Epic vs Monolith

Well, if Tim Sweeney did in fact post that article, then it most definetly stinks of desperation. Why else would someone as busy as a lead programmer take the time to write such a long-winded personal ranting diatribe? People don\'t insult one another for fun, it usually is for personal gain even if it\'s not immediately obvious.

tookycat@nconnect.net

#111 bs

Doom2 was doom1 with minor engine tweaks.

Same can be said for quake2 - quake 1

however, a lot of you seem to have a problem with understanding the fact that engines are rarely static. They are living pieces of code always being tweaked.

130 -- Which company?

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#126, the reason I said \'screenshots\' and not \'game\' was I never played WOT. I don\'t know.. the models in Unreal do look pretty shitty, but that\'s an art issue, the ones in UT look poor too.

Id has always been better at pumping polys but there is a price. Outdoor areas. Unreal strikes a balance there. Tribes is LESS detailed than Unreal, but can do better outdoors, and Quake3/2/1 is more detailed than Unreal, but can\'t really handle large outdoor areas (unless romero proves me wrong with DK, which I doubt). Of course, lithtech is trying to do both.

I don\'t know, I was impressed with the Unreal engine when it came out. It looked very good. Hell, even Carmack said so.

#124: the cathedral screenshots from WOT looked pretty good.

#122.. I was impressed with Unreal, I like Unreal Tournament. Quake 3 clearly has a better engine, but until Quak3, Unreal was king of the hill.

#120.. right or wrong.. this thread has gone on far too long (heh.. poetry). I think it\'s time we just chilled and said \"well know when the engine is in a new game\".


eh?

So I guess everyone is right... To some extent.

Indeed, this is from an earlier post from me:

NO wonder monolith split off technology to it\'s own company, they don\'t know how to make games. The lithtech/lithtech2 debacle is due to the fact that the lithtech2 engine is a heavily modified lithtech engine.


however, this means that all the features Hall is talking about aren\'t necessarily complete yet. Because the press release is about the LITHTECH engine.

No, freshview

lithtech and lithtech2 are the same thing.. Just modified. Notice right after it says \"shogo\" it says \"and no one lives forever\". That game is most definately being done with lithtech2...

holy shit #116 is right.... the pres release is talking about LithTech

\"the engine that powered Shogo...\"

Jason hall, however, is talking about Lithtech 2.

110: I\'ve done my homework. Or were you suggesting something else? (\"Oh, no this is Tim/Steve/Erik/Brandon posting under a false name!!!\" 8)

-- Martin

I think it\'s time for me to take my own \"arguing\" advice.

It is clear that I will never convince the Lithtech supporters that Epic\'s statement isn\'t all that bad.

And the LithTech supporters won\'t convince me that it WAS all that bad.

I still say the Unreal Engine is better than Lithtech 1.0.

Lithtech 2.0 may very well BE better than Unreal Tournament\'s engine, but dont\' tell me about it in press releases, show it to me in a game. That\'s all I ask.

#112.. I\'ll give you that.. shogo got more of my playtime than Sin, but it wasn\'t anywhere near as good as half-life or quake2.

The engine may have been solid, but it wasn\'t up to Quake and Unreal standards.

They did nothing near that for Q3. They rewrote a fair portion of the rendering engine, and some other misc stuff like the virtual machine, but it\'s not as though it\'s completely different and new.

Shogo I actually thought was quite good, the first real shooter I\'d seen in a long time. The engine itself seemed very solid, their art was what was iffy.

martin hella knows what he\'s talking about.

Either way, all I\'m saying is that as far as releasable products from monolith, I\'ve seen the following:

Blood
Blood2
Get Mideval!
Shogo:Mobile Armor Division.

The engine on the LIthtech games wasn\'t impressive and NONE Of the games were fun.

NO wonder monolith split off technology to it\'s own company, they don\'t know how to make games. The lithtech/lithtech2 debacle is due to the fact that the lithtech2 engine is a heavily modified lithtech engine.

As far as I know, only Id Software will totally scrap an earlier engine and start from scratch every time. (they didn\'t QUITE do this with Quake3, but almost).

Jason Hall loves to spout gas about all sorts of things, but, fuck, if you gave me 3 weeks, I could write you an impressive looking graphics engine. It would be useless because as soon as you tried to build a game around it, framerates would drop to zero, so I don\'t believe monolith has anything until I can see *SOMETHING*, not a game, necessarily, but something more than that stupid \"ozymandias\" movie.

Gee.. Martin sure knows quite a bit about Unreal Tech.. hmmmm

The problem with DirectX is that it\'s Windows-only. We don\'t want a Windows-only world, do we?

#107: I was speaking more in PC terms; in that everyone used to bitch about DX and praise OGL, but now it looks like DX is becoming the API of choice (and not just for compatability\\\\marketability reasons. I\'m quite willing to take your word for the core-crossplatformness (*heh* I love making up words) of the UT-engine and engines in general, since I\'m one of those clueless liberal arts peeps. /=

#103/104: Epic will support all major API\'s with their next engine but will concentrate on DX since it\'s the fastest API out now (according to Tim). Tim doesn\'t mind working with OpenGL but in it\'s current state it\'s too limiting (again, according to him).

It\'s very possible to build a modular engine and still use DirectX. The PS2 probably uses it\'s own grpahics API (of sorts as GreenMarine stated in a recent interview) and all you do is you plug in proper modules/DLLs/whatever when you compile the codebase depending on what platform you\'re compiling it for.

A lot of the compatibility comes from UnrealScript as well. Only the core functions (gfx/networking/sound/UScript parser/etc) needs to be written for the platform. The gameplay logic, AI, yada, yada is then written in UScript which can run on anyone of the platforms. In theory atleast. 8)

-- Martin

Any good comments for today? its tuesday HELLO! were are todays issues?

#68/81: Win Chun VR isn\'t out yet. Since when are you to decide what\'s crap and what\'s not? I enjoy Wheel of Time a lot, others don\'t. Nerf has gotten great reviewes and should imho be a great alternative for 10 year olds to play if their parents doesn\'t want them gibbing each other in Q3A or UT or whatever. And In what way are Epic underresourced?

#69: The comparison is between LT2 and UT, not any other way around. And a modifed UT engine at that.

#79: Oh yeah, Epic is very afraid. Not. Are you even serious?

#80: It\'s not the Unreal engine! And if you look closer you might see this: \"We\'re currently enhancing the animation system, finishing up a very powerful skeletal animation system, adding terrain and height-map support, and working on hardware T&L support, adding new Internet features.\"

#82: The Unreal engine isn\'t being ported. The UT engine is being ported and modifed.

#84: Again, it\'s a modifed UT engine that\'s being used on the PS2. But judging from your post it\'s pretty celar that you only got a couple of words into the text and then quit reading because of severe headache.

#85: I think so too. It\'s to much PR over this for it to be written by Tim. He must agree with what\'s in it though since it\'s posted in his name.

#97: Umm... I can read quite well thankyou and it\'s LithTech 2.0 that Tim is referring to. Although he uses the label \'LithTech\' throughout the majority of the release he mentions the LT2 engine at the start: \"...and Monolith is doing it now with LithTech 2.0 vs Unreal Tournament.\" Just as Jason Hall never says LithTech 2.0 when he means it (from his .plan update): \"We have been working on the PSX2 version of LT for quite some time. The PSX2 team has made great progress. As an example, I can use LT2 to build a level/world, save it, and then load and display it on a PSX2 or PC without any additional work.\" And when Tim mentions a bunch of licensees using the Unreal engine he\'s also mentioning games using the LithTech 1.0 eninge. This is because there\'s no games out based on LT 2.0 or the UT engine (besides UT).


-- Martin

Wadmaasi: Are you sure? What do you use on the playstation2 then? I doubt that this machine will use Windows CE like the dreamcast does (and even that doesn´t insure directX support). And using DirectX would go against the part where Tim Sweeny said that they wanted to have a common codebase that can easily be ported to other plattforms (Linux, PS2). DirectX ist Windows only...

Hmmm...LithTech 1.0 was originally the DirectEngine, so can we guess that LithTech 2.0 is going to use DX for its 3D rendering? I\'m taking bets that Epic\'s next-gen engine will use DX (notice that they quit trying to optimize their OGL drivers and have instead been concentrating solely on DX7 improvements). This leaves id as the sole holder of a licensable OGL-based engine. Unless TRIBES2 gets licensed out?

#79
the following quote is from http://finger.planetquake.com/plan.asp?userid=hall&id=13940

\"You would think that having support for a six figure engine would be an obvious requirement for developer to ask for - unfortunately it isn\'t. There are some companies out there that have as many as 16 licensees working with their technology and they do not have even ONE person dedicated exclusively to support! Amazing! Maybe the licensees don\'t need any support I guess... I dunno. I have a tendency to disagree with that approach. Engine licensing is not just about delivering technology, it is also about delivering a full service.\"

Though he doesn´t mention Epic he is clearly taking a stab at them. And this is the main reason Epic is so hostile towards Monolith / Jason Hall. When you think about it a dedicated support person for an engine really doesn`t make sense unless that person was involved in building the thing - and top notch programmers probably wouldn´t want to start a new career in tech support.

Where is my news! Hurry up! :)