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vimes

Engine licencing a good deal for ... ?

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Looking back at 2004 and 2005, 4 big FPS titles were released whose publishers/developers offered engine licensing : Doom III (DIII Engine), HL²(Source Engine), Unreal Tournament 2004(UE 2.5) and Far Cry(CryEngine). What sounded cool at the time was that all these engines were covering different technical areas and shipped with a bunch free tools, so I figured (like most people I suspect) that we would see an explosion of mods and games licensing these engines to focus on the gameplay [which could, as they pretended at the time, bleed outside the FPS genre]

Now, we know that never happened but the huge letdown was unexpected. As always, 95% of moding projects never saw the light of the day, UE went pretty dead after the result of 'Make Something Unreal', HL² modding community has only been delivering since a few weeks ago and Far Cry as well as Doom III never had any proper mods project to begin with.

As for licensing, it never happened for Far Cry and Doom III whose engines were only used for internal projects or sister-companies' projects(Quake IV for instance). HL² would be in the same case if it wasn't for Dark messiah and a few mods promoted to stand alone versions; with the difference that the Source Engine based games are offering subtle difference of gameplay inside the FPS genre : The Ship, They Hunger, Portal... The real winner of the lot is unsurprisingly UE2 - that was upgraded to 2.5 in 2004 and 2X in 2005 - which managed to get a freakin' lot of clients and surely covers the costs due to extra-dev to make their engine something another company could understand. But what about Crytek, Valve and ID : of course the sale of the games made this cost virtually invisible, but one would wander if the gain from licensing really turned to profit at a point or not...And it's not like they guarantee commercial success for the studio which bought them : nearly all UE games are sequels of sequels and most of their audience are people coming back for it, not people convinced by the use of the engine itself. What's even more troubling is that developers stopped spending time on tech research :how many resorted to tweaking and spending an awful lot of time understanding the way the engine works. Is that the fault of the providers or the end-developers ? Frankly, apart from the bad reputation of the Source Engine, I don't have a clue...

But anyway, we gamers don't really care about that, it's dev studio internal mess. What's important are the quality of games. So... were there any benefit in that respect for the gamers? In truth it's alarming : there is nothing that proves that game engine licensing induces better games. When you look at the games with the Unreal Engine, the average quality is very average not to say quite low. And I'm not talking about innovation in gameplay, I'm just talking about overall quality.

The point is... what's the point of licensing? Licensing engine has still to prove being profitable to the providers, that it's really useful to developers and that it helps creating better games. And thus, even so their tool suit and their engine look amazing, I wonder what might make Crytek sell their CryEngine2 while

  • CryEngine despite its enormous quality was an utter failure
  • most of the big production will take the UE3 safe bet
  • small prod will turn to cheap engine such as Torque or Ogre3D-based engine.

Really, I still dream of an industry in which a few Cryteks, Epics and Ids would focus on tech solutions while the most of the rest would push the envelope in terms of gameplay ... but it's more and more difficult to imagine it's going to happen.

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I still dream of an industry in which a few Cryteks, Epics and Ids would focus on tech solutions while the most of the rest would push the envelope in terms of gameplay...

It's something John Carmack has alluded to in the past; id Software concentrates on engine development, then works with someone like Splash Damage in the latter stages of development to produce a game with which to launch it... like Enemy Territory: Quake Wars for example, which will be id's first MegaTexture-powered game (and no doubt something they hope will revive the industry's interest in the Doom 3 engine).

What's perhaps interesting is certain pundits have cited Japanese developer interest in Western game technology, such as Mistwalker's licencing of the Unreal 3 engine for Lost Odyssey.

It's all a question of industry maturity and service-orientated business models; look at something like the Engineering industry for example. This is happening more rapidly now (just how many friggin' physics middlewares do we need?!), especially now that premium Xbox360 and PS3 titles are so expensive to develop. Just a matter of time really...

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HL² would be in the same case if it wasn't for Dark messiah and a few mods promoted to stand alone versions;

But didn't lots of games use the HL2's havock physics engine, I seem remember flatout did.

Ok jsut done some research and it turns out that Valve licensed the Havok engine off an Irish company and included it the source engine.

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It's something John Carmack has alluded to in the past; id Software concentrates on engine development, then works with someone like Splash Damage in the latter stages of development to produce a game with which to launch it... like Enemy Territory: Quake Wars for example, which will be id's first MegaTexture-powered game (and no doubt something they hope will revive the industry's interest in the Doom 3 engine).

Actually it probably isn't something they're pushing for the industry with the Doom 3 engine, since they're already working on their next generation of technology and have been for quite some time. Of course the MegaTexture-thingy will make it's return in their next engine iteration, but it will be much more useful in that revision, not only for landscape texturing. Check out Carmack's QuakeCon '06 keynote where he brings all of this up.

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Well.. just imagine how those games would have been if they didn't license the technology. I think the bigger part of the "problem" is the focus, not the tools. WW2 shooter games were popular so everybody wanted to create a game like that. Pretty much every time when a mod is announced the first few things you'll see is renders of their weapons, often it has an MP5 and/or Desert Eagle.

I do wonder whatever happened with all those half finished original mods. Some of them were released but never completed (for example MetaBall, a while ago they announced they would create MetaBall 2 using UE3 tech). But for example the mod Drawn to be alive, according to the moddb page they suffered from a knowledge drain (e.g. people being hired by companies). And I doubt that was the first time it happened with more original mods.

Don't know about iD, but at Epic they expanded the company a lot after UT2004 where part of the company focuses on the engine development and the other part creating new games. Ofcourse the question is what their game creation part will do (well except for the past GoW and upcomming UT3). And UE3 is starting to become a very interesting pluggable box with a lot of additional supported middleware, not just physics but also trees/vegitation, AI, various modeling improvement thingies. The whole thing about component oriented development is finally reaching game engines. Ofcourse this raised the licensing costs. With previous engines (UE2, Doom3, ...) you still had to apply your own glue to get the other middleware working with your engine. So I think the whole engine licensing thing is finally reaching the level where the focus can actually be placed upon the gameplay. Ofcourse this changes nothing to the fact that the money often dictates the direction to take and finally the type of game that will be released.

Anyway, if you look at Naked Sky (creators of RoboBlitz), they clearly licensed UE3 for the tech so that they could focus on the gameplay.

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And the winner is... RENDERWARE!

Vimes, what I think hapenned here is that:

a) Mod groups are mostly amateurs, people hoping to break into industry or even on a team just for shit and giggles. Whatever their ideas are (and those are often retarded/unrealistic/the opposite of innovative, like "A living world the size of US! Go to work, date a girl, use a toilet!" or "You can be hit in every limb, get drunk and use drugs! Innovative!", not to mention "A mod based on a shitty TV series/anime! Give us a cookie!"), they either fall apart due to the lack of a sensible team structure and time, or as a result of being drafted into an actual company. Not everybody can be Josh Sawyer, who - even though he has an actual job as a lead designer - is willing to spend his time on an ambitious mod (which probably will be put on hold anyway as Sawyer's duties catch up with him).

B) Licensing an engine for commercial use is still expensive. Hence, publishers can't really fuck around and are forced to put out more clones of tried and tested games.

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I'm not really into development costs, but I'd say building a honorable game engine is something achievable in maybe 8-12 months by 8 to 10 employees (including engineers) , right ? And the price for UE3 is around $500000 as Mark Rein stated... sooooo, is there a huge difference ?

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And the winner is... RENDERWARE!

What about GameBryo? RenderWare is now EA property and no longer available for licensing. So RenderWare is dead as middleware.

I'm not really into development costs, but I'd say building a honorable game engine is something achievable in maybe 8-12 months by 8 to 10 employees (including engineers) , right ? And the price for UE3 is around $500000 as Mark Rein stated... sooooo, is there a huge difference ?

Well, except that support is included with that price and usually the licensed engine is more mature (e.g. more tested and what not) and maybe has better tool support (e.g. for 3d modeling apps and what not).

And ofcourse there's the thing that you can start on the game right way without first building an engine from scratch.

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I'm not really into development costs, but I'd say building a honorable game engine is something achievable in maybe 8-12 months by 8 to 10 employees (including engineers) , right ? And the price for UE3 is around $500000 as Mark Rein stated... sooooo, is there a huge difference ?

That's, what, at least $300,000 on wages. You'll probably need more than that. Making the engine is a separate software project, and they are prone to failure. Another unknown in an already unstable venture.

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Yeah, that's my point, so why bother creating an engine when there are so many good ones out there and when it's not economically sensible ?

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If you are a larger dev studio once you made a good engine you could use it decent a number of times before it became dated (imagine you have 3 dev teams running in tandem and the engine would probably last 2-3 dev cycles, with a bit of tweaking), making it much cheaper in the long run.

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Rado is spot on about mods and mod teams. Their work is often rubbish and overly ambitious.

Additionally, art asset production is an even bigger hurdle for mod makers than game developers, and one of the primary reasons mod teams fail. People have all kinds of ambitions with correspondingly large requirements for art assets.

A certain moderately famous developer (who remains nameless I'm afraid) once wanted Black Cat to create a vast narrative + multiplayer game in Victorian London using the UT99 engine. Nuh-uh, we stayed with manageable things, and have suffered when we've tried to go beyond them.

Wise teams choose to make mods that work with the assets of the game they're modding. Then their work gets criticised for not having an original aesthetic... :bomb: (So others go for an original aesthetic and are told by fans "How dare you keep us waiting so long!" :bomb: :bomb:)

Licensed engines that ship with editors and scripting tools are an excellent way for people to cut their teeth. However, apart from the really hardcore who work in game dev during the day and mod at night, mods depend on volunteered time and lower levels of skill. The good people get industry jobs and often stop modding.

There used to be a hope that modding would facilitate an art house games scene, but I think not. Mod communities are highly balkanised according to the middleware they work with, and using a specific engine tends to tie your mod to specific forms of gameplay it was designed for.

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What about GameBryo? RenderWare is now EA property and no longer available for licensing. So RenderWare is dead as middleware.

I stand corrected - I totally forgot about that.

Rado is spot on about mods and mod teams. Their work is often rubbish and overly ambitious.

Of course, Black Cat is a noble exception and an example to follow. I'm very glad that we are in agreement.

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About mods: The only good mods to come out started out with a very minimal amount of original assets and focused instead on the gameplay. They call it a beta (or alpha) and let people play it. Gradually, it then gets some more original assets. So, people don't have to wait. Gameplay gets balanced. Assets eventually get created.

That's basically how Counter-Strike was created, if I remember correctly. I may be completely incorrect, though. But it still sounds like a good plan. :)

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That's basically how Counter-Strike was created, if I remember correctly. I may be completely incorrect, though. But it still sounds like a good plan. :)

well, that's one of the problems of FPS mods, most of them want to be like Counter-Strike. Which is a bad move, everybody that likes Counter-Strike plays Counter-Strike. Those who don't want other (more fun ;)) gameplay.

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It seems clear that in Valve's case, they built their own engine because it was the best way of achieving what they wanted with Half-Life 2. Certainly the sales of HL2 alone will have easily covered the development costs, so they didn't need to license the engine. But since it existed, why not? Perhaps the same applies to Crytek and the others? I would bet that Gears of War alone has repaid the development costs of UE3.

If we're talking about Source Engine games then let's not forget Vampire TM:B, and there are the upcoming commercial sequels to Natural Selection and They Hunger.

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CryEngine2 looks impressive, but I'm wondering as to its flexibility with texturing. Doom3 only allows 1 texture per model, which isn't very nice.

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Left 4 Dead is also being built on the Source engine. Co-op zombie game. Yummie. :yep:

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