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Game engines that are better than the "popular" ones

The Hedgehog Engine was awesome. Not sure how versatile it would be for anything non-Sonic but Rooftop Run I'm Generations really showed off what it could do. Seemed to scale down to Wii nicely as well.
 
element said:
They do! As many have said, engines and tools are just evolutions. It is VERY rare for a studio not to just fork their codebase and refactor major features.
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Wait, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor used... holy crap. I thought it was Unreal Engine.
Didn't know when WB bought Monolith, Touchdown/Lithtech were part of the deal.
Well then, Lithtech and the REDengine definitely are my choice.
 
CenturionKei said:
And yet it's a modders paradise.
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Because they released tools, not because their engine is particularly special (or good). If you have tools, it lowers the barrier of entry. Most games that have released tools or publicly available engines have a thriving enthusiast development community. Open source software is a powerful and attractive thing.

Most games can't do that nowadays due to the large amounts of 3rd party middleware licenses that are integrated into the engine, or are integral to the development toolchain. Not to mention that upkeep/support for such a community is expensive. Not every studio can do it, exactly why Unity and Unreal are so popular right now, they've successfully tapped into a lucrative market niche. A lot of Epic's continual engine advances are sourced from the community.

OT: I don't think that just looking at the resulting game in question is a good indicator of how good the engine is (loads of mentions of Destiny ITT). You could take a look at Max Payne or the GTA games in the Rage engine and say "Wow. Euphoria is amazing! Why don't devs use this in every game?" That is until you learn that the technology driving it had to be deeply integrated into the entire process of each games development, and that Rockstar is now entirely dependent on the Natural Motion engineers if something breaks. Potential workflow murder. Remember Red Dead Redemption, and the rumor that the game is being held together by duck tape and super glue, which is why it never got a PC port? That's a pretty good looking, well animating game to me (for the time).
 
Suprised not to see Red Faction Guerrilla's engine.

Ran smooooth and looked great/clean AND had the best destruction/physics tech.

edit- oh that's right Geo-mod was mentioned. doh!
 
DoublePayje said:
To my knowledge this is incorrect. Treyarch stated that for BlackOps 3 they used a modified version of the Black Ops 2 engine and snubbed the new stuff made by IW for this gen. Only IW and Slesgehammer share the engine developed by IW and that only because Sledgehammer needed help to get AW going with pre-existing tech.

Now of course the Black Ops Engine is just a modified version of the original CoD engine by IW, but after so many games my guess is that they are fairly unique. In two games Sledgehammer might have modified their work so heavily that all three studies have three different engines that came from the same tech back in the days.

I mean you just gotta look at AW and Black Ops 3. They look nothing alike, and i don't mean artstyle.
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Apparently this is not the case.
 
nOoblet16 said:
First two images, and the 3rd image from last are not from Escape from Butcher Bay.

They are from the PS360/PC Remake of the game that came out with the Assault on Dark Athena expansion.
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There's a remake?

Wasn't aware of that. That being said, i remember the 1st part being in the game and looking like that. Screen looks sharp but i thought it's from the PC version?
 
gabbo said:
Wait, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor used... holy crap. I thought it was Unreal Engine.
Didn't know when WB bought Monolith, Touchdown/Lithtech were part of the deal
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Wasn't UE at all. When WB bought Monolith/Lithtech, Lithtech then turned into Touchdown Entertainment and they licensed it from WB/Monolith to continue to license to outside developers because Monolith/WB really didn't want to be in the 'engine industry' (billing, support, developer relations, etc).
 
Guerilla Games Engine:

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I personally find engine debates really shallow, because what you see is the renderer and typically that doesn't mean anything unless you have the tools and solid pipeline to actually to exploit the features your renderer can do.

That is why UE4 and Unity are so great because their toolset is refined that allows people to actually push the technology.
 
Do we know what MonolithSoft made XenoX with? Even for dated hardware, they pulled off some impressive feats with that game and the game-world.
 
I thought the Glacier 2 engine used in Hitman Absolution was amazing. Say what you like about that game's design, but it was one of the most beautiful looking games on previous gen consoles and could easily pass for a current gen game in terms of image quality.
 
As a developer, pretty much every proprietary engine I have ever used has ultimately been terrible. When you develop in-house, you run into a lot of issues with engineering resources.

See, when you license an engine, you are also getting support and tools. You get updates to the engine, tools patches, documentation, etc. You aren't just given an engine, you get the entire support structure whatever company you are licensing from has (both DICE - Frostbite and EPIC - Unreal are really, really good at this).

But in-house, you are at the mercy of the bandwidth of your engineering team. Because most of the time the engineers who built the engine will either ... leave the company because they're engine developers, not game developers; be reassigned to different engineering tasks, dramatically limiting the time they can assist with engine-related issues like tools; or put full-time on engine optimization since those licensed engines have multiple years and 100 engineers working on the same problems and you need to be able to compete with them performance-wise.

So you end up with busted or inefficient tools that make development take much, much longer than it needs to (see: Destiny), the potential that undocumented engine quirks and features get lost forever because the engineer in responsible for it either got laid off, quit, or reassigned, and limited engineering resources since at least some will be in a constant state of optimizations right up until launch (and potentially after for service-oriented games).

It sucks. I wish every in-house engine project I've worked on would have just licensed something instead. It's rarely even cost-effective anymore to develop on an in-house engine. Most studios only continue to use their proprietary engines because of habit (all the devs know their own engine) and because of sunk costs of originally developing it.
 
nkarafo said:
There's a remake?

Wasn't aware of that. That being said, i remember the 1st part being in the game and looking like that. Screen looks sharp but i thought it's from the PC version?
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Yes there is, a remake and a continuation released together in 2009.The image isn't just sharp, it also has superior lighting and shaders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueIgInz2se8
Nirolak said:
A lot of proprietary engines that did things well once upon a time simply had trouble keeping up with modern standards.

Syndicate runs on the same internal Starbreeze engine and looks awful because they had to compete with engines being made by 50-100 people.

There's also significant tools considerations. An engine isn't helpful if it looks great, but you can't make a game effectively on it.

There are some setups where you can make a very specific setup and have it work, but you still need a lot of people and they have to be very good.
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What are you talking about?
Syndicate was a very modern looking game for its time, it was a looker....except for the bloom that was overused.

But the engine itself had no trouble keeping up with modern standards.
 
Übermatik;192375059 said:
RETRO's engine for the Metroid Prime series.

Let the debate on wether it was a derivative of Unreal or not commence
I believe the final verdict was that it wasn't
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First thing that popped into my mind. That engine was amazing. It did some legit amazing things, especially in the third game.
 
I think MT Framework did a lot of flexing last gen. It seemed to adapt well to tons of different kinds of games, and there are a lot of really impressive looking and running games on the 360 and PS3 that used it.

EvilKatarn said:
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To be fair, we don't actually know if the FOX Engine is/was any better than any other third party ones. Metal Gear Solid V is a great game, but it took a very long time (engine development ate up a lot of time too) and since no other teams really got a chance to work with it, we don't know much about what it's like to work with, how adaptable it is or isn't, etc. I don't think we ever got much of a look at what the tools are like.

It does have fantastic scalability across a variety of hardware strengths though - that much we can see.
 
DoublePayje said:
I mean you just gotta look at AW and Black Ops 3. They look nothing alike, and i don't mean artstyle.
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Huh? They have the exact same shading model and the exact same post processing chain. Motion blur is the exact same, for example. You can see the same artifacting in how shadow maps are rendered.
nOoblet16 said:
They actually don't.
I distinctively remember reading a post by a Treyarch developer on Beyond3D a long time ago.

Basically what he said was that after COD4, they got the engine from IW but got little or no support for it from them and instead Treyarch had to do their own modifications to it, which led to the WaW engine (they had things like fire propagation, water deformation by player actions etc that MW2 lacked as IW never implemented it).

This engine was later updated and used in Black Ops 1, where Treyarch tried their hands at an early implementation of physically based lighting way way back and before most developers and then again updated that engine and used in Black Ops 2.


Tldr: The original COD4 engine was branched off as developers started doing their own thing with it and added stuff to it according to their preference and built upon it.
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So for the last gen COD games, they all had COD4s engine as its base? My bad in stating they "share", but they share a common root quite obviously.
nOoblet16 said:
Then they obviously developed their PS4/Xbone engine for BO3 using this as it uses tech unseen in Advanced Warfare or Ghosts.
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So you are saying The Black Ops 3 engine is not based on the AW one? They look REALLY similar to me in a lot of rendering features and quirks.
 
Helacious said:
Project Offset's engine was so promising back in the day (shat all over Oblivion which was the lastest craze at the time). It got bought by Intel and then shelved and forgotten forever. One of the first engine with per object motion blur I think.
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It lives on! At least partially in Firefall, which looks absolutely gorgeous with it :).
 
XANDER CAGE said:
To be fair, we don't actually know if the FOX Engine is/was any better than any other third party ones. Metal Gear Solid V is a great game, but it took a very long time (engine development ate up a lot of time too) and since no other teams really got a chance to work with it, we don't know much about what it's like to work with, how adaptable it is or isn't, etc. I don't think we ever got much of a look at what the tools are like.

It does have fantastic scalability across a variety of hardware strengths though - that much we can see.
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Sure, I think all we got was this map building demo. I have a feeling that a TON of work was put into the engine to make it easy to use for whatever game any Konami studio had in mind. I'd be interested in learning more about how long it took to develop the Fox Engine vs MGSV.
Zone of The Enders was gonna be on it too.
 
Probably Guerrilla's engine, so far this gen we've seen a semi-linear arenaish FPS, a narrative driven game, and an upcoming open world RPG, and a VR arena shooter.
 
element said:
I personally find engine debates really shallow, because what you see is the renderer and typically that doesn't mean anything unless you have the tools and solid pipeline to actually to exploit the features your renderer can do.

That is why UE4 and Unity are so great because their toolset is refined that allows people to actually push the technology.
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Precisely. It's also difficult to compare engines based on the games they are used in, since it's often difficult to separate between engine features/performance and content.
 
XANDER CAGE said:
To be fair, we don't actually know if the FOX Engine is/was any better than any other third party ones. Metal Gear Solid V is a great game, but it took a very long time (engine development ate up a lot of time too) and since no other teams really got a chance to work with it, we don't know much about what it's like to work with, how adaptable it is or isn't, etc. I don't think we ever got much of a look at what the tools are like.

It does have fantastic scalability across a variety of hardware strengths though - that much we can see.
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ProEvo seemed to work out ok with it.

Sadly, I think that's going to be the legacy of FOX. ProEvo yearly updates.
 
Croteam's engine scales incredibly well. I played The Talos Principle on low settings on a laptop and was blown away when I fired it up on my new PC.
 
Jonathan Blow's group wrote their own engine for The Witness. Sure, it's rendering simple textures under a fantastic art direction, but the end result is still beautiful.
 
XANDER CAGE said:
To be fair, we don't actually know if the FOX Engine is/was any better than any other third party ones. Metal Gear Solid V is a great game, but it took a very long time (engine development ate up a lot of time too) and since no other teams really got a chance to work with it, we don't know much about what it's like to work with, how adaptable it is or isn't, etc. I don't think we ever got much of a look at what the tools are like.

It does have fantastic scalability across a variety of hardware strengths though - that much we can see.
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FOX is used on ProEvo. But there have been mixed results with that game, whether it is the engine or the developers in question is unknown.
 
I'd have to say MT Framework.

Resident Evil 5 is a real looker. Resident Evil Revelations on the 3DS too. Resident Evil 6, in terms of the scale of the environments and solid performance, was also impressive.

Panta Rhei is such a misstep. They should have just focused on improving MT Framework for current-gen. Speaking of, where is Deep Down?
 
Dictator93 said:
Huh? They have the exact same shading model and the exact same post processing chain. Motion blur is the exact same, for example. You can see the same artifacting in how shadow maps are rendered.


So for the last gen COD games, they all had COD4s engine as its base? My bad in stating they "share", but they share a common root quite obviously.

So you are saying The Black Ops 3 engine is not based on the AW one? They look REALLY similar to me in a lot of rendering features and quirks.
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Yes. They all came from the same root but by now the three games are not the same tech anymore. That's what we try to tell you.
 
Literally anything that isn't Unreal.

Ass backwards pipeline, terrible support, and doesn't expose you to having your game legally erased from history by a homer judge after you're left twisting in the wind by the engine provider.
 
nOoblet16 said:
What are you talking about?
Syndicate was a very modern looking game for its time, it was a looker....except for the bloom that was overused.

But the engine itself had no trouble keeping up with modern standards.
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Yeah I thought Syndicate looked brilliant (and was a great game too incidentally), apart from the bloom. I'll never forget that laptop screen that looked like it would give you a suntan lol.
 
Trickster said:
Bethesda's gamebryo and creation engines.

No I'm not joking. Are they the prettiest or most stable engines? No, not by a long shot. But they are engines that allow a great level of interactivity in an open world setting compared to other engines. And when it comes to mods they just reign supreme
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I remember reading that Atlus' 'Catherine' used Gamebryo.

That really surprised me.
 
Raist said:
Most of 1st party devs' own engine are better, simply because they're a lot more optimized.
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Yep. Owning and known all the secret sauce gives a huge hands up. Also, third parties never are interested in grabbing all corners of performance, since they need to be on multiple platforms.
 
The Yokai Watch engine on 3DS is so far superior to the Pokemon engine on the same handheld that it's embarrassing. Level 5 is showing The Pokemon Company how it's done.
 
Don't know about "better" but the Killzone 2 engine was always fucking amazing.

bscap042.jpg


2823379-0386578299-killz.gif


Where's my god damn remaster Sony.... remastered God of War III but not this? Smh.
 
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