Why don't more games license out their engines?

[imzjustplayin]

I guess what I'm really asking is why are the following games: BF2, Oblivion, SimCity, The Sims, GRAW, etc. not on the HL2 engine? Why do these developers insist on creating their own engine? I'm just asking because I'm wondering if the only reason for companies making new engines is because certain engines work with only certain games or not. Like can you use the HL2 engine for a RTS? how about WoW? Man WoW would look awesome if it had the HL2 engine, and BF2 would run a LOT better if it had the HL2 engine. The reason for my enthusiasim for this is because I recently found out (in another post here) that HL2 runs on DX6 cards which I think is absolutely fantastic.

 

[L1ght]

I guess what I'm really asking is why are the following games: BF2, Oblivion, SimCity, The Sims, GRAW, etc. not on the HL2 engine? Why do these developers insist on creating their own engine? I'm just asking because I'm wondering if the only reason for companies making new engines is because certain engines work with only certain games or not. Like can you use the HL2 engine for a RTS? how about WoW? Man WoW would look awesome if it had the HL2 engine, and BF2 would run a LOT better if it had the HL2 engine. The reason for my enthusiasim for this is because I recently found out (in another post here) that HL2 runs on DX6 cards which I think is absolutely fantastic.

While source is a decent engine, it sure isn't the best, or well suited for every game type.

Does DX6 really matter? Seems pointless for a modern game engine to support it, IMHO.

Take a look a the next gen engines, Unreal 3 and cryengine2, they are much more impressive than source.

 

[Blazestorm]

Not all games need a UT3 engine (which isn't the simplest to work with)...

Games are straying away from what matters... simple fun...

You play games because it's enjoyable, not because it looks pretty, while that adds to the experience... I still go back to TFC and Starcraft because the gameplay is what matters... I get 300fps+ in TFC with my system...

I can't wait for TF2, I'm hoping the gameplay is as good or better than TFC...

 

[imzjustplayin]

While source is a decent engine, it sure isn't the best, or well suited for every game type.

Does DX6 really matter? Seems pointless for a modern game engine to support it, IMHO.

Take a look a the next gen engines, Unreal 3 and cryengine2, they are much more impressive than source.

Because some people like to play games for what they are, what are developers worried that when you strip what makes a game look pretty that people will see the game for what it really is, some pretty game with a lacking story line? HL2 in DX6 mode looks damn good and makes you realize you can still enjoy graphical improvements with out having the new hardware which I think is very worthwhile. Not to mention the fact that these developers need to support slower platforms in order to have a larger audience to play with.

This would also kill the arguement that PC gaming simply costs to much when it really is, it costs too much to stay on top. If people are willing to play with lower graphical settings, then PC gaming is far superior to consoles. Plus with PC games, when you DO get new hardware, you get a free boost in graphical quality. HL2 engine clearly illustrates that supporting older hardware IS possible and in my opinion, is worthwhile.

 

[kelbear]

Because licensing an engine is only useful if it's easily applicable to your needs.

If you need to throw away 2/3rds of it and write your own in-house code to get your game to work, it doesn't make sense to pay for someone else's engine. As the work continues, they'll find implementations in the licensed engine that also don't work with what the game is trying to do, so pieces just keep getting stripped and stripped.

Engines are built modular so that you can swap stuff in and out but there are limitations to how far you can take this. Licensing an engine is only a good idea if it makes the end-product better enough to justify the price. It's a business and overhead management is critical to survival.

For an analogy, it's like trying to build a car out of boat parts. They both use "engines" but they're way too different. You might as well just start fresh instead of trying to reshape all the boat parts to make a car.

 

[Netrat33]

Welp. I could be wrong but I thought the Graw engine is really just one of the unreal engines (2??)

But I think it's also the cost of the engines. Is it cheaper to make your own to the needs you have or is it cheaper to buy one outright? I know the company I work for was thinking about getting into gaming and using a premade engine and looked at Unreal 3, Doom 3, and source and they all go for about 500,000 and up. So now, can you basically make a game engine that has your needs and be cheaper then buying an engine outright or does the scope of yoru game need to cut costs?

Also some of those games have been in production for a long time too way after an engine was available to them.

*yaaah..I'm a little drunk so my statements might not make as much sense*

 

[Obi_Kwiet]

Source is nice, but it looks really, really bad with out a strong art team.

 

[imzjustplayin]

Source is nice, but it looks really, really bad with out a strong art team.

is that why it can look so good on low spec machines?

 

[133]

i wouldn't like all of my games to have the same overall "feel". i like a little variation ya know.

 

[Riddlinkidstoner]

I'll be honest. I'm completely content with source engine games and if every game was based off of it, I wouldn't mind so much.

 

[Met-AL]

is that why it can look so good on low spec machines?

Yep, partly. HL2 has some very very good hi-res textures. It is a well done and very efficient engine as well.

 

[Trimlock]

very efficient and very basic at the same time

the art direction taken by the HL team is what really made the game, its pretty much texture driven instead of model/shadering

it does support some of the best looking water to date though

 

[FreiDOg]

I guess what I'm really asking is why are the following games: BF2, Oblivion, SimCity, The Sims, GRAW, etc. not on the HL2 engine? Why do these developers insist on creating their own engine? I'm just asking because I'm wondering if the only reason for companies making new engines is because certain engines work with only certain games or not. Like can you use the HL2 engine for a RTS? how about WoW?

Two main reasons few game engines are licensed:
Cost - both to develop and buy. It's a lot more difficult and time consuming to develop a customizable, extensible and reusable engine than it is to just build one that meets your immediate needs. There is also the support costs; if you're licensing a cutting edge engine for 1-2 million dollars you don't drop of the code and good luck. You are going to have to commit to supporting that engine for a good deal of time. On the flip side of that is the cost to customize an engine for your needs. You don't drop a few new models into UT2.0 and get GRAW; at a minimum you're going to be rewriting most of the Unreal Script to change the game mechanics, and probably more than a bit of work on the game engine itself.

The other reason I would say would be the proprietary nature of code. If you have some hook for your game be it physics, lighting, AI, scalability, whatever, that is causing people to want to buy your game you probably don't want to other developers to have that. Most companies do not do what Epic and id do - license their engines from day one. It's rare to sell an engine before you have your game out in the market establishing its presence. Consequently, most games engines up for license are not going to be cutting edge technology anymore.

Man WoW would look awesome if it had the HL2 engine, and BF2 would run a LOT better if it had the HL2 engine. The reason for my enthusiasim for this is because I recently found out (in another post here) that HL2 runs on DX6 cards which I think is absolutely fantastic.

Quite honestly, it would be stupid to develop for DX6 or 7 today. Source kept DX7 support to work on lower end hardware of the day and being so similar DX6 comes almost free. But any game you write today would run terribly for the few people still using GF3 or 4s; making the significant addition to the time and effort required for DX7 or earlier support a total waste of money.

More to your point though, Source would be a very poor choice for either battlefield or world of warcraft. It's not designed to deal with the massive sprawling environments of those two games. When source came out even with the fairly confined levels there multiple loading screens per level, now imagine in WoW or BF if every few hundred yards you have to load a new section of the map from disk. The maps (multi player included) for HL2 and its mods are detailed, but they are not large in comparison to BF, WoW, or even UT2004 (at least in the vehicle maps). And the few mods for source that do feature open environments (like the Empires Mod) tend to look pretty bad. Doom III has similar issues and has had to undergo several revisions to work better with the outdoor areas of Quake 4 and now Quake Wars.

 

[imzjustplayin]

But any game you write today would run terribly for the few people still using GF3 or 4s; making the significant addition to the time and effort required for DX7 or earlier support a total waste of money.

Why do you say that? There is nothing preventing a developer from making a game work with older hardware. All they would have to do is make all the advanced features built in from the getgo so that they don't run poorly, and then to run on older hardware, disable or scale them back. For video cards that are lacking in video memory, reduce the draw distance, if it can't support TL, don't use it or do it in software, if a video card can't do a certain special effect, don't do it, if it can't support HDR, don't enable it, if there isn't enough room for grass, disable it, can't support advanced lighting techniques, dont support it, textures too large for video card? when running the game for the first time, recompress them so that they match the level of hardware you have (probably what they do for BF2) etc. etc..

The other reason I would say would be the proprietary nature of code. If you have some hook for your game be it physics, lighting, AI, scalability, whatever, that is causing people to want to buy your game you probably don't want to other developers to have that. Most companies do not do what Epic and id do - license their engines from day one. It's rare to sell an engine before you have your game out in the market establishing its presence. Consequently, most games engines up for license are not going to be cutting edge technology anymore.

I feel like developers are trying to hide the fact that their game doesn't have much to offer by making it look pretty instead. At the end of the day, whether you're running on a PIII 700 with a TNT2 card or a Core2Duo with an 8800GTX, the game should be more or less equally enjoyable. If a game is 'so good', then it should have much to offer regardless of the specifcations of the hardware in which it's running on. The only thing the graphics should do is add immersion, but if the game has a terrible story line or doesn't offer much from previous generation games then what's the point?

 

[sculelos]

Dude, supporting vastly outdated software is a waste of money and time for developers. I pretty much think the Radeon 9800Pro / Geforce 6600GT should be the lowest cards supported today as their both dirt cheap and if you can't afford them (or significantly better) how the hell are you suppost to afford games.

 

[ivan_gromov]

Because licensing an engine is only useful if it's easily applicable to your needs.

If you need to throw away 2/3rds of it and write your own in-house code to get your game to work, it doesn't make sense to pay for someone else's engine. As the work continues, they'll find implementations in the licensed engine that also don't work with what the game is trying to do, so pieces just keep getting stripped and stripped.

Engines are built modular so that you can swap stuff in and out but there are limitations to how far you can take this. Licensing an engine is only a good idea if it makes the end-product better enough to justify the price. It's a business and overhead management is critical to survival.

For an analogy, it's like trying to build a car out of boat parts. They both use "engines" but they're way too different. You might as well just start fresh instead of trying to reshape all the boat parts to make a car.

For one HL2 is made by Valve and BF is made by EA. EA is a shithole. Even though the sorce engine would run game more efficiently and it will look prettier, they will never do it. EA, and others, are marketing companies, they wabt business, they would much rather develop their own stuff. Plus, if every game ran on source engine, I would not buy them all, because they would be just like mods. And games like Ship, feel like a css mode, that is how every game would feel.

 

[squeezee]

For one HL2 is made by Valve and BF is made by EA. EA is a shithole. Even though the sorce engine would run game more efficiently and it will look prettier, they will never do it. EA, and others, are marketing companies, they wabt business, they would much rather develop their own stuff. Plus, if every game ran on source engine, I would not buy them all, because they would be just like mods. And games like Ship, feel like a css mode, that is how every game would feel.

The Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield 2 games/engines were made by DICE before they were fully acquired by EA. Granted EA was still the publisher for both titles but the programmers at DICE are the ones who deserve the blame here. (the game engines really are a mess)

 

[FreiDOg]

Why do you say that? There is nothing preventing a developer from making a game work with older hardware.

Except budgets and deadlines.

All they would have to do is make all the advanced features built in from the getgo so that they don't run poorly, and then to run on older hardware, disable or scale them back. For video cards that are lacking in video memory, reduce the draw distance, if it can't support TL, don't use it or do it in software, if a video card can't do a certain special effect, don't do it, if it can't support HDR, don't enable it, if there isn't enough room for grass, disable it, can't support advanced lighting techniques, dont support it, textures too large for video card? when running the game for the first time, recompress them so that they match the level of hardware you have (probably what they do for BF2) etc. etc..

I think you underestimate the complexities of that kind of scalability.
DirectX 7 and earlier have a very different rendering system than DX8 and later do, Microsoft changed from Direct Draw being the primary rendering tool with D3D as a supporting library if limited functionality to D3D being the only rendering library - it is a not a trivial change and supported a tiny percent of the market with outdated hardware requires a developer to invest time, effort and money into supporting that DX7 code path.

Scaling just the LOD of the graphics is one thing, all games do that, most pretty well. But when you start talking about running games on pre-Geforce hardware you have to take into account what the rest of the system must look like. You're looking at wanting games to be played on a P3 500 with 128 Mb of RAM (or less), what happens to gameplay then?
For me personally, by far the biggest sell for HL2 was the physics. The story was ok, the game was vintage half life, but the physics turned it from a servicable sequel into some of the most fun I've had with a shooter in a long time.
What happens when you ask to play that game on CPU that just isn't fast enough for the Havock physics engine?
And you want it no support Hardware Transform and Lighting? All that vertex processing needs to be done some where, without T&L on the GPU the CPU is left that task meaning less time for physics, AI, pathfinding and other game play oriented tasks.

Take a look at the AI from a good game 10 years ago vs a good game today; there's no comparison to how well the AI functions today. That's not (only) because we've gotten much better at AI, but because there are 50 times the number of CPU cycles we can throw at AI processing now.

I'm all for scalability in graphics, my 7600 GS is an average or probably even above average graphics card right now; and as they should pretty much every game I have tried plays well on it. For just over $100 I get about 2 years of serviceable use out of a card before I"m tired of turning the detail settings lower and lower and I buy a new $100 card. I'm comfortable with that.
But when you start expecting graphics scalability to the absurd, you will do far more to hurt game play than to help it.

I feel like developers are trying to hide the fact that their game doesn't have much to offer by making it look pretty instead. At the end of the day, whether you're running on a PIII 700 with a TNT2 card or a Core2Duo with an 8800GTX, the game should be more or less equally enjoyable. If a game is 'so good', then it should have much to offer regardless of the specifcations of the hardware in which it's running on. The only thing the graphics should do is add immersion, but if the game has a terrible story line or doesn't offer much from previous generation games then what's the point?

People have been bemoaning the death of game play since gaming started. If everyone stuck to the notion that it was choice between good graphics and good gameplay we'd have the greatest text based adventure game of all time to enjoy; fortunately for gamers, flash and substance are not mutually exclusive and just because some developers try to substitute graphics for gameplay does not mean we need to look to 10 year old graphics hardware to save games. There are always tons of great games to play (not just look at), some with top notch graphics, some that will run on a PIII 500. There is no excuse for not finding great games to play right now.