Speculation Discussion - Developers preferance of engine

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Loto_Bak

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With all the new hardware up on the market these days, and 3 major engines DX9 engines available

Crytech (farcry)
Doom3
Source

And others on the horizon

Battlefield 2
unreal 3 (long way away)

Along with non FPS engines

Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 (dx9?)
EverQuest
World of Warcraft

It appears the most overlooked portion of the market is speculation on a developers choice of engines. We can bench HL2 and doom3 till the cows come home but I'd like to hear some peoples input on what they believe will draw developers to one engine or another.

Please refrain from 'cause hl2 rulzzz!!!11' or 'hl2 sucks' or 'doom3 pawns hl2'. Any post not contributing factual, useful information to the discussion should be promptly deleted.

Now from my point of view.....

Has anyone heard details of source being ported over to xbox/xbox2/ps3 ? ( I discount ps2 due to development time on the proprietary hardware ) Consoles have become the cash cow in the video game market. Without support for the largest variety of hardware how can valve exspect to sell their engine?
Xbox will see doom3 in the comming months. Along with optimised paths for virtually every generation/brand of PC hardware that needed it, doom3 seems to offer excellent performance among the largest variety of hardware.

Source performs well on the latest generation of hardware, though lack of a mixed presision path (discussed in the 'valve sucks' thread... barried deep inside) alienates a good ~20% of the target market. (gf5xxx series)

Farcry has some very nice shaders, and is visually stunning. They have an excellent LOD model and the engine is becomming more mature.

All this being said I havn't heard a single announcement for licencing any of these engines. Nothing at all. Granted doom3 and hl2 have only been on the market for weeks, but farcry has been available for some time and I would have exspected to hear an annoucement of licencing by now.
 
id has a pretty impressive list of games using the licensed doom3 engine, but i really haven't heard of other games using either Source or the CryTek engine. Anyone have a list?
 
DanK said:
Doom 3 is OpenGL, not DX9.
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True, but all 3 are in about the same class... extensive use of PS2.x+ level (or OGL fragment) shaders.
 
IMNSHO there are two types of games and game developers. There are the ones that create their engines, and then the ones who license them. Obviously, the latter is the larger group and the one you are asking about.

My belief is that engines are often selected using non-technical criteria as well. I would imagine that anyone looking to license an engine is going to look for the right fit from both a product and a partnership angle. In other words, it all depends on who's sister the game producer is sleeping with. Ok, that may be an overstatement. But seriously, if your little development shop is hooked up with a publisher or receiving capital from an entity with a financial interest in one of the major engines, wouldn't you think it'd be an uphill battle to try and license the "other guy's" engine instead?

Maybe I don't know jack diddly, but that the impression I get about how business gets done these days.
 
I highly doubt you're going to see the EQ2 engine used for anything other than EQ2 for a while - unless SOE decides to use it in another game. The hardware requirements are pretty out there (suggested hardware is like 3.0GHz P4/1GB/128MB 9800).
 
Price is an important factor. I don´t know how much they charge for licensing it.
 
Dillusion said:
Great, two games i will never play.

There is also the Havok engine, and the 'farcry' engine is called the CryTek engine, FYI.
Click to expand...

Havok is not a graphical/game engine FYI
 
the source engine has had an incredibly rocky and bug-filled launch compared to the doom3 engine. doom3 pretty much worked out of the box on most setups. source engine has random sound stuttering/freeze bugs, random memory read crashes, video glitches on both ATI (rainbow textures) and NV (texture lighting) cards, problems with some input devices (Logitech drivers), etc. These affect all source games, including the recently released Vampire: Masquerade. Not to mention that graphically Doom3 looks to be graphically more robust out of the gate. If I was spending money on either, Doom3 to me would look like the best bet to have a happy userbase. Just look at the steampowered.com (HL2 official support) and halflife2.net unofficial support forums. They aren't pretty.
 
tranCendenZ said:
the source engine has had an incredibly rocky and bug-filled launch compared to the doom3 engine. doom3 pretty much worked out of the box on most setups. source engine has random sound stuttering/freeze bugs, random memory read crashes, video glitches on both ATI (rainbow textures) and NV (texture lighting) cards, problems with some input devices (Logitech drivers), etc. These affect all source games, including the recently released Vampire: Masquerade. Not to mention that graphically Doom3 looks to be graphically more robust out of the gate. If I was spending money on either, Doom3 to me would look like the best bet to have a happy userbase. Just look at the steam and halflife2.net support forums. They aren't pretty.
Click to expand...

i dont have any freezing/stuttering/sound problems on my setup, but i did notice one rainbow texture in the teleporter yesterday while playing. didnt effect game performance, its like it was meant to be there (obviously wasnt) ... thats the only one ive ever seen
 
iD has recieved support and licenses by the score for a long time. Not to mention Id licensed games tend to do better I think than other games based on other engines.

Whether this has anything to do with the money required to back a game based on an engine like that is a whole other story.

I do think though that given ids success in the past that they will continue to do well in this area.
 
Am I the only one that would like to see companies stop endorsing games, and the game companies just making sure it runs on both hardware.. after the game is out, what the card company wants to do -- they can do...

I'm just sick of this nVidia = FarCry, ATi = Half Life 2 stuff... It should be, FarCry/Half Life 2 = THE PEOPLE...
 
Dillusion said:
i dont have any freezing/stuttering/sound problems on my setup, but i did notice one rainbow texture in the teleporter yesterday while playing. didnt effect game performance, its like it was meant to be there (obviously wasnt) ... thats the only one ive ever seen
Click to expand...

Personally I beat the game, had one "memory could not be read" crash, and frequent sound stuttering, game pausing for 5-10 seconds once every 15-20mins or so. Seemed to get worse the further I got into the game, happened rarely at the beginning of the game, often by the end of the game.

you can see people with virtually every combination of hardware are getting the sound stuttering/freezing and memory crashes though:

memory could not be read crash bug:
http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?t=51549

sound stuttering/freezing bug:
http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?t=57251
 
I think the BF2 engine will be pretty nice... Dice Sweden is making it, and they seem to not have thier heads up thier asses... Plus the swedish government will be using it for training, so i bet they will have pressure to make it bug free and powerful... If they can deal with the netcode issues of BF1942, it will be pretty kickass! Not the greatest graphics though...
 
Dillusion said:
its a physics engine....the topic states 'engine' not 'graphical engines'
Click to expand...

I think the point was you were talking of a physics engine and a graphics engine in the same sentence. I assumed you had no idea what you were talking about either.

On the topic of physics engines that could be one of the major selling points of the hl2 engine. If doom3 does not include anything 'out of the box' it requires studioes to licences another technology which means greater cost. I would sure be interested in seeing what licencing fees are for engines. 2mil + 3-5% royalties?
 
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