Information Unigine CEO Offers Free Engine License for Wasteland 2

[St. Toxic]

Nobody is expecting characters polished to the level of, say, Gears of War.

 

[Surf Solar]

Pixels are beautiful and a line drawn by human hand has always more soul than one rendered by a machine. Or something faggy like that.

It's kinda hard to describe why exactly I love the aesthetics of entirely 2d enviroments. It just has a certain style going on that I can't see going on in realtime rendered 3d enviroments. It feels more like playing on a "painting" than some jagged 3d pile. Plus, to tell some small anecdotes, I don't know what kind of argument that is that it's hard to do animated foliage/trees in 2d. Wat? You just render out the animation, loop it and export it. The only time-eater is the actual animation render time if you want it highly detailed with big textures and lots of polygons and depending on how many frames you want and how smoothly the animation plays. Which brings me to the next one - you don't have to care for polygon counts or big textures being loaded into memory, you can create models with billions of polygons and very detailed and big textures without having to worry about performance later on. This would never be possible with realtime 3d rendering (less you have some renderfarm at home for your gaming rig) This allows you to do your models much more detailed than what you could achieve by realtime rendering, without having your computer or graphic card kneel down - for all you care you just have to prerender your high poly model and be done with it. Same goes for "post processing" - in my experience it was much more enjoyable and easy to do additional actual painting over static 2d objects to add some dirt, particles or whatever over your model than fucking around in 3d programs all the time. It is more intuitive and more what I understand under doing actually some "art".

I don't buy the "sprites are hard to manage" argument, when even I can make macros to easily render out new sprites from existing models+animations, then for sure so can the boys and girls at Inxile or wherever this argument may come from. This was maybe hard to do in 1997, today it is not.

Same goes for camera, an argument people often bring up. To be honest, there is not a single 3d cRPG I played (like NWN2, Vampire the Masquerade:Redemption, the dungeon siege games, hell even Age of Decadence) where I am not constantly raging at the camera movement. Why do I have to use additional time to constantly tweak the camera, rotate it, zoom in/out when I just want to play the game? I don't need to view this house or this tree in multiple angels, just render the assets in one angle and lock the camera, be done with it. If you walk behind a wall, then let the engine render contours of your character so you can see him, or do it the Fallout way and make a circle around the character in which the "blocked" wall gets invinsible. Were games like Jagged Alliance 2, the Infinity Engine games and so one really inferior because you couldn't rotate the camera? They weren't for me, they were convient to control and easy to handle, without me having to constantly fuck around with the camera.

Maybe it's that - the simplicity and efficiency of prerendered 2d games that I seek for - both in terms of aesthetics and actual functionality.

As said, it is kinda hard to explain, I am quite surprised I and the few other people in the thread here who prefer such a graphic style - always thought on the codex are more like minded people over this.

/rant

 

[DominikD]

This fallacy is called "post hoc ergo propter hoc": you're assuming that there's a connection between technical aspect of the game and its art style. Your assumption is that because games exposing aesthetics you enjoy were all (or mostly) hand-crafted 2D, that means that there's a causation involved from the technical aspect to the perceived beauty. But there's little (if any) correlation between art style and the type of renderer you're using.

 

[Surf Solar]

Who was merely talking about only games of the past? I must be hallucinating working on my own game then, to easily compare different workflows of 2d and 3d I guess. Nice way to ignore other points in the post aswell.

 

[shihonage]

This is a hard subject.

This fallacy is called "post hoc ergo propter hoc": you're assuming that there's a connection between technical aspect of the game and its art style. Your assumption is that because games exposing aesthetics you enjoy were all (or mostly) hand-crafted 2D, that means that there's a causation involved from the technical aspect to the perceived beauty. But there's little (if any) correlation between art style and the type of renderer you're using.

Unfortunately, there is. It's not like you just painted a statue. Texture work goes through a lot of transformation in hardware and software in realtime, and that transformation process is often vastly inferior to non-realtime image processing methods (painting by hand, ray tracing).

And of course, there's the aforementioned performance issue. You can cram infinite amounts of polygons into 2D art without a performance hit, while 3D art is restricted by intended system requirements.

Most 3D games look alarmingly alike. The lower the budget, the more alike they look.

Back when games were only 2D, there was a lot more difference between them. Partially because of not having performance restrictions, partially because of not having so many transforms between artwork and end result (every pixel you see, could be, literally, controlled), and partially because there was no such thing as "3D accelerator structure" with its GPU, alpha blending, and other readily-available yet inherently limited tools.

All tricky effects were coded in software, which allowed for some distinct looks/animations created by need for optimization or other trickery - unique to a specific game. Such as the character animations in Wasteland, for instance.

It was actually possible to take existing hardware and create something people have never seen before, as John Carmack did with his first side-scroller engines. These days... it's still possible, with 3D hardware, but it is ever-so-rare. Everyone uses templates - preused engines, preset "academically accepted" methods of doing things. All effects look the same. Fixed. Digital.

They don't have an analogue look to them, they don't make you wonder how they work - you just have your blurry particles and your volumetric fogs and shit. Specular effects look the same everywhere. You look at something and whoa, it's specular. Whoa, that's anisotropic filtering. Whoa, that's normal mapping. The fancy "sunshafts" from WoW look exactly the same in Tribes:Ascend. They're sunshafts, man.

2D is a very different beast from 3D. It is largely disconnected from any and all filters, preconceptions and limitations of current technology and development mantra, the only exception being the pixel resolution of the end image.

 

[Infinitron]

This is a hard subject.

This fallacy is called "post hoc ergo propter hoc": you're assuming that there's a connection between technical aspect of the game and its art style. Your assumption is that because games exposing aesthetics you enjoy were all (or mostly) hand-crafted 2D, that means that there's a causation involved from the technical aspect to the perceived beauty. But there's little (if any) correlation between art style and the type of renderer you're using.

Unfortunately, there is. It's not like you just painted a statue. Texture work goes through a lot of transformation in hardware and software in realtime, and that transformation process is often vastly inferior to non-realtime image processing methods (painting by hand, ray tracing).

And of course, there's the aforementioned performance issue. You can cram infinite amounts of polygons into 2D art without a performance hit, while 3D art is restricted by intended system requirements.

Most 3D games look alarmingly alike. The lower the budget, the more alike they look.

Back when games were only 2D, there was a lot more difference between them. Partially because of not having performance restrictions, partially because of not having so many transforms between artwork and end result (every pixel you see, could be, literally, controlled), and partially because there was no such thing as "3D accelerator structure" with its GPU, alpha blending, and other readily-available yet inherently limited tools.

All tricky effects were coded in software, which allowed for some distinct looks/animations created by need for optimization or other trickery - unique to a specific game. Such as the character animations in Wasteland, for instance.

It was actually possible to take existing hardware and create something people have never seen before, as John Carmack did with his first side-scroller engines. These days... it's still possible, with 3D hardware, but it is ever-so-rare. Everyone uses templates - preused engines, preset "academically accepted" methods of doing things. All effects look the same. Fixed. Digital.

They don't have an analogue look to them, they don't make you wonder how they work - you just have your blurry particles and your volumetric fogs and shit. Specular effects look the same everywhere. You look at something and whoa, it's specular. Whoa, that's anisotropic filtering. Whoa, that's normal mapping. The fancy "sunshafts" from WoW look exactly the same in Tribes:Ascend. They're sunshafts, man.

2D is a very different beast from 3D. It is largely disconnected from any and all filters, preconceptions and limitations of current technology and development mantra, the only exception being the pixel resolution of the end image.

I claim that this would have happened anyway - regardless of technology used - due to rising budgets. The more costly game development becomes, the more it becomes necessary to use safe, well-tested, "best practice" development techniques, in order to reduce risk.

 

[DwarvenFood]

This fallacy is called "post hoc ergo propter hoc"

Alternatively you could try some "post hoc, ergo prosper hoc" but it could be damaging to mental health.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Same goes for camera, an argument people often bring up. To be honest, there is not a single 3d cRPG I played (like NWN2, Vampire the Masquerade:Redemption, the dungeon siege games, hell even Age of Decadence) where I am not constantly raging at the camera movement. Why do I have to use additional time to constantly tweak the camera, rotate it, zoom in/out when I just want to play the game? I don't need to view this house or this tree in multiple angels, just render the assets in one angle and lock the camera, be done with it. If you walk behind a wall, then let the engine render contours of your character so you can see him, or do it the Fallout way and make a circle around the character in which the "blocked" wall gets invinsible. Were games like Jagged Alliance 2, the Infinity Engine games and so one really inferior because you couldn't rotate the camera? They weren't for me, they were convient to control and easy to handle, without me having to constantly fuck around with the camera.

Yeah, that. If W2 has more camera movement than SC2 I'm gonna rage hard.

 

[DominikD]

Just a side note: according to official forums inXile is down to 2 engines to chose from, Unigine being one of them (no info on the counter-candidate, UE is probably the most obvious choice). There's also a statement from one of the devs that platforms are to be disclosed in the next few days. If they decide to port to Linux, there are very few options to chose from (essentially Unigine, OGRE and recently revived Torque).

 

[shihonage]

Fuck Linux. Wasteland 2 on more than one platform is a pipe dream. The longer this dream is maintained, the worse it will be for the project.

They need to have as much stability with the project as possible. They should go for a proven and polished engine, as opposed to one whose biggest draw is being either "cross-platform" or "free".

 

[Brother None]

Just a side note: according to official forums inXile is down to 2 engines to chose from, Unigine being one of them (no info on the counter-candidate, UE is probably the most obvious choice). There's also a statement from one of the devs that platforms are to be disclosed in the next few days. If they decide to port to Linux, there are very few options to chose from (essentially Unigine, OGRE and recently revived Torque).

Fargo confirmed 2 engines were left in the search to NMA a while ago. Yes, Unigine is one of them, and kind of feels like the stronger candidate.

Wasteland 2 has already been announced for Windows, Mac and Linux. This is all old news.

 

[Infinitron]

Fuck Linux. Wasteland 2 on more than one platform is a pipe dream. The longer this dream is maintained, the worse it will be for the project.

It's too late to backpedal on this. Would be a PR nightmare. At most the non-Windows versions can be delayed.

 

[Licaon_Kter]

Fuck Linux. Wasteland 2 on more than one platform is a pipe dream. The longer this dream is maintained, the worse it will be for the project.

all hail my platform fuck the others... yeah, a Wasteland2 FPS would be better easier to develop since most of the engines already have proven FPS capabilities right? maybe a post-apoc-pop-a-mole would wet the fans, but hey keep it WindowsXP compatible only, keep the dream alive man!

 

[deus101]

Meh...almost all middleware engine have heavy focus on being platform agnostic. This has increased ten-folds with the smartphones shit.

*to trail of from topic*...really...that shit has taken off and everyone want to jew into the fucking thing, Microsoft with their Embedded OS now market their next visual studio on how easy and flexible it provides build environment for "apps"...if that wasnt enough...NEXT windows WILL SUPPORT THEM! Fucking GOODY!.

Then you have Nokia and QT, which is basically putting their core stuff on the shelf so they can develop QTQuick and their shitty QML runtime enviroment.


Ok, maybe its a bit pointless to bitch about a lowered development bar... but hysterical market hype allways finds a way to fuck it up for the Elite.


anyway...probably wound't take to much effort to port shit.

 

[shihonage]

Fuck Linux. Wasteland 2 on more than one platform is a pipe dream. The longer this dream is maintained, the worse it will be for the project.

all hail my platform fuck the others... yeah, a Wasteland2 FPS would be better easier to develop since most of the engines already have proven FPS capabilities right? maybe a post-apoc-pop-a-mole would wet the fans, but hey keep it WindowsXP compatible only, keep the dream alive man!

It has nothing to do with affinity to a specific platform, but with the scale of the project, size of the company, and platform-specific QA that is inevitably required, even if your engine is "cross-platform capable". There are always differences between platforms, there's no such thing as a seamless porting process.

 

[deus101]

*fah*
If i had my way I'd stick to windows 2000.

...fuck...I miss linuxs common sense file structure and environment variables
And packetsmanager....GOD! WHY DON'T WINDOWS COME WITH REPOS!

And non-schizophrenic rights and without that retarded file buffering caracas which manages to make memory hogs of simple file operations!


Windows...is...SHIT!

Atleast we have the only IDE in the entire world worth using though.

 

[Marquess Cornwallis]

If I were them, I'd try to book Ryan C. Gordon, unless he is taken for that far ahead already (which unfortunately is quite possible). Few people have the experience he's got; he could easily handle both ports single-handedly.

 

[deus101]

Fuck Linux. Wasteland 2 on more than one platform is a pipe dream. The longer this dream is maintained, the worse it will be for the project.

all hail my platform fuck the others... yeah, a Wasteland2 FPS would be better easier to develop since most of the engines already have proven FPS capabilities right? maybe a post-apoc-pop-a-mole would wet the fans, but hey keep it WindowsXP compatible only, keep the dream alive man!

It has nothing to do with affinity to a specific platform, but with the scale of the project, size of the company, and platform-specific QA that is inevitably required, even if your engine is "cross-platform capable". There are always differences between platforms, there's no such thing as a seamless porting process.

Actually I'm quite impressed with QT, they now have their own C++11 libraries, provide context libraries for GL, their own lowlevel sound modules, SVG, animation and simple 2D graphics designer if you want to make your own quirky UI elements.

If i can get past the current lack of documentation that's not obsolete I might never go back.
And if I can port my project to tablets and shit with as little effort as possible, i can score some cheap points with my boss

 

[Licaon_Kter]

If I were them, I'd try to book Ryan C. Gordon, unless he is taken for that far ahead already (which unfortunately is quite possible). Few people have the experience he's got; he could easily handle both ports single-handedly.

see:
https://twitter.com/#!/icculus/status/186660489470812160
&
https://twitter.com/#!/icculus/status/190199525657419777

 

[deus101]

If I were them, I'd try to book Ryan C. Gordon, unless he is taken for that far ahead already (which unfortunately is quite possible). Few people have the experience he's got; he could easily handle both ports single-handedly.

see:
https://twitter.com/#!/icculus/status/186660489470812160

@icculus I'm trying to start a company for porting games to Linux, along with localizing other games. If we can get moving, you want a job?

That might have pinched a nerve

 

[shihonage]

That's why you buy an engine, they take care of the low level driver and OS issues. If they are worth anything at all. It's not hard to write renderer or tools it's easy, what's hard and expensive is to maintain it and keep it bug free on all platforms. For engines like torque you are going to have to deal with things yourself, but for something with tens of thousands of dollars per license you should have that level of support or it's madness to pay them.

If the engine supports the OS you should have to do nothing special for different platforms, and if bugs pop up you send them on to the engine maker and get free support.

The issues aren't that clear-cut. It's not necessarily the engine maker's job. They just make the engine, and then if you do something stupid that simply doesn't work on one platform, it's not always something within engine's power to provide. It's just something you missed in the mountain of documentation, the "do not do this" section, or worse yet, your knowledge of platform-specific quirks is merely assumed.

If one platform has, say, problems mixing audio at 44100hz and needs 48000hz, and you missed that warning somewhere, you'll spend a lot of time beating your head against the wall. Or you ran into some kind of filesystem naming difference or file limit. Or you realize that the OS polls certain kinds of input at a different rate, so you need to use alternate settings in order to match the same "feel" functionality from another OS. Or using some kind of low-level timer interferes with something else in the OS. On technical level it all works, but the user experience will be different.

Cross-porting requires low-level platform awareness from the get-go, from the dev. team itself,and I don't think a small team should spread themselves this thin, in the project of this magnitude. This isn't friggin' Braid. But, as people said, too late now.

 

[shihonage]

Sure that would make some sense if Mac Linux and Windows didn't all use exactly the same hardware. So does Xbawks for that matter.

I don't think you understand what a driver is.

It should be a snap to port to the platforms involved, excepting the driver issues.

Oh, wait, so you do understand. Sort of.

How's this then - there's a lot more stability and optimization to be found in Direct3D drivers than in OpenGL ones.

OpenGL is a fine STANDARD, but on driver level it simply hasn't been war-tested and polished anywhere near enough of what Direct3D went through. There's a fragmentation of extensions, standards, and most importantly, driver polish and performance.

Yet if you choose to do both platforms, you have to use OpenGL on both, and even on Windows it is a fragmented, unoptimized mess because barely any games use it (last time I checked Quake Wars ran like shit, and Rage had launch OpenGL issues, and WoW's OpenGL mode was a joke).

Though current onboard videocards may run Wasteland2-level Direct3D quite snappily (WoW-level graphics?), with OpenGL it will be hit-and-miss in terms of performance and compatibility - on Windows, but moreso on the turmolous, do-it-yourself Linux platform.

This is a good example of how crossplatform focus impacts the project from the very start - by excluding a great, reliable, optimized API.

The biggest goal of a game engine maker is to make things work properly across platforms and with driver versions. Some do a better job than others, and you should select one that does it properly. Unreal 3 does a good job with this, even though it has some serious defects because of this. Why make things that run and look as good as they can on PC and are easy and powerful to use when all you make is corridor console shooters?

An undoubtedly cozy worldview, but not a realistic one. That's why there are "porting teams" and "porting departments".

 

[Cassidy]

Seriously, unless a game engine was developed in .NET (LOL), infected with shitty GFWL, coded shoddily without any regards to OS-independent standards and/or totally reliant on DirectX having no OpenGL support there is no reason it can't be compiled under Linux.

 

[shihonage]

Two issues here.

1) So driver issues are the responsibility of the buyer of the engine for platforms they support? Sorry, this is ridiculous. You don't pay a million bucks to get Unreal and then mess with driver issues yourself. You mess with driver issues only if you port yourself, or use a really crappy barely supported engine. Maybe your hobbyist code makes you think this is how professionals work but let's try to deal with planet earth. You still don't get it, you are porting to the same hardware. The drivers are the responsibility of the engine maker to deal with. That's the whole value of having middleware from someone else, they take care of the massive task of 3D accelerator compatibility.

The driver issues are not responsibility of the buyer. They're not responsibility of the engine. They're responsibility of the driver makers (audio, video, mouse, keyboard) and OS makers (filesystem).

2) Sure they have port teams for dealing with consoles and embedded devices and things that are genuinely different, or if they port things themselves. I already pointed out before the example you brought up just doesn't apply. If an engine doesn't provide things like virtual file system, its own thread and sound library, and all the basic stuff you need for a game in a crossplatform manner it's a complete joke.

Summary is, your hobby code using low rent tools is absolutely nothing to do with buying an engine that supports all your platforms and has been used to make AAA games on a platform before when all the platforms use the same hardware. Especially since it's in 2D anyway, and you are whiteknighting 2D now. So whatever, you wanna keep herp derping you're welcome to it.

Wasteland 2 is not in 2D. And I'm not a proponent of it being in 2D. I did argue the positive sides of 2D, since they seem to be largely overlooked, but it doesn't mean that everything can and should be 2D.

Note that you mention AAA games. AAA games can afford all the extra labor that goes into porting them. Yet Wasteland 2 is not an "AAA" game. It doesn't have tens of millions. It has to be very savvy with the money and time.

Seriously, unless a game engine was developed in .NET (LOL), infected with shitty GFWL, coded shoddily without any regards to OS-independent standards and/or totally reliant on DirectX having no OpenGL support there is no reason it can't be compiled under Linux.

"Compile" does not mean "function the same way as it does on the other platform". This is my last post on this subject, because there's nothing more to add, and I don't want to keep hijacking the thread. Carry on.

 

[Johannes]

It's a pipe dream people paid to fund, deal with it.