Widescreen Gaming Forum

In reading about IW's CoD4 engine I have yet to see any buzz word used for it or other developers seeking to use it, yet it's probably the best game engine currently made. Is IW not interested in licensing it out? They'd not only make a fortune off it we'd have a lot better games to play.

I'm growing tired of all the hype surrounding the Unreal Engine 3 and the myriad of developers choosing the easy way out in using it. I mean what's so great about UE3? Every game I have that uses it be it GoW, FFoW or UT3 plays very choppy and doesn't look nearly as good as CoD4.

I've been pretty impressed with how well UT3 engine games run.. especially on older machines.. but I think the COD4 egine seems a little more limited.. maybe after ome tweaking..


SPOOOOOON!

The only thing I can see about the IW engine that some devs may not like is the mod tools are not nearly as good as those for Unreal Engine 3. I always thought the devs have access to better tools than the public when they buy rights to use someone's engine though, so I'm not sure that applies.

As for how UE3 games play on older spec vs the IW engine, I can't agree with you at all there. I have a P4 3Ghz, X1950Pro 512MB AGP, 2GB RAM rig. GoW, FFoW and even UT3 all play pretty choppy with much worse looking graphics then CoD4, which also plays much smoother. In fact if you look at the forums for the UE3 games I listed, complaints of choppy gameplay are common.

What i'm surprised at is how iD's engine has kind-of dropped off of the map, when that was supposed to be revamped and become extraordinary.

Yeah iDtech5 seems to have gone quiet for the time being.

Hopefully it won't be as poor as the Doom3 engine...

Ooh, Id, yeah, another dev I keep forgetting about along with Valve. I should mention them too when talking of good engines, though I still feel IW's is the best. It would be nice to see Id's engine make it big in the news again with the release of RTCW 2. I'm beginning to think it's wishful thinking there will even BE a RTCW 2 though.

The reason the CoD4 game runs so smooth with little hassle and hardware trouble is because it's a revamped CoD2 engine. And due to the engine's age, it has quite a few limitations (map sizes is likely to be the top reason). While there are a couple of maps that seem fairly large, the general playing area within the CoD4 maps is small and compact (see Pipeline as example).

As to why Infinity Ward doesn't license their engine out, you can speculate on a few things. For starters, it has limitations and isn't very flexible. Its design is very specific and not generic like Unreal Engine. The Unreal Engine was designed to be flexible in molding the game to do what you want it to do. This is largely in due to how the UE engine was fundamentally designed as well, with various support libraries and feature drivers in order to accommodate today's trendy technologies (shaders, bumpmapping, EAX, etc.). Because of the way UE was designed, many have licensed that engine to build their game around it. Of course, even UE has its limits (see TRIBES: Vengeance) and flaws. But weighing in all the pros and cons, many considered UE to be the most versatile given the vision and ideas these game developers have.

id Software's doom3 engine shares some of the problems that many engines have: map size. While the game itself is visually impressive with respect to lighting, the developers felt that the way the engine was designed cannot cope with the vision that they want to realize: large area, detailed structures, intricate facial animations.

Valve's Source engine pretty much changed the way characters move and animate. It's all nice but I kinda wonder if the engine is too complicated for developers to use or something else. There aren't a lot of titles today that uses the Source engine these days, as everyone is trying to come up with that one big title that will spring them forward into fame. So it's a mystery why there aren't many developers using Source engines.

There's also DICE/EA's Frostbite engine that powers Battlefield: Bad Company. Too bad there's little detail on it. The engine in BF2 and 2142 might have been decent enough to accommodate large detailed area and I could almost envision a TRIBES-like gameplay. Alas, the engine itself doesn't seem to be very robust. For one reason or another, it may have been a decision by DICE/EA to not license their engine out.

CryEngine2... Ouch... The pain... 'nuff said.

Is IW's engine underrated? Probably not. The main thing one has to consider is that engines need to suit, mold, accommodate, and provide all the necessary features in order to make a vision realized. It has to be easy to understand, have the kind of support you'd expect from an engine developer, does not cost oodles of dollars, and isn't overly complicated to use. When you factor all that in, would the engine IW used in making CoD4 be good in other gaming applications as well? Sure it loads maps fast and is light on the system.. but is that enough?

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t3h bl0g | Old Warriors Soceity | my BFBC2 stats

The thing that hit me about the Doom3 engine right in the first level was how poor it was at curved surfaces. The heads looked all angular - it was horrible.

The first game I recall playing that had nice model curves was Splinter Cell, which uses the Unreal Engine. It almost seems in some ways the graphic quaility on the UE has gone downhill since though. Maybe it's all the effects they're focusing on but in some ways the textures just don't look as good.

Sixshot, you seem to know a lot about engines and have made some good points. What do you think of Saber Interactive's Saber 3D engine? I'm talking about the one they used for TimeShift. It looks pretty good and runs pretty smooth but it may have a problem with large maps.

Oh, btw, I was wrong about IW not using a buzz word for their engine. From what I've read it's officially called the IWTech Engine.

Hmm... I don't have info on Saber 3D. If I had played Timeshift, I would have dug up some info on that. Sometimes licensing an engine isn't all that great of an idea since the engine probably won't be able to handle the kind of vision the developers have in mind. In those cases, it'd be necessary for the devs to build their own engine. Nowadays there are numerous 3D engines around that it's a problem for me to keep up with them all. There's even little to no buzz surrounding engines like Crystal Space 3D and Torque, the latter is responsible for TRIBES 2.

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t3h bl0g | Old Warriors Soceity | my BFBC2 stats