wow this week is like troll week: first hellmania with awful reviews of games then acidshaman being a d**k saying that every free app on the appvent calender suck and now dogmeat with all this s**t
Well the really great thing about UE3 is not only the graphics, but the possibilities what games can be made and in what time. Great graphics is only one of the advantage. You can make any type of game with the easy-to-use engine, not only FPS! It can anything, from top down shooters, rpg, car racing, adventures to multiplayer fps. Just check out this thread: http://forums.epicgames.com/forumdisplay.php?f=368 And now imagine this kind power in hands of indie developers... Because UE3 if FREE to use... (You must only pay some royalties) I can't wait...
I believe the announcement mentioned that the iPhone port of their engine is not included in the free toolkit. It has not yet been made public how much using the engine would cost. Despite that, it's strange how everyone's going nuts about this engine and totally forgetting that there's already Unity for the iPhone. The fact that UE3 needs shader hardware to run already means it has a very limited business case on the platform. Nobody in the right of their minds would start developing a large game with an engine that raises false expectations about the target quality for a device base that's a small fraction of the market. This may change in the future when shader-capable devices are the majority of the market, but that's years away. Even if the engine itself runs on the hardware, it doesn't mean the games that have been developed for consoles using it would have any chance of running on a mobile device with significantly less performance than a home console. The data size, poly counts, even control designs have all been made with a totally different device performance category in mind. UE3 is not going to magically transform iPhone games to the next level of quality. The games on this platform are already only limited by the business case, not the technology.
lol. sucks that it won't be comaptible with 2G / 3G. hopefully it doesn't take that much battery. my playtime expectation with this engine running is like only 1 hour. even tap tap revenge 2 has at least only 2 haha. i wonder if gameloft will use the engine. that would be EPIC.
I struggle to understand your logic. No one is saying they've got to port over Gears of War et al to the iPhone. But with a solid engine in place, the developer needs only focus most of his efforts on things like controls, story line etc. And not all games are limited by the business case alone. Perhaps for the likes of EA, yes, but most of the games on the iPhone aren't even really pushing the limits of even the older hardware. There are already millions of 3GS iPhones and 3rd Gen iPod Touches sold already. There's got to be a time when a developer decides to break free of the mass market and move on with quality. In fact, the first developer to come out with a 3GS exclusive game with high production values (meeting or exceeding that of the PSP) is bound to see a tremendous amount of sales purely based on the pre-release hype bound to be drummed up thanks to the improved visuals. Funny you mention Unity as an alternative, conveniently forgetting to mention that Unity is not nearly capable of pumping out visuals such as those in the Anandtech article (even in its unpolished state). SOmeone has got to test the waters, and that person has to stop thinking about the silly 'mass market' angle. With that same Logic you're applying, you wonder why devs bother making games for the PS3 when the PS2 has at least 10 times the install base. So if you were president of Konami in 2006 you'd have canned all PS3 development in favour of the more 'mass market' PS2?
yes and no- mods say free mods of the engine like defense alliance it is free however in order to create say retail game like one of my games that i am looking forward to Red Orchestra: Heroes of Stalingrad you must own a license
It doesen't have shaders so you can forget ever seeing it run well on an iPT2G or older! I know how you feel, I don't have a 3GS/iPT3G either.
No fear, the best U3 engine games won't be released straight away... by the time we all get around to upgrading they'll be top notch.
yes i have a game specific copy of that on steam (killing floor) it is and has always been the devs of the UE engine to provide a free SDK however as i was saying in order to try and make a profit i.e. sell a game on steam or the app store you must own a license to the game
This is untrue and totally underestimates the expenses related to team sizes needed to produce "next-gen" content. And yes, most games are limited by the business case alone, and this is as true to big publishers as it is to small indies. Games aren't more polished, more full-featured or more content-rich for the single reason that the business case doesn't exist on the iPhone. Professional game development costs money, and any professionally developed game must expect profit. The only ones who can afford to make their game perfect are hobbyist developers with full-time jobs. These developers are highly unlikely to benefit from UE3 because coding the game logic and shaders, plus making detailed, normal-mapped 3D levels and characters in the 3D program of your choice is a job usually better suited to a full-time team. Sure, as already mentioned in my previous post this business case doesn't exist until shader hardware has a majority market share. Right now the 3GS-specific games have had limited success or downright disappointing results. Give it a year or two and something nice and 3GS-specific may arrive to the market. It's not exactly reasonable to expect a high quality game to be developed in less time anyhow. I brought up Unity because as an engine it is more relevant to the current App Store market situation than UE3. As for the visuals, the fact that Unity on iPhone has been used in small-budget projects is a poor reference for the capabilities of the engine. In the right hands it is capable of producing competitive visuals even on the powerful home consoles. In 2006 excellent PS2 projects were canned or rejected because publishers were caught in the next-gen hype and foolishly expected PS3 to magically flush 150 million PS2 consoles away. So as a result they were caught with much more expensive projects on a device base roughly 10% in size, noticing they should've waited another year. It's easy to expect someone to bite the bullet when it's not you wondering how to pay the wages for the people in the company. And in any case you're reading my previous post in much more hostile manner than it was written. UE3 is a production-proven engine and it's nice to see it running on 3GS hardware, but the reality of App Store as a marketplace makes it ill-suited for high-end content. It would be nice to see this change, and partially it may change as the market share of shader hardware grows larger, but price points are still a huge concern. It's also important to remember that (in a roundabout way) UE3 is only good for the games it's good for. Making a character-focused action or adventure game is a huge undertaking for any studio, and traditionally UE3 has shined here. But if you look at the innovative games on iPhone, most of them are so far from the above genres that wrapping their logic around UE3 might even hurt development more than it helps. In any case, if as a studio we could afford to undertake a project utilizing UE3, it's quite difficult to justify 3GS as a lead platform instead of putting the same budget into taking that game to PSN and XBLA. And finally, the first game to feature 3GS-specific content, Dark Raider 3GS, sold a few hundred copies since launch. Admittedly it doesn't compare to Gears of War as a product, but the mentioned numbers do provide a loose indication that the owners of 3GS hardware are in large numbers not interested in normal maps and pixel shading - they're just people who have bought "a fast iPhone".
I see no point on having UE3 for the iPhone. The only people who would care about it are the kids and 2 hardcore gamers out there starving for console-like experiences. Also, a game using this engine would drain the battery life of the platform in seconds.
some of u are are very wrong... newer devices will have much higher gaming capabilities than older ones. the ipod 4G will play game that the 3g cant. ur guys are basically saying that ps3 games should work on ur ps2. NO! the ps3 has the best graphics ever seen in console gaming, better than the 360, wii, and 95 % of computers, and ur asking a 7 year old thing to do that? the ipod 3g and iphone 3gs has a graphics card 28 times more powerful than the 2g and 1g. u cant make something that requires 28 times more power than what u have run on ur device. i want a console quality experience on my ipod! the ipod 3g has a better graphics card than a psp and ps2. i want games that will make pspGO owners burn their PSPs and run out to buy itouch 32 and 64 gigs. if u want to play Super MArio Bros. 1 on ur ipod, go ahead. no one will stop u. Millions of other people want Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 on their ipods! ( Nazi zombies is a joke: sloppy controls and graphics are pretty bad compared to modern combat sandstorm.
There are so many inaccuracies and ignorant statements in that mess that it just totally voids your first sentence... more or less turns it right back on you in fact. 10 posts and you're insulting people? I hope the mods come down on you fast.
Funny how you sound so confident about what Unity can't do. Are you a Unity Pro developer to say that ? Because I am since january 09, and I can say that Unity is very capable of producing whatever your brain can pump out. The only visual limitation is from the hardware.
You are right about the 'hostile' comment, and i sincerely apologize for the tone of my earlier response. I agree with you on the cost factor for small teams, i think big devs like EA are far more likely to recoup their costs from development on the 3GS. But it's worth noting that the 3rd gen ipod touch is also a factor in this equation. So it's not just people that bought a 'fast iphone'. Unity is a powerful tool in the right hand, i agree. But when you're speaking of projects that can compete with titles on home consoles, surely you're referring to desktop Unity, not the version specifically for the iPhone? either way, i did not mean to sound disparaging of the capabilities of the Unity engine, we've gotten lots of really cool games from Unity devs. And from the time spent on the Unity forums i agree with you that the output depends entirely on the skill of the devs. Where i disagree with you completely is on your timeline for more devs to focus on the PowerVR SGX GPU found in the later models. I'm pretty sure that when the 2010 iPhones and ipod touch models come out, more and more of the 2G and 3G holdouts will switch. You're overlooking something really critical here: the Apple Tablet. It's defintely going to be packing Open GL 2.0 hardware, and it's definitely going to attract a serious number of big time devs. Porting stuff from the tablet to the iPhone will not be much of an issue. Already i've heard Apple are requesting specific big Devs to make their apps scale nicely on higher resolution. If the tablet does as well as expected, you should see lots of really good stuff on the 3GS For the poor sales of 3GS specific games, it's easy to see why. People like flashy graphics! 3GS only games should look like PSP games, not bland looking games with a few lighting effects thrown in. Insane graphics = hype = sales!!
