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Other Ubisoft games may start using Massive's (Division) SnowDrop engine quite soon

C

Crossing Eden

Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
http://www.finder.com.au/gaming/the-divisions-dark-zone-experience-could-turn-up-in-assassins-creed

“Internally we try to share as much technology as possible between the studios,” head of IP at Ubisoft Massive, Martin Hultberg, explained to finder.com.au during a recent press event for the game in Times Square, New York.

“It’s just more efficient that way. In our case we developed the Snowdrop Engine from the ground-up because we needed middleware that could run on the new consoles and PC, while doing everything we wanted to do with the open world, the weather, time of day and such features. Now we’ve made that engine available to other studios, and not just the Clancy teams. Any Ubisoft team can use Snowdrop now.”
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On things like the seamless multiplayer also being incorporated into other Ubi titles:

“The Dark Zone experience in itself isn’t technology specific to the rest of the game,” Hulkberg continues, “but the transitions that we do between the [campaign and Dark Zone] game modes – the fact that we do not use lobbies or menus – is the key part of the Snowdrop Engine. I think that feature could definitely be incorporated into other Ubisoft games like Assassin’s Creed. It’s a really immersive feature that I think fits with pretty much all Ubisoft’s IPs.”
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N

Nirolak

Mrgrgr
I was kind of confused why Ubisoft makes 12 similar games all on disparate engines.

I'm not sure if other teams would use it though just because they all seem to already be on different engines if this is only now becoming an option.
 
S

shinobi602

Member
Massive's always been excellent at tech what with World in Conflict looking absolutely incredible back in 2007 and now The Division. Ubisoft really should integrate all their teams into one engine instead of a dozen engines. It's helped EA tremendously with Frostbite in terms of team sharing of knowledge and troubleshooting as well as individual teams adding their own features to Frostbite that others could utilize.

Also helps that this is the most stable and technically impressive game from Ubisoft this gen so far in my opinion. I hope they implement it across all their games eventually.
 
N

Nokterian

Member
Nirolak said:
I was kind of confused why Ubisoft makes 12 similar games all on disparate engines.

I'm not sure if other teams would use it though just because they all seem to already be on different engines if this is only now becoming an option.
Click to expand...

Well seeing how EA is now only using frostbite for everything and that is not bad..would be nice to see ubisoft doing the same with this engine. So far PC version from the division works great and better than any game from ubisoft that runs on PC.
 
R

RoboPlato

I'd be in the dick
This is excellent news. Ubi's mess of different engines has really been holding them back and Snowdrop looks and runs quite well. Very impressed with how The Division looks so far.
 
DOWN

DOWN

Banned
Someday's EA masterpiece decision to pump Frostbite into god tier multi-studio bliss will be obvious to all of the industry and we can say bye to Square Enix's visually mediocre AAA's. Everyone should be trying to do what Frostbite has accomplished, though I doubt they can do it as bEAutifully.
 
F

Fisico

Member
The technology has been hot at Ubisoft for quite a while now already, some already discussed whether it'd make sense or not to use a single engine (Anvil being a likely candidate at some point), but considering the variety of games Ubisoft publish and the critics that the game look to similar to each other at some point they quickly gave up on te idea.
Though they should slow down on creating new engines from now on, and I do expect smaller scale projects using Snowdrop releasing in 2017.
 
S

sflufan

Banned
So Snowdrop will be Ubisoft's Frostbite.

Which is an interesting parallel as it will involve another engine from a Swedish developer (Massive Entertainment) following the same path as DICE. Must be something in the Swedish water!
 
S

smokeandmirrors

Banned
What is Siege using?

also i dont know why they didnt do this in the first place.

sflufan said:
So Snowdrop will be Ubisoft's Frostbite.

Which is an interesting parallel as it will involve another engine from a Swedish developer (Massive Entertainment) following the same path as DICE. Must be something in the Swedish water!
Click to expand...

well Scandinavia in general in education including math and sciences so that may be a big reason why.
 
V

VariantX

Member
They werent already? WIth the amount of software Ubisoft makes this makes way too much sense for them not to get to work on. I get Ubi Art needs to be a different engine, and I get why R6 siege would be on a different engine, but i dont get why most of their AAA needs to be on different when most of them have the common thread of being large open world games.
 
J

John Caboose

Member
The Division looks fantastic but I'm not a fan of the quite obvious LoD pop-ins, at least on Xbox One (haven't seen other versions in person).
 
S

sjay1994

Member
smokeandmirrors said:
What is Siege using?

also i dont know why they didnt do this in the first place.
Click to expand...

If I remember correctly, Seige was using a modified AnvilNext engine that is used for Assassins.

shagg_187 said:
Hope it happens but I'm not sure how far into WD2 development they were when Snowdrop was considered complete and shareable.
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If its coming out this year, its probably using the Disrupt engine the first one was using.
 
S

Smokey

Member
I have no problems with this. Division looks gud and Ubi could stand to use SnowDrop the same way EA uses Frostbite.
 
Maxey

Maxey

Member
They should. Snowdrop is a masterpiece.

I wonder if that's one of the reasons the AC series is taking a sabbatical.
 
F

Fafalada

Fafracer forever
Nirolak said:
I was kind of confused why Ubisoft makes 12 similar games all on disparate engines.
Click to expand...
Maintaining a software-monolith for disparate products is hard, and most importantly - expensive work (and it grows more expensive with the size and number of products).
And extremely-wide horizontal scaling model Ubisoft has been employing for past 8 years gives short-term predictability wins that are hard to compete with and isn't compatible with central-tech approach - unless you allow for breaking the monolith model - which again introduces uncertainty (for lack of precedent, if nothing else).
 
M

Massa

Member
shinobi602 said:
Massive's always been excellent at tech what with World in Conflict looking absolutely incredible back in 2007 and now The Division. Ubisoft really should integrate all their teams into one engine instead of a dozen engines. It's helped EA tremendously with Frostbite in terms of team sharing of knowledge and troubleshooting as well as individual teams adding their own features to Frostbite that others could utilize.

Also helps that this is the most stable and technically impressive game from Ubisoft this gen so far in my opinion. I hope they implement it across all their games eventually.
Click to expand...

I'd disagree with that. Being forced to use Frostbite caused a few teams at EA to really fall behind and deliver worse games than they were used to. It's working fine for them now, but it was a very painful transition that I personally don't think was worth it (for DICE it was great though, they rule EA now).
 
R

RoboPlato

I'd be in the dick
Massa said:
I'd disagree with that. Being forced to use Frostbite caused a few teams at EA to really fall behind and deliver worse games than they were used to. It's working fine for them now, but it was a very painful transition that I personally don't think was worth it (for DICE it was great though, they rule EA now).
Click to expand...
Care to explain? I've found that EA's quality has been much more consistent the past few years and most of their games have been pretty solid on a technical level as well.
 
Maxey

Maxey

Member
Fafalada said:
Maintaining a software-monolith for disparate products is hard, and most importantly - expensive work (and it grows more expensive with the size and number of products).
And extremely-wide horizontal scaling model Ubisoft has been employing for past 8 years gives short-term predictability wins that are hard to compete with and isn't compatible with central-tech approach - unless you allow for breaking the monolith model - which again introduces uncertainty (for lack of precedent, if nothing else).
Click to expand...

UnitedImpureAlaskajingle.gif
 
S

shinobi602

Member
Massa said:
I'd disagree with that. Being forced to use Frostbite caused a few teams at EA to really fall behind and deliver worse games than they were used to. It's working fine for them now, but it was a very painful transition that I personally don't think was worth it (for DICE it was great though, they rule EA now).
Click to expand...
Which games are you talking about specifically? And in what way are they quantitively worse?

Any transition from an engine that a studio is used to to a completely different one will be painful and difficult obviously, but the end result is worth it. From the devs I've spoken to at Bioware, Visceral and Ghost Games, they've become quite comfortable in it now and love the hotlink to DICE and other teams when they need to consult on the engine.
 
S

sjay1994

Member
RoboPlato said:
Care to explain? I've found that EA's quality has been much more consistent the past few years and most of their games have been pretty solid on a technical level as well.
Click to expand...

I'm curious as to why he says so too. I don't believe frostbite is negatively impacting EA's game output. Only non DICE frostbite game I played was DA:I, and I thought it was mediocre, but that was mostly due to the game design than actual engine qualms, and my problems with battlefront was merely lack of meaningful content that encouraged replayability, but that game is hands down an engine showcase.
 
J

Jedi2016

Member
Nirolak said:
I was kind of confused why Ubisoft makes 12 similar games all on disparate engines.
Click to expand...
Their development process seems so fragmented, I wouldn't be surprised if entire divisions of the company were unaware that Snowdrop existed until development on the older engines was too far along to switch. Hence the delay in the next AC.. dollars to donuts it'll be suddenly running on Snowdrop the next time we see it.
 
S

sjay1994

Member
Jedi2016 said:
Their development process seems so fragmented, I wouldn't be surprised if entire divisions of the company were unaware that Snowdrop existed until development on the older engines was too far along to switch. Hence the delay in the next AC.. dollars to donuts it'll be suddenly running on Snowdrop the next time we see it.
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I did some reading, and it seems like some of the "new engines" from montreal are based on existing engines from the building.

Example: Disrupt (watch dogs) was a combination of the former engine used by Reflections, and the Anvil engine and Dunia engine. Anvil is apparently a foundation to make open worlds, while Dunia is used for vegetation simulation.

Most of the engines the company uses are in the Montreal building, I doubt people there are completely oblivious to other engines existing.
 
DOWN

DOWN

Banned
Jedi2016 said:
Their development process seems so fragmented, I wouldn't be surprised if entire divisions of the company were unaware that Snowdrop existed until development on the older engines was too far along to switch. Hence the delay in the next AC.. dollars to donuts it'll be suddenly running on Snowdrop the next time we see it.
Click to expand...

Eh, pretty sure I've read that the open world stuff like For Honor, Assassin's Creed, Watch Dogs, and SnowDrop are all linked in foundation even though they are called their own engine names, hence having some similar flat looks at times.

EDIT: see above me
 
C

Crossing Eden

Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
Jedi2016 said:
Their development process seems so fragmented, I wouldn't be surprised if entire divisions of the company were unaware that Snowdrop existed until development on the older engines was too far along to switch. Hence the delay in the next AC.. dollars to donuts it'll be suddenly running on Snowdrop the next time we see it.
Click to expand...
Collaboration and communication is highly valued at their studio iirc. Snowdrop allows for much faster testing and prototyping and apparently that was the stage they were at when the new AC was leaked so maybe. Either that or they're heavily upgrading anvilnext 2.0
 
M

Massa

Member
RoboPlato said:
Care to explain? I've found that EA's quality has been much more consistent the past few years and most of their games have been pretty solid on a technical level as well.
Click to expand...

Yes, I agree that now they have things under control and a great engine.

shinobi602 said:
Which games are you talking about specifically? And in what way are they quantitively worse?

Any transition from an engine that a studio is used to to a completely different one will be painful and difficult obviously, but the end result is worth it. From the devs I've spoken to at Bioware, Visceral and Ghost Games, they've become quite comfortable in it now and love the hotlink to DICE and other teams when they need to consult on the engine.
Click to expand...

These were the first non-DICE Frostbite 2 games:

Medal of Honor: Warfighter (down 20 points on Metacritic from MoH reboot, studio shut down)
Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel (down 20 points on Metacritic from 40th Day, studio shut down)
NFS: The Run (decent game held back by lack of content, studio shut down)

There's also Command & Conquer that was cancelled and the studio shut down.

We tend to judge engines based on how pretty games look, but the most important feature by far is how easy they're to work with. When devs can't work with the development tools at their disposal they can't iterate on their game, put new ideas in place and have the time to refine them and eventually make them great. The core of the development process is iteration, if your tech gets in the way you can't do that. It was clear as day everyone outside of DICE struggled with Frostbite out of the gate.

It sounds great on paper to have one in-house engine. For DICE it was obviously great, they went from being a studio whose life was tied to Battlefield to being at the center of all of EA's games development. The EA execs probably think they did great, they're not paying royalties to Epic now. But how much money did they have to spend on Frostbite to get it to where it is now? How much more expensive is DICE now that they have to maintain a much more complex engine and support all their internal studios? I'm not convinced it was better for their bottom line, but it's a moot point anyway. What's done is done, those studios are gone and the tech itself is great now.
 
C

Cave Johnson

Member
Massa said:
Yes, I agree that now they have things under control and a great engine.



These were the first non-DICE Frostbite 2 games:

Medal of Honor: Warfighter (down 20 points on Metacritic from MoH reboot, studio shut down)
Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel (down 20 points on Metacritic from 40th Day, studio shut down)
NFS: The Run (decent game held back by lack of content, studio shut down)

There's also Command & Conquer that was cancelled and the studio shut down.

We tend to judge engines based on how pretty games look, but the most important feature by far is how easy they're to work with. When devs can't work with the development tools at their disposal they can't iterate on their game, put new ideas in place and have the time to refine them and eventually make them great. The core of the development process is iteration, if your tech gets in the way you can't do that. It was clear as day everyone outside of DICE struggled with Frostbite out of the gate.

It sounds great on paper to have one in-house engine. For DICE it was obviously great, they went from being a studio whose life was tied to Battlefield to being at the center of all of EA's games development. The EA execs probably think they did great, they're not paying royalties to Epic now. But how much money did they have to spend on Frostbite to get it to where it is now? How much more expensive is DICE now that they have to maintain a much more complex engine and support all their internal studios? I'm not convinced it was better for their bottom line, but it's a moot point anyway. What's done is done, those studios are gone and the tech itself is great now.
Click to expand...

Exclusive engines like the ones to power Uncharted is pretty much the same thing. I thought we all know that manpower=budget. Because DICE can be used as an internal hub for advisory/deployment. The development and engine re-iteration are part of the same internal team - this should mitigate a lot of the transitional costs/support not to mention it evens out on the long term. Having a multi-million selling title on royalties vs in-house should've answered your own question, especially, if it comes from a company with multiple IP's.
 
M

_machine

Member
Luis1986 said:
I wonder if that's one of the reasons the AC series is taking a sabbatical.
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No. Realistically the next AC has been in development long enough (it's not like they just decided to start working on it) and they would not have changed to an unproven technology when they just got their engine suited well for this generation platforms. I would say it's unlikely we see any titles move on Snowdrop within a few years, and even then expecting Ubi to take a singular engine approach might be out of the question (and I don't think they would want to enforce that, given that the individual studios still maintain ownership of their work).

Cave Johnson said:
Exclusive engines like the ones to power Uncharted is pretty much the same thing. I thought we all know that manpower=budget. Because DICE can be used as an internal hub for advisory/deployment. The development and engine re-iteration are part of the same internal team - this should mitigate a lot of the transitional costs/support not to mention it evens out on the long term. Having a multi-million selling title on royalties vs in-house should've answered your own question, especially, if it comes from a company with multiple IP's.
Click to expand...
They are still some worlds apart: ND's engine is tailored towards a feature set, and thus can ignore some features needed for a more middleware-like tool. The amount of support and complexity needed to make the cross-studio toolset is much, much more harder, even from factoring the additional communication and management costs from a structural standpoint. It can make sense, but it can also take power away from developers, make from a few very, very troubled production cycles, need much more human resources etc.
 
A

Auctopus

Member
All I've thought whilst playing The Division beta is that I hope Ghost Recon doesn't control like it. GR needs to be snappier where as the Division feels a little sluggish.
 
P

Parsnip

Member
Parsnip said:
I do wonder how Ubisoft's Snowdrop engine is coming along, and if it is being built in such a way that it could be potentially used to replace other Ubi in-house engines.
Click to expand...

Parsnip said:
The thing I want from a new AC game is them moving away from AnvilNext.
I'm hoping that Massive is building the Snowdrop engine and tools in such a way that all future AC games (and other franchises too I guess) could eventually use that one too instead of Anvil.

Assuming Snowdrop ends up being good, obviously. What they have shown so far seems pretty great. Ubisoft has a lot of internal engines.
Click to expand...

Parsnip said:
And I'm hoping that it's good and smartly built engine that scales to all kinds of games and that they'll start using it on AC games in a few years.
Click to expand...

Parsnip said:
These shots just makes me hope that Ubi abandons all their other dozen or so internal engines and makes all their games with Snowdrop from now on.

Excluding Ubiart.
Click to expand...

Parsnip said:
I'm secretly hoping that part of the reason they are skipping a year is a move to Snowdrop.
Click to expand...

Just according to keikaku.

n450SFl.jpg


Seriously though, I really really want this. There's just something about a new fresh engine that gets me going. At this point it would seem foolish to spent all this time to build new tech just for one IP.

Anvil's such an old engine at this point that I'm wondering if ease of use was something they thought about when they started working on it way back when. I obviously don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a similar nightmare as Bungie's tech is (based on that Kotaku story).
 
S

Setsuna

Member
No point in everyone switching over, to the Snowdrop engine, Its not like Snowdrop its so much better so much more advanced than Anvil Next, or Dunia. To the point that everyone should switch over and re-implement everything they have worked on for however many years
 
P

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
kurahador said:
Good. Assassin's Creed desperately needs it.
Click to expand...

The engine is not the problem, putting together hundreds and hundreds of different software components/sub systems developed by different teams, see Watch Dogs, is the problem. Huge scale, components assembled together late in the project.
 
S

Setsuna

Member
Panajev2001a said:
The engine is not the problem, putting together hundreds and hundreds of different software components/sub systems developed by different teams, see Watch Dogs, is the problem. Huge scale, components assembled together late in the project.
Click to expand...

Thats not even a valid comment considering that the Disrupt engine was built specifically for Watch dogs
 
V

viHuGi

Banned
shinobi602 said:
Massive's always been excellent at tech what with World in Conflict looking absolutely incredible back in 2007 and now The Division. Ubisoft really should integrate all their teams into one engine instead of a dozen engines. It's helped EA tremendously with Frostbite in terms of team sharing of knowledge and troubleshooting as well as individual teams adding their own features to Frostbite that others could utilize.

Also helps that this is the most stable and technically impressive game from Ubisoft this gen so far in my opinion. I hope they implement it across all their games eventually.
Click to expand...

Not sure if it is more stable than Far Cry 4.
 
F

Fisico

Member
Crossing Eden said:
Collaboration and communication is highly valued at their studio iirc. Snowdrop allows for much faster testing and prototyping and apparently that was the stage they were at when the new AC was leaked so maybe. Either that or they're heavily upgrading anvilnext 2.0
Click to expand...

Considering most of their AAA productions (if not all) use teams from accross 3 different continents I'd say yes, also they're currently trying to improve the knowledge management efficiency so that tools/technologies/middlewares knowledge can be shared more easily, how far they got in that process that I don't know though.
 
P

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Setsuna said:
Thats not even a valid comment considering that the Disrupt engine was built specifically for Watch dogs
Click to expand...

We are saying two relatively orthogonal things. Building something custom tailored for the task may make it possible yet far from trivial.
 
C

Crackbone

Member
shinobi602 said:
Massive's always been excellent at tech what with World in Conflict looking absolutely incredible back in 2007 and now The Division. Ubisoft really should integrate all their teams into one engine instead of a dozen engines. It's helped EA tremendously with Frostbite in terms of team sharing of knowledge and troubleshooting as well as individual teams adding their own features to Frostbite that others could utilize.

Also helps that this is the most stable and technically impressive game from Ubisoft this gen so far in my opinion. I hope they implement it across all their games eventually.
Click to expand...

This is absolutely true.

If the toolset is as good as we're lead to believe, and I have no reason to doubt Massive, as you mentioned, they've always been top tier when it comes to their engine tech, there's really no reason that the other studios shouldn't utilize the engine.

It's easily the most graphically impressive engine this gen. What's going to be interesting is finding how adaptable it is. The players will have some idea of this after launch of The Division. The quick addition of minor content and other gameplay changes should be the proof.
 
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