What's your favourite engine?
polycounter lvl 19
Which engine have you worked with in the past that you wish you could develop for from here on out? I know every engine has its problems but lets keep this thread positive.
It doesn't have to be a major player (Unreal, id, Source). To be honest I'd like to hear more about the non-major engines out there that were fun to work with. We've got quite a collection of company employees that post here at the boards so hopefully there will be some good information that comes through.
TonyHawk, BloodRayne, DarkSector, GTA's, Doom, Unreal, Homeworld, Company of Heroes, Battlefield, Oblivion, Halo... these are all games that at least one PC regular has worked on. I'm sure theres SOME good qualities about these engines and their pipelines.
Why'd you like it?
What's the main feature you liked about it that you wish all engines could adopt?
How were the tools? Or how about the pipeline?
Of all the engines I've had to work with the past year and half my favourite has been Unreal 3, and a close second being any engine that was 90% 3D application (Halo, Shadowrun, etc.) for art, lighting, and design.
UnrealEd just has something about that, to me, encourages creativity. Particularly on the material side of things. Any engine with a GUI for shader setup, scripting, particles, is A-OK with me. I'd rather have my face in an intuitive setup then notepad. It was a lot less stressful to try out ideas when the feedback is nearly live and the information input is a breeze than it was to go through a text editor then wait, compile info, review changes, repeat.
The reason I've enjoyed the 90% 3D app engines in the past is that most of the work can be done from 2 applications: Max and Photoshop. The rest is up to the programmers to define entities based on Max helper names. It was awesome, easy, and fun. Granted the final aesthetic results weren't as impressive as a lot of the other engines out there, but it was a blast to develop for.
It doesn't have to be a major player (Unreal, id, Source). To be honest I'd like to hear more about the non-major engines out there that were fun to work with. We've got quite a collection of company employees that post here at the boards so hopefully there will be some good information that comes through.
TonyHawk, BloodRayne, DarkSector, GTA's, Doom, Unreal, Homeworld, Company of Heroes, Battlefield, Oblivion, Halo... these are all games that at least one PC regular has worked on. I'm sure theres SOME good qualities about these engines and their pipelines.
Why'd you like it?
What's the main feature you liked about it that you wish all engines could adopt?
How were the tools? Or how about the pipeline?
Of all the engines I've had to work with the past year and half my favourite has been Unreal 3, and a close second being any engine that was 90% 3D application (Halo, Shadowrun, etc.) for art, lighting, and design.
UnrealEd just has something about that, to me, encourages creativity. Particularly on the material side of things. Any engine with a GUI for shader setup, scripting, particles, is A-OK with me. I'd rather have my face in an intuitive setup then notepad. It was a lot less stressful to try out ideas when the feedback is nearly live and the information input is a breeze than it was to go through a text editor then wait, compile info, review changes, repeat.
The reason I've enjoyed the 90% 3D app engines in the past is that most of the work can be done from 2 applications: Max and Photoshop. The rest is up to the programmers to define entities based on Max helper names. It was awesome, easy, and fun. Granted the final aesthetic results weren't as impressive as a lot of the other engines out there, but it was a blast to develop for.
Replies
Runner up is the first Unreal engine, followed closely by the Quake3 engine. Only for the ambience they brought to my screen at the time.
Ofcourse there are more powerful engines these days, none that I've spent a considerable amount of time in. The first unreal engine had fantastic water and lighting for its day, something that will always stick in my mind. Quake3 had a really robust chunky-ness to it, moreso than Quake2 to some degree, although Quake2 had it's own feeling of satisfaction for making maps and so on.
Half-Life 1 was my first real experience with any engine from a development stand point. It holds a tiny, tiny sliver of a spot in my heart (I didn't enjoy it much) but wouldn't be here without it!
the COH engine can make some lovely looking stuff, and we're making it even more robust for the upcoming expansion pack, adding weather effects and transitions, etc. in that sense, it really seems to be artistically geared. the world builder is very easy to use and has all sorts of great functionality available to make stuff pretty. the tools that we work with are very robust and I can't really think of something offhand that we haven't been able to make, but i sure as hell wouldn't want to pick them up un-documented. they give a lot of control, but some of the less-technical types find them frustrating.
i gotta say, this crisis world builder looks pretty damn impressive.. I enjoyed tinkering with oblivion as well.. and remember it being easy to create environments and such in morrowind.
quite frankly i'm all for quick and dirty usability. i don't give two flying shits about how much shit the engine can rip through. i think we've gone far enough towards realism and it's time to take the step into impressionistic games.
edit.. er.. not 'expansion pack'.. "companion product."
I've messed with quake 2(never messed with Quake 3), used a c&c editor, messed with oblivion, Battlefield 2, Doom 3 a little, Quake 4 a little as well, Milo, and a few others.
Recently (past 3 years) I have been using the Unreal engine a lot. I think it opens up a lot of stuff for artists and it's pretty easy to use as well. Now that I am working on some Unreal 3 titles though I'm really starting to like it even more. The material editor has some awesome features and can really push things to look better than in the past. (atleast with the stuff i have been doing.)
It still has it's quirks though. Collision meshes can create some interesting results if you have intersecting geometry for the collision cage.
idtech5 ?
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Haha.. well you're the only one who should be bringing this up.
Can you say WHY? Or is it too early for that (re: nda)?
Those were the days
It had better world animation support, better shader support and better lighting systems. It's tri-stripping algorithms were also a billion times better than Renderware's.
I remember loading the pak files that changed the weapon models, player skins, sentry gun models, and also a pack that changed the font to a brighter shiney version. They were pretty sweet. I remember practicing my conc jumps and trimps after I got home from school for hours. Clan matches was the best, so intense. Checking our rankings on the strongerfortress, league website. I miss it. :~(
Next up is Quake 3 for its RGB skins for easy editing
oooohh.. you meant game engine. In that case, the Unreal Engine. All around good to work with.
Sauerbraten, Jawohl!
Coop-mapediting FTW
The Chrysler Hemi or the Chevy LS7...
oooohh.. you meant game engine. In that case, the Unreal Engine. All around good to work with.
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Damn, you beat me to it
I've been working with the torque engine. It's not too bad, but the Unreal engine beats it IMO as far as offerings. Price wise though, Torque is a better indie option.
I've also been eyeing Ogre3D, but it's a graphics engine. You still need physics, sound, ...
after having used torque for a year, and finding myself completely lost in hammer, the Unreal engine is probably the one im most comfortable.
At the moment, I'm playing around with DXStudio, and having a pretty good time of it. It supports .x models, as well as Collada. So it is pretty painless getting fully skinned, boned, and animated meshes into it. And the scripting system for it features a lot of natural object orientation, kind of like Flash in a way. You can apply scripts to specific objects, but still create top-level methods if you need to. (and even code up your own classes)
On the downside I've learned to hate engine editors that work with boxes, ie. extrude your path in BSP/CSG and lame 90 degree corners or don't offer much help besides moving and rotating things by hand... You want to snap, rest things on the ground or the surface you're marking etc to speed up things. The best engine doesn't help if the editor is a handicap that limits what you can achieve in a decent amount of time.
While some things don't matter if you're making boxy interestions anyway, in ruins everything else if you put limited tools in even more limited hands.
That said, I've played with the 'old' Farcry engine which was already great, and the videos from the new editor look AWESOME (go find them) toolwise. I don't know how easy it is to import things but i'd kill for tools like that.
Despite the bugs, which were fine once I learned the work arounds, it's tools were great, was very fluid to work with, etc...
As far as user ease goes I would have to say that from what I have used Never Winter Nights 1-2 engine is pretty much universally regarded as the best engine to work with . Those engines are made with modding in mind were as with most other engines it is just an after thought .
Bioshock is Unreal3+, yes.
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Wow, really? Somehow I've missed that tidbit all this time.
We just export out of max or maya and texture using our engine as the viewer. It refreshes textures in real time and you can edit shaders in a nice flowchart viewer.
We create normal maps with our normal map generator through max or maya. No exporting meshes needed. It also creates ambient occ maps too.
You can turn parts on and off, create animation strings, alter soft body physics, and attach objects to tags all in the character viewer.
Why'd you like it?
Because of its ease of use and stability. Getting a character from max into unreal3 is easy as pie. Reimporting textures and updating models in your scene is equally as easy.
What's the main feature you liked about it that you wish all engines could adopt?
Node based material system, oh my god. It blows my mind and i just about giggle every day i get to sit down and use it all day. *sigh*
How were the tools? Or how about the pipeline?
Absolutely great. Yes, there are the occasional crashes like every other program but its so minimal... at least with the builds the artists get at our company.
ok... i'll stop being a fanboy...
worst engine to work with?
Source... screw batching every damn model and texture you need to compile! 'nuf said.
I also second the fact on how easy it is to work from max to unreal. No compiling crap. I do have to use SHTools though. I'm sure a lot of you guys that use UE3 use that as well. It's not too bad now that I have 3 computers networked running it. It cranks out my normal maps pretty quickly.
Yeah I was excited to do some work with Source UNTIL I learned of all the extra stuff. No thanks...
there are the occasional crashes like every other program but its so minimal
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Ue3 crashes, never!. we had a competition every 2 months all the way through development, the one with the most crashes got a free lunch
The most common problem for me is that the mip levels will get corrupt sometimes so you'll have crazy party confetti face man.
Just noticed, your a level designer. I'm talking from the artists perspective. I know our LD's pull their hair out.
Overall I like UE3, just wish it was a tad more stable.
Sucks to hear the new one is crashing a lot as well ><
I dont hate it or nothin. Overall its pretty cool.
It has it's problem areas, but they're working to get the kinks out.
It's come a long way in the past couple years.
that said, I looooove unreal engine 2 and 3, HL was a pain in the ass to map for, Aurora (neverwinter nights) was cool, but only if you don't add anything (the dialogue editor in there is quite awesome) I liked the warcraft3 editor a lot too, very easy to prototype stuff in.
Gamebryo (the Oblivion flavor and the Daoc/mythic flavor)
Infernal (before the current tools though)
The Titan Quest engine
Torque
Tony Hawk engine
And a few proprietary ones.
The TH engine (not even sure it has a proper name) was definitely my favorite. Not only was exporting and updating a single button press away, but adding the character to the game to begin with as an entity was a line copy+paste away.
You could also make any character entry the main character, so you can run it around, put it through the animations, move it in and out of the shadows, put it on a skateboard, a horse, etc. And when you updated, it didn't even reset the animation, so you could jump the character, zoom in to a bad skin weighted area, fix it in max, export, and the verts would pop to their new better weighting location in the game. Lurved it.
The TH engine (not even sure it has a proper name) was definitely my favorite. Not only was exporting and updating a single button press away, but adding the character to the game to begin with as an entity was a line copy+paste away.
You could also make any character entry the main character, so you can run it around, put it through the animations, move it in and out of the shadows, put it on a skateboard, a horse, etc. And when you updated, it didn't even reset the animation, so you could jump the character, zoom in to a bad skin weighted area, fix it in max, export, and the verts would pop to their new better weighting location in the game. Lurved it.
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Damn the TH engine sounds nice as hell. I don't do much character stuff but I can see how that would be really helpful.
I've worked with q2, q3, d3, reality engine, and nothing has came close to just sheer ease of use as what i'm working with here.
I think UE3 took the customization thing and multipurpose do-everything engine too far (they sort of had to with their business model). At one point you have so many different options, routes you can take, all involving a ton of nitty gritty work, that it becomes difficult to be creative. And it doesn't matter how slick the tools to do the work are, in the end it's still wasted effort. UE3 probably has the slickest boxes and smoothest lines to program shaders with ever but it's still not something most artists should spend their time using. Customizing shaders per asset makes artwork involve more effort rather than less. The UE3 school of tools will just end up as something like the Maya rendering system: anything is possible, everything is hard.
Anyway, I like Quake 3 because the art pipeline is extremely easy to use. You export your model, write your material/shader, job done, you're set. In the case of animated models, it's pretty simple to get that done too -- depending on your exporter, it may be more complex, however. But anyway, getting content into the engine is a breeze.
In addition to this, writing code for Quake 3 is by far the easiest I've had in terms of modifying engines and games. The complete C API without any bloat or unnecessary addition of object-oriented crap that doesn't need to be there (I'm not against object-oriented programming, just not a fan of it being used for everything regardless of whether or not it makes sense to use it) is a dream to work with, and the control I have over how things are rendered is great. This is the area I have no experience in Doom 3 with -- I'm not at all familiar with its game code.
There's no real specific feature about it I love other than its shader system, but that's completely out of date now (fixed-function has pretty much gone out the window these days, it seems). However, for the time, it was a great way to get content working quickly and painlessly with numerous visual effects being allowed by it.
Tools are described above as well. Also, I love GTK Radiant. Some people love it, some people hate it. Same with UnrealEd. Personally, I don't like UE, but each has its merits and I'm just more at home with Radiant.
In any case, id's engines have always struck me as the most friendly, and that's what I like about them.
UE2. Hands down. It looks great, with nice understated effects and for the love of god doesn't look like a big shrinkwrapped embossed eyesore like nearly every post Doom3 engine made. It plays fast, smooth, and allows for amazing detail in the maps(dm-irondeity anyone?). Nice weapon effects, and while some other effects are faked, it still very pleasing to the eye.
Doom 3/Quake 4 for everything else, although it can be an absolute bastard at times, but I love normal maps and dynamic lighting too much to go back.
And it'll only get better - we have an in-house tools guy who is also a level designer, so he knows exactly what tools people need, and he takes requests for features and implements them in no time (where feasible). Handy to have around
lucky to be in the first stages of the pipeline, i can focus on how the stuff looks in max and technical artists are handling the export for me. yay! should have been like this at the previous jobs, too.
i have a test station on my desk but so far all it has developed is a thick layer of dust. still needs some more to hide the nasty spiderman font finally tho. call it a W-I-P.
sorry to be so constructive.
The material system, importing and exporting... it just works so well. I do wish there was an option to be able to right-click a static mesh to re-import it in place like you can do with textures, however. Beyond that, no complaints.
It's fun to watch the look on your environment leads' faces when you mention how many instructions are in a particular material.
My personal record thus far: 107 instructions.
kat: You should love the ETQW engine then - non-flakey editor, tons more editing options, better model support... I love it!
And it'll only get better - we have an in-house tools guy who is also a level designer, so he knows exactly what tools people need, and he takes requests for features and implements them in no time (where feasible). Handy to have around
[/ QUOTE ]digiBob? I know he used to do some mapping a long time ago. But yes, I'm trying not to get too excited over MegaTexture and all that because I can't concentrate on what I'm doing otherwise! I have to say I've been impressed with the makeover I've seen in the various vids, about time for that toolset