Forums | MacLife

granted Silicon might have made some mistakes, but if Epic didn't deliver on their contract agreements they are somewhat liable.  The part I find shady on SIlicon's part is asking for profits from GoW.  I love how corporations can sue for money they hoped to make.  Can I now sue companies for not hiring me since I planned on making $8000 this summer and instead still don't have a job?

Damages is one thing, obviously Epic owes them whateve excess funds it cost Silicon to make up for the mistakes or deliberate with-holdings by Epic, but I don't see where they think they deserve a cut simply because their game wasn't ready.

Hell Blizzard has delayed its last few games by what, almost a year each time?  They still do fine.

they may be big business, but I had hoped since most game companies started with a few guys tryin to have a good time they'd be able to avoid this kind of stuff, whatever the truth of the matter is.  Ah well, absolute power corrupts absolutely I guess

One other crucial difference is that Epic is in the game engine biz, Blizz is not. Epic blew right past iD after Quake 3 and makes far more from licensing engine tech than from the games they make.

Well, figure an Unreal engine license at ~$300,000. Multiply by the number of licensees (world + dog) and you start to get an idea of how much money is involved. That's for starters.

so uhhhh, where's my cut? heh

What, the ice crap?

Iono, guess with this lawsuit Dyack's trying to melt the damn ice.

I suppose it's an acquired taste.

Thinking back, delays have long seemed to characterize Epic, almost as much as advanced tech. Remember the 4 1/2 year dev cycle on the original Unreal?.. it was almost the first Duke Nukem 4ever. Even after delivery on the PC, it required a string of patches that lasted until concentration on UT forced a stop, and the "final" PC patch (that Mac Unreal never got) only came after the only successful online petition in memory, a year after it was promised... and it still didn't quite fix everything. It's almost as if the company had ADD (Tim, take your Ritalin, man).

So, anyway:

EPIC HAS ALREADY had one out-of-the-park hit on its latest Unreal engine with Xbox shooter Gears of War. Despite that title's popularity, however, there are plenty of questions being asked about the engine's capabilities, build status, and Epic's ability to deliver anything else.

These questions are being asked not least by Silicon Knights, top-flight developer of upcoming console title Too Human. The firm is suing Epic for failing to deliver key features and documentation on the engine in time for Too Human to keep up with development schedule - resulting in a sloppy showing at E3 last year and no release date yet in sight. Key features of the game engine - including those present in Gears of War but not in developer builds - were delivered super-late, maliciously, the firm says.

Silicon Knights alleges that the witholding of data was deliberate, but other licensees of the Unreal technology have spoken up in a somewhat spotty defence. Talking over at Shacknews, developers working on UE3 games suggest that Epic was just incompetent, not malicious. What remains clear is that Epic is yet to deliver Unreal Tournament 3, its second in-house game based on the engine, and is still refusing to set a firm date for its release - perhaps suggesting that despite the appearance of Gears on the 360, Epic is having as much trouble with its own dev cycle as other licensees are.

Meanwhile, Sony is admitting to not helping out Epic as much as it could have done with the PS3, and is now standing up and saying that UE3 on PS3 is going to get a whole lot more effective from hereon out.

Speaking to Game Informer, Sony's Phil Harrison said that "If we’re honest, we didn’t do enough of a good job supporting them and getting them the tools and technology early enoug... Also, Epic isn’t a huge company. They don’t have unlimited resource. We have parachuted in some of our SWAT team of super engineers to help them. Specifically, to optimize for SPUs (synergistic processing units) which are the point of difference that the Cell processor has."

Harrison seems to be hoping that this will put some energy behind UE3 development and will help out those looking to release cross-platform franchises based on the new engine.

A number of which Sony needs, like UT3. Maybe the SWAT team includes some of those IBM engineers we heard about a while back?

Shacknews had

Jeffcoat also commented more directly on the situation at hand. "I am unable to account for the engine's current status, but [when] I left, I was aware of several of UE3's limitations--the lighting model is dog slow for anything dynamic, the streaming support has issues; I believe SK mentioned these--but most of these were apparent from the day we first got the code, and we designed accordingly," he explained.

And we read recently that the current deferred rendering was in part to accelerate lighting effects like muzzle flashes, particle effects; things that apparently were first out of the gate for GoW- and even that game has, to my eye, quite a few rendering anomalies and shortcomings in things like FSAA and texture filtering. Hopefully another year's work has squashed many of those bugs for GoW PC and Mac, to (finally) get back to the thread's original subject.

Oh yeah. Raleigh's the apex of a whole IT triangle. Nice place to live, too, they say.

I've only passed through NC, but I've met plenty of interesting people along the way...

Mr. T wrote:

1000 TX.

Holy cow! that was my first DOS machine, replacing a Commodore 128.  I still have it in my basement... with the original AdLib sound card and a 40mb (that seems to weird to type!) hard card.

Good times!

Earendil the Mariner wrote:

I'm going to guess UB, G5 and newer, no Cider.
Any word on if the PC version will support network play with 360 (and PS3 on the UT3 side)?

ABigSmall wrote:

Bat wrote:

ABigSmall wrote:

Dunno whether buying a better graphics card or just a Xbox 360 would better.

Part of it will be deciding which ppl you most want to play with/against (and remember GoW has co-op Campaign; GoW PC has the extra MP maps, editor and mini-campaign including a Brumak fight (shots 2 & 8); also proper m/kb controls.

Ah yes, just saw the "extra 5 chapters" thing on the Game Head video.

Maybe it's just wishful thinking, but I do wonder if Epic would release a future downloads thing to bring the extra PC-only content onto the 360?

Answers here...

Microsoft's announcement on Gears of War on PC at this year's E3 didn't exactly knock us flat in shock, but it was a little surprising to learn that cross-platform support between PC and Xbox 360 wasn't planned.

After all, a massive game like Gears of War is surely just the thing to encourage PC gamers to try this feature that Microsoft's introduced in Games for Windows - Live, isn't it?

It turns out that the reason we've not seen cross-platform announced is to do with the PC and Xbox 360 Gears of War code bases being incompatible.

"The PC build kept going with the [Unreal Engine 3] engine code, as opposed to using the Xbox 360 Gears of War code base. Over time, it gradually lost compatibility", Epic's VP Mark Rein explained to CVG when we caught up with him in Brighton last week.

"It would take a humungous patch on the Xbox 360 side to make that possible, or not using the newer, more optimised code base on the Windows side. It just didn't work out."

Rein explained that code base incompatibility is also the reason it's very unlikely that the Gears of War content Epic has created exclusively for PC will ever release for Xbox 360.

And here.

Consoles will pretty much define what the next five years of games look like on the PC. But remember... take Gears of War. You can run it at twice - if you have enough graphics power and processor power - the frame rate that ran on the Xbox 360 and twice the resolution. That's the value to me of the PC, that the source content we have is still really high resolution, much higher than we can show on a 512MB machine.

You can use that content on the PC. You can express it in higher resolutions and higher frame rates and turn on more effects. I think that's what you'll see, PC games where we turn it up higher, you can turn the texture resolution up higher, the screen resolution up higher.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/ar … ?id=169213

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/ar … ?id=169204