• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Do you think every developer should use Unreal Engine as their base to make their game or should stick to their own engines?

Derktron

Banned
I always wondered what would happen if all devs including major ones would stop using their own engines and just use Unreal Engine, I mean the tech demo we saw a while back is something to get excited over but should all devs stick to their own engine or should they just use Unreal Engine? So what are your thoughts on this? Should some devs stick to their own engine or use Unreal Engine?
 

TintoConCasera

I bought a sex doll, but I keep it inflated 100% of the time and use it like a regular wife
Not an expert, but I think some engines are better suited for some kind of games than others.

I also guess that developing your own engine grants you more control over what you'll be building with it, which can lead to better optimized games.
 

Husky

THE Prey 2 fanatic
I really enjoy seeing new engines, and I'm pretty good at learning to recognize certain engines by a quick glance, though it's mostly instinctual learning, not analytical. I find it comforting when I look at a game and can't immediately tell what it's running on, so I'd like more new engines. Some engines are also gonna specialize in areas that other engines can't quite match.

Northlight, Frostbite, REDEngine, 4A Engine deserve to live :lollipop_crying:
 
Last edited:

Mista

Banned
Each engine can be utilised differently. Take DECIMA for an example, look how Horizon looked beautiful and then look how Death Stranding looked Phenomenal.

I love to see different studio’s approach to the same engine. When you see 5 games using UE but they don’t look the same at all, here’s when I wish to see more studio’s using it.

It’s a beautiful thing which shows who’s going to excel over who. Sticking to one engine is a big no though cause I want to see the same happening with other engines.
 
Last edited:

keraj37

Member
I am playing now star wars from respawn made in UE and even if it looks good, it is no where near frostbyte star wars game made by DICE. So I hope developers will not abandon original engines.
 

Rat Rage

Member
Developers should start making more handmade spritebased games, regardless of engine (for example). Not every (AAA) game needs to have polygon-based graphics, nor does every game need to be a cinematic walking simulator or a first person shooters or rouge-like. I'd say developers should go back to their roots and stop listening to their marketing teams and start producing something unique again visually-wise, even if it's expensive. Fuck all of that - they should take the damn risk and break free from mediocricity.

I absolutely hate the "samey" look of many "modern" games.
 
Last edited:

driqe

Member
I like seeing AAA games being made on proprietary engines.
Forza Tech and Decima comes to mind. Forza Tech is used in Flight Sim, Horizon, Motorsport, and Fable. The integration of Azure and Bing is also something that no other engines have (I think).
 
Last edited:

harmny

Banned
Developers should start making more handmade spritebased games, regardless of engine (for example). Not every (AAA) game needs to have polygon-based graphics, nor does every game need to be a cinematic walking simulator or a first person shooters or rouge-like. I'd say developers should go back to their roots and stop listening to their marketing teams and start producing something unique again visually-wise, even if it's expensive. Fuck all of that - they should take the damn risk and break free from mediocricity.

I absolutely hate the "samey" look of many "modern" games.

Bankrupt
 

TintoConCasera

I bought a sex doll, but I keep it inflated 100% of the time and use it like a regular wife
Developers should start making more handmade spritebased games, regardless of engine (for example). Not every (AAA) game needs to have polygon-based graphics, nor does every game need to be a cinematic walking simulator or a first person shooters or rouge-like. I'd say developers should go back to their roots and stop listening to their marketing teams and start producing something unique again visually-wise, even if it's expensive. Fuck all of that - they should take the damn risk and break free from mediocricity.

I absolutely hate the "samey" look of many "modern" games.
Handmade spritebased animations are much more expensive to make that 3d animation, and (sadly imo) they will sell a lot worse than 3d games.
 

RoboFu

One of the green rats
Nah unreal isn’t great for every single situation but Some devs have come up with neat ways to deal with limitations of engines like unreal.

like dragon quest games now use specific areas in the scenes the player is in for the battles. This is because it’s too costly with loading to have to keep loading out and in different scenes.
 

blastprocessor

The Amiga Brotherhood
A common problem l see with Unreal is performance issues/stuttering. It's renders beautiful graphics (Days Gone one example) but even on PS5 it stutters.

l feel custom engines better squeeze the potential of the machine l mean look at Last of Us 2. I also feel a custom engine can provide some innovations like the amazing hair rendering in EA's recent FIFA, incredible lighting/detail in Dreams.

Would Unreal be what it is today if it wasn't for developers pushing the envelope with their custom engines?
 
Last edited:

Bernkastel

Ask me about my fanboy energy!
I like seeing AAA games being made on proprietary engines.
Forza Tech and Decima comes to mind. Forza Tech is used in Flight Sim, Horizon, Motorsport, and Fable. The integration of Azure and Bing is also something that no other engines have (I think).
Its not. Flight Sim uses Asobo's in house engine which is another engine that should live on.
 

driqe

Member
A common problem l see with Unreal is performance issues/stuttering. It's renders beautiful graphics (Days Gone one example) but even on PS5 it stutters.

l feel custom engines better squeeze the potential of the machine l mean look at Last of Us 2. I also feel a custom engine can provide some innovations like the amazing hair rendering EA's recent FIFA, incredible lighting/detail in Dreams.

Would Unreal be what it is today if it wasn't for developers pushing the envelope with their custom engines?
I think optimization is up to the developer. Gears 5 looks great and is well optimized on the base xbone
 
Mostly of developers do use unreal or unity as base. First fast sketch prototype are done with those engine. When artists want to do look and feel some use their engine of choice.

Common practice. later own all is remade in house.

Btw, were I work we mostly use Unity. Is a custom unity made in house (buy the engine and edit it) is not plain unity subscription. Post effect, asset loading, particles and UI ... all new from scratch. Also is very expensive to buy the engine and modify it. That’s why most of companies keep old versions. We don’t have the subscription, we bought “that” version.

I did all the post effects, unity was taking around 8ms on mobile and I reduced it to 2 ms. I also made from scratch all the profile tools. It barely look like unity.
 
Last edited:

driqe

Member
Its not. Flight Sim uses Asobo's in house engine which is another engine that should live on.
"It is not easy to answer this question. I would say that the first difficulty was to successfully deport 99.9% of the game data to the cloud with Microsoft Azure technology, which allows us to model the entire planet at a high level detailing. "

"Then, we had the great support of Turn 10 during all the years of development of the simulator to learn all the physics, photo-realism, density and base structure of the FTech Engine, which in the version we used, was slightly modified to support the large load of data. "

"In short, the visual rendering is calculated on the player's Windows 10, but all the 3D Textures and Data used come from the FTech Engine in a mix with Azure."

 

harmny

Banned
A common problem l see with Unreal is performance issues/stuttering. It's renders beautiful graphics (Days Gone one example) but even on PS5 it stutters.

l feel custom engines better squeeze the potential of the machine l mean look at Last of Us 2. I also feel a custom engine can provide some innovations like the amazing hair rendering in EA's recent FIFA, incredible lighting/detail in Dreams.

Would Unreal be what it is today if it wasn't for developers pushing the envelope with their custom engines?

Yes but that hair rendering tech was just added to frostbite. When you use unreal you can add your own tech too. Look at the water in sea of thieves.

At the end of the day having your own engine is great if you have a team that can maintain an update it. But for smaller teams unreal is a great tool
 
Last edited:

Bernkastel

Ask me about my fanboy energy!
"It is not easy to answer this question. I would say that the first difficulty was to successfully deport 99.9% of the game data to the cloud with Microsoft Azure technology, which allows us to model the entire planet at a high level detailing. "

"Then, we had the great support of Turn 10 during all the years of development of the simulator to learn all the physics, photo-realism, density and base structure of the FTech Engine, which in the version we used, was slightly modified to support the large load of data. "

"In short, the visual rendering is calculated on the player's Windows 10, but all the 3D Textures and Data used come from the FTech Engine in a mix with Azure."

That article is full of mistranslations and mentions stuffs not mentioned in the original article. They said in the Noclip interview that they used "in house engine".
This article is known to have mistranslated everything. It says stuffs like "Asobo is working on another project with Microsoft". Sadly everyone picked up this news and believed it.
Here is the original article in French(use Google Translate)
No mention of Turn 10 and ForzaTech.

Its not just NoClip, Asobo has done many other interviews with Flight Sim YouTubers and always said "in-house engine". Heres another interview.


At 5:11


6:06
 

driqe

Member
That article is full of mistranslations and mentions stuffs not mentioned in the original article. They said in the Noclip interview that they used "in house engine".
Couldn't ftech be interpreted as an in house engine? Also, why would turn10 assist in the development if they aren't using ftech? Why would Asobo need Turn10's help to understand how to use their own in house engine? Idk this is confusing lol
 
Last edited:

Dr_Salt

Member
I really don't care. Its not as if pretty graphics is a substitute for good art direction, writing, creativity and gameplay. I would take any of those before gfx.
There are alot of great game engines I don't see the point of having UE only as if it was some kind of holy grail.
 

Bernkastel

Ask me about my fanboy energy!
Couldn't ftech be interpreted as an in house engine? Also, why would turn10 assist in the development if they aren't using ftech? Why would Asobo need Turn10's help to understand how to use their own in house engine? Idk this is confusing lol
That madinfinite article can't be use as a source in any way. In the Noclip interview they said that Plagues Tale has the same engine as Flight Sim. In a Major Nelson interview last year, Phil praised Asobo's in house tech.
 

Rat Rage

Member
Handmade spritebased animations are much more expensive to make that 3d animation, and (sadly imo) they will sell a lot worse than 3d games

I always hear this shit. It drives me nuts!! How come SNK could develop 7 Metal Slug mainline games in 12 years in the 90s, sell them at a profit , which are still widely considered one of the most advanced/complex sprite-based 2D graphics works to this day, if it was that hard to produce them? How many people even worked on the first Metal Slug? According to Wikipedia the first 3 games were developed by SNK's Nazca
team, which was like 12 people (at least known through the credits). Let's just assume they were double that or even triple that, so 24 to 36 people (programmers, sound composers, producers inlcluded). If a bunch of these people could develop 3 mainline Metal Slug games in roughly 3 - 4 years, producing nothing but the highest quality of 2D animation, then I call bullshit that developing handmade 2D spritebasd games is just an impossible endeavour, workload-wise as well as financially and/or more expensive than making 3D games. Today, you have hundreds (!) of developers working on one Unreal-Engine based 3D game for years, which cost hundres of millions of dollars, and some of these games even struggle to break even. I don't believe 2D spirte games are harder and/or more expensive to make than the usual high-profile 3D games these days. I just don't believe it.
 

Hugare

Member
Hell no

UE can produce some great results (FF VII and Days Gone), but it has serious problems with I/O

Fallen Order had streaming issues, FF VII had streaming issues and Days Gone also had streaming issues

Both in Fallen Order and FF VII devs had to use the "narrow spaces to go through" in order to make the game work, and it really affected the design of the game in a bad way.

Dont know what Bend did with Days Gone (after patches), goddamn wizards

Also, you can spot that the games were made in UE if you look deep enough.

I love the unique look of different engines
 
Not an expert, but I think some engines are better suited for some kind of games than others.

I also guess that developing your own engine grants you more control over what you'll be building with it, which can lead to better optimized games.
This is absolutely true.

I think that standardizing the engine everyone is using to some degree will allow developers to create games faster. Instead of devoting time to making a custom engine for every generation/game that time could be used for actually developing the game as apposed to the foundation for it.

There is something to be said that this approach would kill a bit of the uniqueness different engines have and genericize the foundation though. I dont like that aspect, but I think if the engine was extremely configurable this wouldnt be as big of an issue.

Really when it comes down to it, developers need to find ways to streamline development and make things more efficient. Consumers dont want to wait 5 years between games due to development times, and then be greeted with a let down if the project is a failure. Simultaneously, businesses need to make money and I would imagine 5 year gaps between income spikes aren't ideal. Increasing the rate at which projects are dropped (as long as their quality doesnt suffer) should allow them to increase their rate of return.

And then there's the topic of development hell, which may be due to engine re-writes and a whole lot of nonsense that could be avoided if smarter work was done.
 
Last edited:

Yumi

Member
When I went to school for sound recording and production the question of what the best program to use was brought up a lot with varying answers. But I remember one of my favorite teachers telling me one on one that ultimately the best one is the one you are best at.

So I wouldn’t agree with everyone using Unreal even if it is technically the best because it might not be the best for everyone.
 
Use their own...

The ccp thanks you for your personal info, pay no mind to the unreal exe collecting info.

maxresdefault.jpg
 
Each engine can be utilised differently. Take DECIMA for an example, look how Horizon looked beautiful and then look how Death Stranding looked Phenomenal.

I love to see different studio’s approach to the same engine. When you see 5 games using UE but they don’t look the same at all, here’s when I wish to see more studio’s using it.

It’s a beautiful thing which shows who’s going to excel over who. Sticking to one engine is a big no though cause I want to see the same happening with other engines.
You think UE games look the same?
 
In a perfect world, all developers would share there engines source code freely so that different developers could each pick and choose the best bits of each to incorporate into their games and make the best possible games using the best of everything.

In the real world, companies wish to keep a competitive advantage by hoarding the specialised in house engine features they themselves have spent years creating and fine-tuning and that make their games look and function better than their competitors.
 
Last edited:
I like seeing AAA games being made on proprietary engines.
Forza Tech and Decima comes to mind. Forza Tech is used in Flight Sim, Horizon, Motorsport, and Fable. The integration of Azure and Bing is also something that no other engines have (I think).
Fable, apparently, will use Unreal Engine.
Any way, almost noone of the best looking games of the past generation use UE. I don't see why should be different in the future. Obviously not any studio can/ should developer their own proprietari Engine, and for most of them UE can be the best soluzione, but I don't think there Is a reason for It to replace Anvil, Frostbyte, Decima, Euforia and all the other different solutions.
 
Last edited:

killatopak

Member
I love that in the past, you can easily distinguish which game was using what engine.

I don’t mind third parties using the same engine as their games will most likely cater to a large amount of platforms. First party should stick to their own in house engine as they only really need to optimize to one specific hardware profile.
 

driqe

Member
Fable, apparently, will use Unreal Engine.
Any way, almost noone of the best looking games of the past generation use UE. I don't see why should be different in the future. Obviously not any studio can/ should developer their own proprietari Engine, and for most of them UE can be the best soluzione, but I don't think there Is a reason for It to replace Anvil, Frostbyte, Decima, Euforia and all the other different solutions.
"Building a new tech sharing team across the Forza and Fable franchises"

 

pr0cs

Member
Seems absolutely mental to tell developers to abandon their artistic vision to conform to some arbitrary standards.
And I love Unreal Engine.. Just makes no sense to try and pigeonhole everything
 

kikkis

Member
In a perfect world, all developers would share there engines source code freely so that different developers could each pick and choose the best bits of each to incorporate into their games and make the best possible games using the best of everything.

In the real world, companies wish to keep a competitive advantage by hoarding the specialised in house engine features they themselves have spent years creating and fine-tuning and that make their games look and function better than their competitors.
Most of the graphics side of things is shared through presentations etc. And whether it's graphics or rest of the engine, they mostly follow the best practices for each individual game type.
 

Rikkori

Member
Let's ask gamers what the best game dev practices are because of course, playing a game means you have special insight into the tech powering it too, by proxy.
 

sunnysideup

Banned
Different engines produce different looking games. Which is good.

Although i feel its less so now than before. During x360/ps3 you definitely had an unreal engine look that i was not that fond of. It is not as noticeable today.
 

Bernkastel

Ask me about my fanboy energy!
Fable, apparently, will use Unreal Engine.
Any way, almost noone of the best looking games of the past generation use UE. I don't see why should be different in the future. Obviously not any studio can/ should developer their own proprietari Engine, and for most of them UE can be the best soluzione, but I don't think there Is a reason for It to replace Anvil, Frostbyte, Decima, Euforia and all the other different solutions.
435a3c656709f3e2ccf0ba171fd49995fd0c68db.png

c3a7289752a758c00b628da945c7873d6317d60d.png
 

Duchess

Member
I still have an utter hatred for Unity. I remember in the early PS4 years how games made in that engine would crash constantly, suffer major performance issues while doing the most trivial of tasks, and exhibit all manner of other issues.

Battle Chasers was a good game that was massively hampered by the decision to use Unity. I finally uninstalled it when it caused my PS4 to hard reset. No other game has ever done that.

Maybe it's improved now, but I still have a hard time trusting it.
 

Rayderism

Member
I don't think limiting devs to one game engine would ever be a good idea. I think it would ultimately stifle creative freedom and innovation. I'm no programmer or dev, but I'd guess that certain engines would be better suited to certain types of games, or do things that other engines might not be able to do as well under certain circumstances.
 
Top Bottom