I feel the future of gaming will have less and less in-house tech. There was a time when the only way to ship a title was to ground up the damn thing, but slowly we have seen the rise of middleware. Now we are at a point where the quality of middleware is starting to come near matching big studio tech, and multiple companies are competing against each other in the marketplace. Indies are grabbing cheap middleware license deals and eating the lunch of larger, more established studios. Sure there will always be blockbuster AAA titles .... GTA and CoD and other franchises show that to be true. But a "middle class" of smaller - often distributed - teams is really starting to put on a clinic (in my opinion).

What I'd like to see are more small studios committed to moving toward an IPO as opposed to a "sell out to Big Corp" exit strategy. Sadly, the VC community loves the latter and hiring via acquisitions is all the rage. Anyway I've rambled myself kinda off topic now

[frostbyte]

Anyway I've rambled myself kinda off topic now

thats fine, nobody here to read this, parents were invited to an "epic" party and the kids are home alone getting crazy
so what we have here:
1) rise of the middleware, tools for the masses...
2) uprise of the indie proletarian...
3) the old elites trying to maintain power by using there money to buy out pockets of resistance
4) some of the old elites decide to join the proletarian and team-up with the "middleware class"
4) steam and apple fuzing and fueling the revolvment and at the same time makeing huge cuts by ripping off the proletarian with unbearable taxes
5)the future, yet to be written...but something to do with "a leader will rise","free us from evil", "open source" and armageddon...

one day children will learn this at history class....


note: the silent gamers mob side of the story was complitly neglected here...but hey, that deserve a whole chapter by itself...