Church and State
One thing I've always wondered about the big engine shops, but Epic in particular, is what role their games play as engine test-drives for other developers. Naturally, the first game using the latest Unreal Engine is a game made by Epic, but does the team consider their title something more than a 40-hour tech demo? Is Epic a game developer or a middleware developer? How much does church and state intermingle?
"The last thing I'm gonna do is ship crappy foliage," Capps says, "because then one of our other competitors has a hallmark of, 'Look, ours is better than theirs.' ... So we think of that sometimes. We should make sure this feature is better than what id Tech just showed, or what Valve just showed. I feel like we do pretty well for that. But that's the engine team trying to make features better, not the game team being told, 'OK, guys, there's not enough ragdoll physics in this level. We need more in order to be competitive with Crytek.' That's not how we do it.
"We are probably more competitive with games than we are with engines. I'm more worried about Brothers in Arms coming out with a cool feature that looks great and makes our game look crappy. That's more concerning to me than what id Tech or what Crytek does. We're game developers first."
Tim Sweeney Plays Dice with the Universe
The game engine business is a harrowing one. In order to remain competitive, you have to begin designing an engine around technology that doesn't yet exist. It's a form of gambling at which Sweeney excels. He dedicates much of his time to developing new versions of Unreal, and right now is trying to read the minds of Microsoft and Sony to figure out how their consoles will work in 2012.
He says determining what to update within the engine reduces risk. A lot of what's in the Unreal Engine 3, like the network code, likely won't change much in Unreal 4. "Everybody's not gonna have multi-gigabit broadband connections," he says. But "things like graphics engines and things like support for multi-threading will be completely replaced."
From an outside perspective, that makes sense. My cable internet connection has been getting progressively better, but even if the rate at which my transfer speed were to double every year for four years, I'd have a 96-megabit transfer rate. That's a lot more data, but from a layman's perspective, the fact data can move faster doesn't change the way you move it. But in the past five years, I've mastered, lost, re-mastered and re-lost the secrets of graphics card technology. It's a safe bet there will be another revolution in time for Unreal 4.
Sweeney also says the prognostication isn't entirely original. "You look at all these external references and see what you can 'steal' from them. What other game developers are doing is one thing, but more importantly there's this wealth of information of what people were doing with offline editors 10 and 15 years ago. And all those techniques are now possible to do in real-time. ... Often when you're developing a rendering technique, you'll find, 'Oh, this was actually developed in the late 1980s!' ... Now you can do it at 60 frames per second."
