Game Engine Showdown!

Engine developer: Epic
Summary: Sweet and safe
First game: RoboBlitz
Released: November 2006
Platform: PC/Xbox 360

First, there was Quake. Then, there was Unreal. The former was licensed out so much in the early nineties, id Software might as well have stuck a copy of the engine, a bunch of blank discs, a burner and cash deposit box outside its headquarters in Dallas, Texas and just let the likes of Raven go crazy.

Unreal, on the other hand, took its time gaining traction, but once it did, it quickly surpassed the popularity of its rival and today is easily the most licensed game engine in existence, with over 100 titles based on some form of it.

That latest incarnation of the technology is Unreal Engine 3. Although its potency was demonstrated back in 2004, it wasn’t until late 2006 we’d see the first use of the engine, in a game called RoboBlitz.

RoboBlitz did an okay job of showing off the new technology. The most advanced bells, whistles, trumpets and clarinets of Direct3D 9.0c were on display, including high-dynamic range lighting, virtual displacement maps, the very latest in normal mapping, bloom, specular maps, soft shadows, volumetric fog and post-processing. It was like id’s Doom 3, but on steroids. Lots of steroids.

Even then, for most gamers poor RoboBlitz was just a blip on the radar. For us, it was 2K Australia/2K Boston’s BioShock that appeared like a leviathan on our scope, shaking its gorgeousness around like Jessica Alba in Honey. And honey it was, when it finally appeared in August ‘07.

‘[UE3] was a pretty natural decision for us as we’ve already worked extensively with Unreal on previous projects,’ explains Jonathan Chey of 2K Australia/2K Boston. ‘Epic had already indicated that they would be making a big push to get the engine performing well on 360 as well as PC, and it was important to us to find an engine that performed well on console in addition to PC.’ Thanks to this familiarity and the maturity of the technology, Chey says that prototyping BioShock was easy from the word go.

UE3 was not perfect, however.

‘With any engine there are always certain choices that the tech provider makes that aren’t those you would have made yourselves. For example, we’re not big fans of the content package system in Unreal,’ says Chey. ‘We have a lot of problems with multiple developers trying to access elements in a package at the same time, which results in workflow problems. Also, having to share data from [one] side of the world to another, as we do, isn’t well supported when you have very large monolithic data packages.

‘But using any engine is about learning to live with the decisions that have been made and not trying to fight against them,’ he says.

Other than the data file gripes, the 2K studio has little in the way of bad things to say about the engine. In fact, 2K Australia/2K Boston is looking forward to the PS3 version of UE3 - the reason for which we’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.

Recently, two game developers – US-based Silicon Knights and the Japanese Mistwalker Studios – have drawn issue with UE3, specifically Epic’s ability to provide support.

Chey admits that 2K Australia/2K Boston’s familiarity with the Unreal technology means that they’ve had little reason to phone home. For newcomers SK and Mistwalker, it’s a different story.

According to tech site Arstechnica, Epic provided SK with a version of the engine that did not perform as advertised. Arstechnica quotes SK president Dennis Dyack, who claims that Epic failed to rectify the problems the company presented. As such, it has now entered into litigation with Epic.

For Mistwalker, Arstechnica discovered that although Epic provides free updates to its technology, it was not so keen to help the studio integrate the new tech into its current project. Mistwalker also had trouble communicating with Epic, due to a lack of Japanese-speaking staff.

While some of the issues are obviously not Epic’s fault, it does bring into question exactly how supportive the company is of its technology.


Strengths: Maturity and a strong legacy. With studios as diverse as Bioware making the RPG Mass Effect, to Auran’s work on the fast-paced third-person MMO Fury, UE3 can do it all. It also helps that the technology supports D3D 9.0c and D3D 10 (as shown in BioShock), and looks utterly superb when used to full effect. We also know that Unreal provides licensees with new updates for its technology, so they’re never behind the curve.

Weaknesses: According to Jon Chey, the data file system is not the most flexible out there. There’s also the question of UE3’s ability to render large outdoor scenes, something which we have yet to see in the currently available titles that use the technology. Finally, the issues with Silicon Knights and Mistwalker has us wondering if Epic is spread to thin, or has become lax with its licensee support. It’s not an issue many developers will talk openly about, but we’ll be watching events unfold with upcoming UE3-based properties including Fury, Mass Effect and Jericho.