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.



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.