Posted: 7/25/2011 11:19 AM
Post subject: If you are interested in game technology…
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L-Spiro
Joined: 4/18/2007
Posts: 88
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Many of you want to get into the game industry in the future in some way. Some of you are already. Designer, programmer, artist, etc. Even if you are not technically skilled nor ever plan to be, if you have a good passion for gaming you may be interested in knowing a bit about what is happening under the hood of your favorite game. I have made a site which will document the progress of my new next-generation game engine. L. Spiro Engine There are also forums where discussions can be had, questions asked, suggestions made, etc. L. Spiro Engine Forums There will be a lot of technical information there but I will also try to explain it in a way that as many can understand as possible. For the programmers among you, this engine will target Windows x86/x64, Macintosh, iOS, Linux, PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii U, Xbox 360, and Microsoft’s and Sony’s next machines. It will be available for a very low price, so you hobbyists can make your own games easily. It will be like having CryEngine 3 for around $100, and with support for more platforms. The downside is you will have to wait. If you are interested in what goes into a game engine, feel free to follow my progress there, and ask on the forums if you have any questions. L. Spiro
Posted: 7/25/2011 1:08 PM
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nesrocks
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The sooner the better: How can a new engine compete with UDK? Can you elaborate on that? I've seen a lot of new engines shaping up around 2007-2009 but then epic changed the license to their engine and I saw no hope for them. What can you offer that UDK doesn't and is that difference a selling point. Also, who do you plan to sell the engine to? indie developers?
aka Nesrocks http://www.youtube.com/user/UoBtExFODA https://nesrocks.com https://twitter.com/bitinkstudios
Posted: 7/25/2011 1:50 PM
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L-Spiro
Joined: 4/18/2007
Posts: 88
Location: Tokyo, Japan
For now I can answer a few questions here, but many people will probably want these answers as well so I will be mirroring them on my forums. #1: Competing with UDK. Unreal Development Kit is indeed free and tested, but my engine will offer better technology in general. My goal is to meet or beat CryEngine 3, coming close to Frostbite 2. If you had the choice between a free Unreal Engine 3 and a $100 CryEngine 3, which would you pick? #2: Target audience. The engine is marketed towards both studios and indies. CryEngine 3 is around $1,000,000 per license and only available to studios with a proven track record of AAA games, which is why the engine is not used in so many games. For studios, my engine, which is expected to be of the same quality, will be $50,000 and packages scale down from there depending on studio needs and budgets. I will try to make sure every studio can afford it through various pricing plans. For indies, source code is strictly unavailable. Packages would range from $2,000 to $100, though I won’t be able to get exact package features and pricing pairs until it is further along. I do however have a strong dislike for companies that remove features from their engines for low-price buyers (the free Unity 3D package removes real-time shadows, for example), so I have to consider hard how to make a $100 plan without stripping too much out of the package. I want buyers to get bang for their bucks. L. Spiro
Posted: 7/25/2011 2:31 PM
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nesrocks
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One suggestion is to participate in the game's sales revenue, much in the same way UDK does. For instance, free could be 50%, 100$ could be 40% and so on. The UDK engine isn't just about graphics, there's a good editing tool with visual scripting. You seem to have studied it all very well though, I just want to make sure you know where you're headed.
aka Nesrocks http://www.youtube.com/user/UoBtExFODA https://nesrocks.com https://twitter.com/bitinkstudios
Posted: 7/25/2011 2:43 PM
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L-Spiro
Joined: 4/18/2007
Posts: 88
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Input is always welcome. That is why the site is there. I am expecting people to ask technical questions, sure, but also to point out things I miss or make suggestions I hadn’t considered before. Contributors (art, music, material I can use in demos, and even just tons of good input) will get a free copy when it is done. L. Spiro
Posted: 7/25/2011 4:47 PM
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nesrocks
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Well, the thing about high end engines is that each day fewer indie developers are having the chance to make games that compete graphically with top developers. So, for the indie developer it is not about state of the art graphical technology, but accessibility and usability. HTML5 for example looks really interesting for indie developers, as browser games allows them to skip publishers and reach their users directly. Achieving some level of graphical prowess in html5 while having a great game creating/editing tool is where I would bet my money.
aka Nesrocks http://www.youtube.com/user/UoBtExFODA https://nesrocks.com https://twitter.com/bitinkstudios
Posted: 7/25/2011 5:09 PM
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L-Spiro
Joined: 4/18/2007
Posts: 88
Location: Tokyo, Japan
That is true and I am a bit torn on how to handle the tool situation. While I do plan to make nice ones, it would delay the release of the engine even though engine would still be perfectly usable during that time (just less easy). So I had considered putting out the first release at a reduced price and using the revenues to start my own game company, hire staff, and then make amazing tools. But that kind of revenue requires major companies to purchase licenses, which won’t happen without tools. For now what I am thinking is that indies will be my main audience early on, and helpful tools will be shipped on release but not as amazing as they will be in the second release. The first release may even be free for indies. I have teamed up with the author of this book (if you read Japanese, check it out; it has good stuff and his work is great) in order to make demo materials/games to help sell the engine, but ultimately it will be the products made by the indie community that will convince major corporations to buy it. That is my thinking for now but we have plenty of time to make final decisions. This is why community feedback is important. L. Spiro
Posted: 7/26/2011 7:16 AM
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Warp
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L-Spiro wrote:
#1: Competing with UDK. Unreal Development Kit is indeed free and tested, but my engine will offer better technology in general. My goal is to meet or beat CryEngine 3, coming close to Frostbite 2. If you had the choice between a free Unreal Engine 3 and a $100 CryEngine 3, which would you pick?
I hate to be a party pooper (I sometimes get flack because of that, a recent case involving asm being a good example), but please don't take it the wrong way if I can't help but feel a bit skeptical. I don't doubt your expertise and competence as a programmer, but the amount of work doable by a single person (I'm assuming you are doing this alone because you didn't mention anybody else) is physically limited, no matter how skillfull and experienced he might be. Modern game engines, such as Unreal Engine, are really huge projects, developed by teams of people (the amount probably counting in the dozens, if not even hundreds if we take into account all the people that have contributed during the history of the game engine in question) and often quite large budgets. There's a lot more to a game engine than just the binary that's linked to the game executable (such as all kinds of design and conversion tools). Even if the engine consisted solely of the executable binary and nothing else, it's still a quite large and complex project. Many of the algorithms and technologies are far from trivial to implement (many of which are related to making the engine as fast as possible, for example by hidden surface removal algorithms and so on). Of course if the engine consists only of a binary library and nothing else, its usefulness will be severely limited (because you then need a big bunch of third-party tools to make everything else.) I'm not trying to discourage you from doing this (and I'm not saying that such one-man projects are impossible and do not exist, because examples do exist), but I'm just wondering if you are not being a bit unrealistically (no pun intended) optimistic.
Posted: 7/26/2011 7:30 AM
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Bisqwit
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Well, at least modern day web projects are managed by an army of engineers and other workers of various trade, yet new ones occassionally pop up and are created by just one or two persons. The initial core invention often needs at most just a handful of people. But when adding features comes to question, that's when the schedule may warrant adding people. That said, I have no idea what the complexity of a game engine may actually be.
Posted: 7/26/2011 8:17 AM
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L-Spiro
Joined: 4/18/2007
Posts: 88
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Don’t worry, Warp, you have every right to your skepticism and I am not offended. At this point all I can say is that this is not my first commercial-sized game engine, and my experiences (and reference source code) between my previous engines and game programming in general are helping me work very efficiently on this project. I wouldn’t have set up the site if I were not fully confident that I would succeed in the long run. How long that run is we will have to see, but I am expecting “promising” results by next year. I am planning to blog about some of those scene/3D/general optimizations soon. Hope you will enjoy, and if you catch any mistakes feel free to point them out to me. L. Spiro
Posted: 7/26/2011 8:34 AM
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moozooh
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I'd say a single competent coder with self-managed time schedule and a clear idea of what he's doing and wants to achieve is at the very least as efficient as a team consisting of specialists with varying experience and coding expertise being thrown from one project to another (as if often happens in large companies) with severe time constraints put on them. I'd like to see what comes of this project. If I ever dated to create a game myself, this could be my engine of choice!
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
Posted: 7/26/2011 8:48 AM
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Warp
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I don't personally have experience with large-scale game engines, but I have a friend who has worked in several big game companies (including Ubisoft in Canada) for many years, and has been writing his own game engine as a hobby. I haven't followed closely the status of the project, but I know it's quite a big ordeal for one single person to do. The project in question has a web page: http://www.spinxengine.com/
Posted: 7/26/2011 1:06 PM
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nesrocks
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I share a bit of Warp's concerns, perhaps it was hinted on my comments. I have only experimented with programming, but it seems incredible that people want to tackle the engine creation market on their own. Like he said, it is a type of product that huge technology companies already develop (konami for example is planning to have its new engine ready soon). It is however a good experience for the programmer, but I wonder if the time would be better spent making a game for example. Realistically speaking, how many games are expected to be made using the engine? Wouldn't the effort to make it a generic tool be better invested in making 1 game fun and unique?
aka Nesrocks http://www.youtube.com/user/UoBtExFODA https://nesrocks.com https://twitter.com/bitinkstudios
Posted: 7/26/2011 1:46 PM
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L-Spiro
Joined: 4/18/2007
Posts: 88
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Your concerns are completely understandable. I hinted at this when I mentioned working with the author of the above book, but I guess I have never said it directly/clearly. One of the best ways to test (and market) game technology is to make an actual game with it. I have worked with the above-mentioned author for over a year. When he learned I was making a new game engine he was delighted and wants to work together on demo material, which will actually be either a small game or a full-sized game depending on how much code I can spit out. His art is at the high end of great (I have seen more than just what is in his book so trust me), and we can make a pretty professional game, I think. This suits his desires to design and create the art for his own games, and gives me test material and showcase material for my engine. I will be making several games alongside the development of the engine. I will also make a few of my own for iPhone. They will be small so as not to eat into the coding time of the engine, but helpful for the very reasons you gave. Yes, coding games themselves are also important. To spend this amount of time only making an engine and nothing else I would feel a bit empty. So a few games and demos will be released along the way. But spending the whole time to make only one game fun and unique, I have to disagree. I have several ideas that I have been wanting to make for over a decade, but I just can’t bring myself to code something that will only be used for one product and then die off. Engines can be used for many games, and I have many ideas, so I need to lay down the engine first. L. Spiro
Posted: 7/26/2011 4:46 PM
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Warp
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L-Spiro wrote:
So a few games and demos will be released along the way.
Please keep us up-to-date with these as they come along. It will be interesting. And don't let skeptics like me/us discourage you. :)
Posted: 7/29/2011 7:18 AM
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pirate_sephiroth
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New systems TAS of 2009
I am monitoring this thread
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself. It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success." - Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
Drama, too long, didn't read, lol.
Posted: 7/31/2011 11:11 AM
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L-Spiro
Joined: 4/18/2007
Posts: 88
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Updates will be on the site via blogs and forum posts. But since people are watching this thread, for now I will mention some updates here. I just posted some early-stage eye candy: http://lspiroengine.com/?p=51&preview=true Nothing fancy yet but I am chugging along, and those models look nice even without too many graphics effects. L. Spiro