Middleware trial 'is proceeding' says Silicon Knights Denis Dyack
Denis Dyack has told Develop that he thinks 'justice will be done' in the still-in-progress legal spat between his studio Silicon Knights and Unreal Engine creator Epic Games.
A year ago, Silicon Knights filed a suit aganst Epic saying the company had "failed to provide a working game engine" - the studio since then scrapped its use of Unreal Engine 3 and built its own in-house technology. The first game using that, Too Human, is due out next week.
But despite the fact that Epic has filed its own counter-claims against Silicon Knights, and that UE3 has become the most popular third-party engine solution amongst publishers and developers, Dyack is adamant his claims still hold water.
He told us: "Well the trial is proceeding, we feel really good about our claims, and we’re hopeful that justice will be done. We all feel really strongly that they have defrauded us, and a major portion of the industry."
Click her to read the full interview with Dyack.
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I'm in two minds about this one - on one hand, the Unreal engine powers a huge number of games, so one would expect a commensurate number of suits being filed against Epic, if Dyack's claims of a shoddy product are bona fide, and SK isn't just covering their asses for employing lame developers.
On the other hand, SK scrapped the Unreal Engine, and built their own goddamn rig - no small task at all, so perhaps the developers were actually pretty damn good.
I'd be curious to see what the evidence is in this case.
I'm more interested in hearing about exactly what "engine" they're using. I bet you any money It's a modified version of UE that they've taken the liberty of calling it their "own". I'm not saying it's a bad thing, as it's standard industry use of any type of middleware: make your engine work for you. Maybe they were unjustly left out of "the loop" but again, you don't see many other Devs (Think Bioshock, Dark Sector, Rainbow 6 vegas, GRAW..etc) have an impossibly difficult pumping out a decent/great title.
I don't think anyone should blame the quality of TH on UE3, because we've been shown by example that you can get quality out of said engine.
Ha, Dyack's comments are hilarious. I work for a large US studio developing a top-tier UE3 game. There is nothing wrong with the engine. I'm sure Develop has just published his comments for comedic effect!
Not quite comedy value, to be honest - although I imagine the huge number of licensees of UE3 probably have a different opinion to Dyack. (As poster number three shows.)
BTW, for MSTRYD3V - Denis did briefly mention SK's replacement tool in our writer's chat with him - he says they 'completely re-wrote' the engine, so I doubt they're using a modified UE - plus, they're suing the originator so that wouldn't make much sense.
I work for Bioware, and i had the unpleasent opporunity to work with UE3 before Gears was released....the product was absolute **** before they released Gear of War...everything they promised wasnt delivered, hard to work with and mad Mass Effect Development very difficult...
On the contrary - I used early UE3 on a project, but didn't really have an issue with it. I mean, there were issues - but it was early technology then. Still leaps ahead of the stuff our team had in place at the time, and I don't recall Epic selling it to us as some cure-all tech.
I'm not going to discount the fact that they've probably put in some overtime into re-writing an engine, but re-writing an engine and building one from scratch are two completely different things. I'm guessing that they've taken UE3 and placed a nice shiny helmet ontop.
I'm not going to discount the fact that they've probably put in some overtime into re-writing an engine, but re-writing an engine and building one from scratch are two completely different things. I'm guessing that they've taken UE3 and placed a nice shiny helmet ontop.
I think though if you look at almost every title using the UE3 engine you will see huge delays prior to the release of GoW. Once they got GoW out the door it seems they were able to free up their engineers to deliver the product that SK and Dyack felt they were promised from the beginning. Of course the counter suit from Epic says just what the other poster has said and that is that they retooled the UE3 engine and now are calling it their own in an effort to get out of royalities. Who is right and who is wrong will be for the courts to decide. Personally I think, without seeing all of the evidence from both sides, that SK has a solid ground to fight from. That opinnion is simply from looking at all the other delays of other games using the same engine. Just my 2 cents.
I work for a big unreal house and the engine is still total ****. Unreal really only does one type of game well, and if you're trying to do anything that it isn't designed to do it is a real pain. Additionally I'm shocked that more companies aren't suing Epic, because they still haven't delivered features in UE3 that were promised when we signed our license agreement over three years ago. This has caused several of our projects to be late and over budget because we've needed to build those features ourselves.
Epic will need to think very carefully about whether they want this to go to court. SK don't have much to lose from this in terms of reputation (though legal fees and costs might hurt if they lose) as they'll be judged on their games. Epic on the other hand hardly need complaints about UE3 given a very public airing. Yes UE3 has a good rap amongst some developers working on FPS titles but it's also got a reputation for being damned hard to customise and use for anything else. If SK get developers from other companies to take the stand to back up their complaints the UE3 could take a very hard knock.
Look at today's headlines about studios targeting cross platform development. That's not something that UE3 handles well. It's expensive, Epic don't have a 'can do' reputation when it comes to support, and it has limited uses. Epic might be better of reaching an out of court settlement and hushing this whole business up. The 3rd party engine market is hotting up at the moment and UE3 is starting to look like a bit of a T Rex - big, impressive but dated and in danger of extinction.
