Unreal Engine - Is it just me?

[anonymous-user]

[redacted]

[130R]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

I'm not a game developer but I imagine it's because there are a lot of developers that know how to work with that engine. UE3 is ancient now but UE4 is pretty new and presumably much better.

Mass Effect 4 will run under Frostbite 3 though I believe.

[Guvernator]

130R said:

'm not a game developer but I imagine it's because there are a lot of developers that know how to work with that engine. UE3 is ancient now but UE4 is pretty new and presumably much better.

Mass Effect 4 will run under Frostbite 3 though I believe.

I imagine familiarity has a lot to do with it plus it's the market leader. If someone thinks "I want to develop a new FPS", what's the first game engine that will pop into their heads? It's kind of circular, it's popular because so many people use it.

Frostbite 3 is good but has it's own issues, not least of which seems to be that games made on it always look a bit grainy (not sure how to describe it better) which looks a bit odd. Not sure why that is though.

[Guvernator]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

I suspected as much but almost every frostbite game I've seen has it and no option to turn it off either. Perhaps it's a part of the engine toolset that's easy to implement but I wish they wouldn't. It might look nice in a cut-scene but when I'm trying to pick off that pesky sniper from 300 yards, the last thing I want is something that blurs the screen.

[Einion Yrth]

I am a game developer and UE4 is a nightmare to work with. Horrible, horrible piece of work.

Please don't stalk me, I'd rather the client didn't know my opinion.

Oh, and currently the engine is very far from solid; hopefully it will improve, but at the moment it's a buggy mess.

[MarkRSi]

So what sort of game engines are best (or at least better) then?

I'm a developer myself but never done any game development before, just curious

[Daston]

The Unreal engine is easy to work with and pretty flexible when it comes to cross platform games. Sadly we only ever get to see a bit of what the engine can do as the developers seem intent to limit themselves to console hardware. For example UE3 had all sorts of cool coding for skin textures to get realistic lighting through skin cells (think about the look you get when you put a torch in your mouth) they also had bone structures so rag dolls could break bones etc.

I quite like that a lot of developers are using other engines such as they cryengine.

[Einion Yrth]

Daston said:

The Unreal engine is easy to work with

No, it isn't. Unless "work with" consists solely in producing junk using blueprints. It's built in physics is appallingly bad (everyone is integrating Havok) it's memory management (garbage collection, in C++?????) is a minefield that will take your leg off whenever it gets the chance. And it manages to re-implement large swathes of the STL (collections particularly), very, very badly.
Each to their own, but if I wasn't being paid to do it I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.

[Mastodon2]

It does tend to make some character skins look like they've been shat out by the vaseline monster, on the other hand it has produced some very good looking games, like Gears of War.

[EDLT]

Maybe it just has a competitive licensing agreement. Unity is popular with indy developers mostly because it's cheap.

[SlipStream77]

Is it not possible to adjust the shaders to avoid the excessive shininess?