Yes, but maybe unlike your own puny budget a big studio has more cash to spend on its game. So the Unreal3 engine is a good opportunity for them, developing your own engine wich would perform at the same rate would cost you well over 750.000 dollars so it's a good alternative for those who do have the money. And about your comparison with MAX, just look at how many times Gears of war has been sold the money made with this is way over 750.000 dollars and is profitable and thus affordable for the studio who devoloped is. So in that sense it's not inhuman

yes, but i'm sure your budget is as puny as mine , or you wouldnt be here , so why all the hostility towards a felow puny budger developer ? Your a bit too defensive of the big companies for being a gamestudio user yourself dont you think ?

People don't use gamestudio just because it's cheap. Even if it doesn't have all the next gen speeds and graphics, it's very easy to use and is still a great engine/studio!

There are about 100 projects using Unreal3. So there must be good reasons for that

And your comparison with 3ds max ist not very good. 3ds max is a good software but not the best. All max users I know tell how often it crashes. Plug-ins are often built in quick and dirty.

The movie "300" has been made with Lightwave and Lightwave is much much cheaper than 3ds max.
Sometimes the most expensive software is not always the best.

For pure modelling some other tools like Silo or Modo are better. And ZBrush is the best for creating details. Max ist just a well known but very old tool.

MS Office is expensive. OpenOffice is for free. I wrote many scientific documents with StarOffice / OpenOffice because it is better, better support for formulas, big documents work better and faster, direct vector graphic support in your documents, inbuilt PDF writing and much more.

Max and MS Office might do better marketing and there are simply more warez copies around there. That still does not mean that they are the best.

What is this thread even about anymore? Its not about max, lightwave or gamestudio..

@ Frazzle:
Happy B-day

@ Matt Aufderheide:
I've sent you 2 pm's why don't you answer?

@ All:
Sry for the offtopic.
Cheers
Omega

derOmega:

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@ Frazzle:
Happy B-day

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Thanks for the I-Happy B-day-C
Srr for being offtopic but I think it's allowed on a BD

Cheers

Frazzle

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@ Matt Aufderheide:
I've sent you 2 pm's why don't you answer?

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I sent you an email..

First of all : Frazzle have a happy-spec-tacular birtheeeeday

But don't eat all of the cake

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Your crazy cipher , no matter how beautifull and good the Unreal Engine 3 is ,
it's $750,000 , do you properly understand that number , SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS , maybe in capital letters you'll understand it better. Thats a fortune man , it's insane , only big companies with tons of money can afford that , no one else.

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Hehe well your right it is expensive and it is beyond what many indies. ( I ) can afford. And yes its only for " big companies ". But that is partly what they want really, supporting a small army of users is very resource intensive and not what Epic probably wants to do.

Yes it is also partly due to the lack of a perceived alternative and of course Epics track record and marketing savvy.

The price is a bit high, but seems like they can ask

It should be noted that depending on the engine middleware license it should be possible to develop and release multiple games. So for example, license Unreal 3 once and develop a FPS and RPG simultaneously. In this case, the cost of Unreal 3 would be spread over the two games. This is what many studios are doing to keep rising costs in ( some ) control.

( The average base cost to develop a " next gen " game is a bit more than 10 million USD. But average costs are about 20 million USD. This would be roughly comparable to a MMO circa the year 2000 . )

The biggest cost is not the engine itself, its the limitations / awkwardness of the toolset and artwork cost.

An ideal toolset would allow you to rapidly prototype and refine game logic and data --- scripting, meshes, textures, materials, shaders etc.

By " rapid " I do not mean hours of painful work to craft a shader.

Unreal 3 and various other engines are being developed to assist in reducing the time and effort required to make your game.

Now of course, whether they actually make a difference is not so certain, but many well-regarded developers seem to thing so

As for artwork development, well that is beyond what engines do. But they should have an easy, efficient pipeline to take artwork from the content development tool ( i.e. Maya, Lightwave, Softimage XSI etc. ) into the engine with little hassles.

Thats what Unreal 3 and other such engines try to do.

One thing I am a bit puzzled by is the lack of understanding of what an " engine " is ---- or at least what it should be.

An engine is not an afterthought. It really does impact the game.

An ideal engine is basically a " game operating system " that allows you to do what you want in an easy and efficient way. It does not limit you, instead it assists you in doing whatever you want.

Yes this is very much an ideal vision, not really true in practice.

But as hardware becomes more capable and the demands on the industry grow for more rich worlds and gameplay --- we will slowly see game engines becoming very important, even critical to a game.

This is a bit unusual to say. Afterall game engines are important now. You cannot make a 3D computer game using a ball of string. But to be blunt, many / all present-day engines are basically interchangeable. Game designs are not much evolved. Worlds are static, limited. Stories are simple and undynamic. But do not assume that they always will be.

As for A6, it is a good package. The most important aspects are the community and the relative completeness of the tools.

Overall the feature set is a bit limited in some areas. But the big issue in my mind is how ordinary the engine is. It basically is, more or less, like Unreal 2 or Source.