A discussion on the relevance of engines

[Killing_You]

I was originally going to post this as a response to a post in a different thread, but I feel like this deserves to be discussed in a broader sense, and to avoid derailing another topic.

 

I have to ask: why are people so concerned with what engine a game uses? To me, the only people who need to worry about engines are the developers, as they need to work with it in order to create their game. But why is it an issue for the average consumer (or player, for free games such as the ones at W3D Hub)? It's pretty baffling, honestly.

 

To use a AAA example: One of the many criticisms that Call of Duty has received over the years is the fact that they essentially all use the same engine. Personally, I don't see why it matters, as the IW engine clearly does everything Infinity Ward/Sledgehammer/Treyarch want it to do, not to mention the fact that it's been tweaked and updated over the years. The same could be said for W3D; Sure, it's an old engine, but it's come a long way since Renegade came out in 2002. Just look at what we have so far; sprinting, digging underground, deployable artillery, walkers, jetpacks, chronoshifting, sandworms, etc... Stuff that nobody would've thought remotely possible 13 years ago. And yet, there is still a push for a switch to UDK or UE4 because they're "better engines." While I'm not blind to the advantages of moving to UE4, I do wonder why people claim that the switch would solve all of our issues and bring in tons of players.

 

What are your thoughts on this? Is there something I'm missing here?

[GeneralCamo]

Mostly graphical and modding capabilities. I will admit, in the past few weeks working as a full-time developer, I got frustrated at times with outdated techniques.

 

For those of you who do not know (most of you), I have been working full-time on TSR. I've been working on not only bringing new features and balancing, but also some new graphics. I've been updating our effects, and also implementing a new system of headlights and brakelights that is designed to bring a bit more to the table in terms of graphics. Reception internally has been positive, but it is difficult as I need to do a lot of these things. For all that work, it adds a bit graphically, but it isn't as good as what I really want. To let me demonstrate, I was working on a few lightmaps for AR before I started work on TSR. Here is my (WIP) results on the barracks after a few iterations:

This looks great, yes? Well, unfortunately, w3d does not support the lighting I did here, so I need to fake it. And it still won't look as good as this render.

 

However, with an engine like UE4, I can create the lightmap right in the engine, and essentially, what you see is what you get in-game, since the editor is the game.

 

Do further note that I have access to the latest script builds of w3d, and a ton of documentation and helpful experience. What about modders who do not have access to this stuff? They will for sure have a much harder time.

[danpaul88]

Somewhat off topic, but the lighting in the screenshot you posted looks really over-saturated, far too bright in many places. Obviously hard to judge lighting from a single perspective though.

 

 

As for engine comparisons... it really doesn't matter all that much in the long run, good gameplay is far more important than pretty graphics, although pretty graphics do help!

[GeneralCamo]

Yeah, OWA mentioned that. That picture was actually me trying out a new renderer (Mental Ray as opposed to Scanline) in 3dsmax. I was going to fix it, then I was drafted into TSR.

[OWA]

For me, a game engine facilitates game functionality. If Game Engine A has all of the functionality that a team needs to make it's game, but Game Engine B has none of the functionality, but features better graphics and physics, then Engine A is the clear winner, because it already has a large amount of the key pieces in place to make the game that the team wants to make.

 

If you chalk it up to W3D vs UDK, W3D has all of the functionality there already, whereas UDK (even with the Renegade X SDK) does not.

[DeviousDave]

To be honest with you, I like the W3D engine and TSR being on it, I'm not a dev and have very little experience with modelling or game making/modding shenanigans (I once tried to put an ION cannon turret into an onslaught map on UT2004 oh so many years ago.... it didn't end well) but as someone who messes about with textures and and all that, I like how easy it is to just... well... do stuff.

 

Take my modified Banshee for example

 

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/710787530750187747/E32F476AE7E035F990D6F8C77D7351241EC80237/

 

it's just so much nicer not having to use specialist software and learn the whole Unreal engine just to re-texture stuff and just being able to paint it how I want using paint.net while even having the game open and watching it update every time I click save.

 

Maybe it's just me, I think the ION cannon incident made me afraid of the Unreal Editor (sigh)

 

P.s, really wish I could use the whole image in post thing with stuff from my Steam library without the 'You are not allowed to use that image extension on this community' . Real pain having to go to upload to Photobucket just to post a pic here

Edited June 4, 2015 by DeviousDave

[Einstein]

I have splitted the side-discussion into another topic here. Glad that finally got fixed!

 

Dave I'd kinda like to know about your ION cannon episode lol but this probably isn't the topic for that. Also nice banshee!

 

I tend to agree that the W3D engine was "made" for this niche type of gaming. As has been mentioned multiple times, many of the features we use are unique to our engine. So unless someone wants to make a totally new engine that retains all the functionality of ours, PLUS some extra to account for the hacks we've had to make throughout the years, PLUS support for better renders and such, its plain to me that we've chosen wisely in sticking with what already contains the most functions that our dev team would otherwise have to code themselves on another engine. The quicker the engine is functioning on the level we need it to, the quicker the devs can work on the actual game stuff without having to worry if something will blow up or not.

 

My humble opinion, take with a grain of salt.

[Squid Empire]

Here are some responses to the initial post:

 

I was originally going to post this as a response to a post in a different thread, but I feel like this deserves to be discussed in a broader sense, and to avoid derailing another topic.

 

I have to ask: why are people so concerned with what engine a game uses? To me, the only people who need to worry about engines are the developers, as they need to work with it in order to create their game. But why is it an issue for the average consumer (or player, for free games such as the ones at W3D Hub)? It's pretty baffling, honestly.

 

To use a AAA example: One of the many criticisms that Call of Duty has received over the years is the fact that they essentially all use the same engine. Personally, I don't see why it matters, as the IW engine clearly does everything Infinity Ward/Sledgehammer/Treyarch want it to do, not to mention the fact that it's been tweaked and updated over the years. The same could be said for W3D; Sure, it's an old engine, but it's come a long way since Renegade came out in 2002. Just look at what we have so far; sprinting, digging underground, deployable artillery, walkers, jetpacks, chronoshifting, sandworms, etc... Stuff that nobody would've thought remotely possible 13 years ago. And yet, there is still a push for a switch to UDK or UE4 because they're "better engines." While I'm not blind to the advantages of moving to UE4, I do wonder why people claim that the switch would solve all of our issues and bring in tons of players.

 

What are your thoughts on this? Is there something I'm missing here?

 

You're correct to say that the players shouldn't be concerned with the engine, it should be an entirely technical topic for the developers only. The fact that players are talking about it shows that there's a problem. It's an indirect path, but the players are responding to shortcomings in the project as a whole by fixating on the engine. Development of the W3D games is about as slow as it can be (I know it's just a hobby), and the graphics are not a major concern of the teams. The reason some people are recommending updating the engine is that they believe that doing so would help the fix these problems. By changing to a newer engine, the teams would be able to move faster: because of the support, communities, resources, and technology these engines offer - as compared to the entirety of W3D knowledge existing in this small community.

It's not a direct criticism of the W3D engine at all, but a statement that "Hey, you've been slogging away on this ancient engine to make these games, and in 10+ years we have something 'passable'. Maybe if you switch to some modern tools, you'll be able to create better games, faster?"

 

Using a AAA game as an example isn't really relevant, as they're working with gigantic teams and heavily modify their engines themselves in a very short time. And for them it's true that the engine they use, so long as it supports their game and looks on par, is of little consequence to the player. Again, it's true that our teams have been editing the W3D engine to suit our needs, the pacing of that is what creates the issue. It might be that W3D hub simply doesn't have the staff to do what we want using this engine.

 

In my opinion, switching to a modern engine would allow faster, more rewarding work (especially as it would give the team members marketable experience with modern tools), thereby giving the players a better game sooner. However the downside would be the loss of years of W3D work and the likely death of the engine completely.

 

It boils down to the question of whether this team exists to create TSR, AR, and the other titles, or whether this group exists to preserve and update the W3D engine.

[danpaul88]

You also need to consider copyright. C%C is owned by EA, making C&C games on a non EA (and non C&C) engine leaves us even more vulnerable to the EA legal department deciding they don't like what we're doing.

 

I also love how people assume that a new engine would make things faster. We'd probably have to spend several years customising any other engine before we even started porting the games properly, with nothing being released to the public at all. New engine is not some kind of magic bullet go faster stripe

[OWA]

In my opinion, switching to a modern engine would allow faster, more rewarding work (especially as it would give the team members marketable experience with modern tools), thereby giving the players a better game sooner. However the downside would be the loss of years of W3D work and the likely death of the engine completely.

From an art perspect, changing the engine would make the art pipeline a lot slower. Currently what we do is model something, then texture it, but with a newer engine, we'd have to model a high polygon model before making a low polygon model to bake the details out into a normal map, then we've got to paint the diffuse and create the specular. It adds extra steps on that would undoubtably slow things down on the art side of things. The only saving grace is that we get to use newer versions of max.

[Synaesthesia]

>Currently what we do is model something, then texture it, but with a newer engine, we'd have to model a high polygon model before making a low polygon model to bake the details out into a normal map, then we've got to paint the diffuse and create the specular. It adds extra steps on that would undoubtable slow things down on the art side of things.

 

I feel that if you (in general) as an artist truly enjoy the work you're doing, developing art for a new engine is not going to be a problem. It's not hard to do these days, either. You can make high-end models without high-poly baking. There's a lot of methods you can use to create AAA art that don't require the ridiculous timeframes