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Kingdom Hearts 3 is now using Unreal Engine 4
- Thread starter duckroll
- Start date
Citizen_Insane
Member
Strange news. All that time and money spent on their engine development and it was still a failure. What a waste.
Hopefully this means KH3 can come out faster.
Hopefully this means KH3 can come out faster.
Unreal Engine 4 has a really wonderful toolset for building levels and scripting gameplay that Luminous might not actually have.
They've never shown off the gameplay or level creation tools for that engine, which is one of the biggest points of having an engine.
It's the kind of stuff that Unity built an empire upon (which is also a very popular engine in Japan and at Square Enix), and was the primarily focus for companies like EA when developing Frostbite as well.
Fast, efficient, highly iterative workflows and toolsets are the heart of modern development, so choosing a toolset that works for that (whether internal or licensed) is what drives most engine selection these days, since it can be a lot easier to customize shaders and graphics rendering pipelines to your needs (and your engine provider will help you get what you want on that front) than build an engine that supports this core philosophy.
Sounds like it's for the best. After hearing the stories of crystal tools, I think it's a good idea to re-focus on an established engine that is flexible, mature and proven to ship titles across a myriad of studios.
DEAD lol
Edge_Maverick
Member
This is so... Unreal.
LOLminous.
LOLminous.
It was great. I remember Epic Games Japan really trying their hardest to license out. Most devs just didn't know or didn't care about middleware, let alone western middleware, because they had never used it in the PS2 era or before.
Everything was custom designed for a single game, they didn't need more because the budgets and stakes were not as high back then to deliver. But when they started getting big, its when SE gets their idea to make their own engine that can be used for many types of projects. And they had to fail 3 times in a row(white engine which eventually became crystal tools which was then superseded by Luminous) to decide "hey, let's just use an engine we already have licensed that does basically everything we are trying to make ourselves anyway"
Alex_Mexico
Member
Guys, correct me if I'm wrong but the Unreal Engine 4 is basically impossible to run on PS3/360/WiiU right? UE4 is only for PS4/X1/PC isn't it?
ramuh
Member
Maybe they team up with Tri-Ace and throw a Valkyrie Profile or Star Ocean game in too. What are the upcoming Enix side published games? DragonQuest? Or is it all KH and FF now.
Alice, Enslaved, Batman, and Mass Effect all look pretty different from one another. I'm not even gonna bring up the technical marvel that is Guilty Gesr Xrd.
I'm sure it was accurate for a while, but the "everything looks like gears" line of thinking re: UE is pretty antiquated at this point. Developers have been actively subverting that impression through art direction for years and UE4 looks like it moves even further out from it.
MrCunningham
Member
But on the flip side, Epic games has this generation by the balls.
What Epic ships only works on PS4/XB1/PC (Win/Max/Linux) and on iOS/Android (which uses the same pipeline/toolset, so your staff can easily shift between mobile and console development, but the usable graphical features varies per device capabilities).
Someone could try to port it to 360/PS3/Wii U, but it's not support by Epic, and thus very unlikely.
Blood Diamonds
Banned
Guilty Gear Xrd uses UE4?? This is great news for KH 3 lol
It was my understanding we had no idea how far along KH3 was in development, or when it's release date was anyway. How could switching to a different engine delay something that wasn't slated for a date in the first place? It'd be like saying The Last Guardian was delayed. 
So, if I'm understanding this whole debacle right, the reason why Square doesn't really release games anymore is they spent so much time coming up with their own engine instead of using someone else's? Is that why we got three games featuring Lightning because it was all with the same engine?
Still, KH has a very distinct look. I'd imagine UE4 can have that look if they're willing to use it, but I don't think it's something the engine usually does or has done before, has it?
And I really wouldn't use Batman as an example.
So, if I'm understanding this whole debacle right, the reason why Square doesn't really release games anymore is they spent so much time coming up with their own engine instead of using someone else's? Is that why we got three games featuring Lightning because it was all with the same engine?
Still, KH has a very distinct look. I'd imagine UE4 can have that look if they're willing to use it, but I don't think it's something the engine usually does or has done before, has it?
And I really wouldn't use Batman as an example.
It'll run, but you'd have to manually modify the engine by taking out many things the 7th gen consoles(and wii u) don't support, like certain shader features and many other things dictated by a certain level of power grunt. Its mostly about architecture though, because there is a mobile UE4 variant out for mobile units that support DX11+
It uses Unreal Engine 3, but they should be able to make a nice artstyle on that front since UE4 is actually much more robust in its rendering breadth and customizability.
They might just get rid of it or rework it.
UE4 has very robust shader tools so they can presumably either remake it or make another one that works better for them.
You know that was just a name for the style of visuals they are going for with each Disney world, right?
Blood Diamonds
Banned
It uses UE3 and it looks like that? Holy shit.
Every Japanese developer needs to use UE4.
LouisaFerre
Member
I'm somewhat pleased by this, actually. I just don't think it's practical for them to try and make a new engine every generation, and after it was said that the Luminous dev team was folded into the XV team, It seemed to me like it could really fuck up the development of KH3 until they got enough people to help them through the issues they were having.
I'm glad to see that they made the switch relatively early on in development.
I'm glad to see that they made the switch relatively early on in development.
that was strangely arousingGGXRD uses UE3.
That's right, this
Isnt even its final form.
it's like 2d animation but better
It means itll actually work now. UE4 has insane shader controls
GGX uses UE3.
Like, ASW is powered by cocaine and witchcraft or some shit. It's nuts.
I think that might very well be related to the rendering problems they mentioned. It's not that they can't get it to run, but rather with an engine switch they'll need to put in work again to get it looking the way they intended from their previous dev environment.
Blood Diamonds
Banned
DangerMouse
Member
In terms of styles, even UE3 is good. It only depends on the hardware.
What UE3 can do on PS4.
Yeah, this is gorgeous with however they customized UE3 so I hope this is a sign that if some of them decide to use UE4 that it won't be a problem like last time and that hopefully more of those devs will be able to achieve what Arc System Works has with Guilty Gear Xrd since it seemingly looks beautiful in video (though obviously I haven't played it yet to see it in person).
And hopefully UE4 and it's documentation is a lot better suited to be smoother for them to work with than it seemed UE3's documentation was for Japan last gen.
One thing I'm a little worried about though (even though I guess most of the creation would be done in stuff like Maya or Max and in this case we're talking corporate level resources), and hopefully they continue to improve streamlining this area if more Japanese devs are going to use it, is that last I looked, the cell shading thread on the UE4 message board that was focused on not just cell-shading but replicating Japanese style cell-shading, seemingly still looked like it had to come up with convoluted ways necessary to achieve such an art style in the materials, lighting, etc. I imagine Japanese development environments would be much more streamlined toward creating that look seamlessly.
So I wonder how much extra work it takes? Like the graphics issue they mention they are having.
UltraGunner
Banned
SE's probably axing there whole engine development after XV. They finally realizing they are awful at it.
So Luminous hasn't been doing well. What utter morons.
Looks so nice. Oh so sweet, and slow, and nice.I feel UE4 is actually really strong at this kind of aesthetic. And hey, they're finally getting use out of that group license.
I'm sure it'll look great. Here's an example of a very stylized UE4 game.
That's very plausible. If they had to start from scratch, they very plausibly wouldn't have had it ready to show at TGS like they did with FFXV, even if they originally wanted to.
Ah I see. That all makes sense, and this all sounds like much better news for sure!
I didn't look too much into it. I thought it was something that unified the graphical style across the various universes to give more consistency to the graphics.
It's why I definitely appreciate the clarity here because now I learned!
AuthenticM
Member
lol
Their main luminous engine guy had quit IIRC, he probably couldn't stand working there.
Blood Diamonds
Banned
thanks for destroying my hype in one post
PLASTICA-MAN
Member
nah, it basically uses the content provied with Vehicle Game sample for UE4 which is a racing game in sandy environments.
Mobile UE4 supports OpenGL ES 2.0 devices even (like iPad 2) which is more equivalent to DX10. Wii U's right in the power envelope and shader spec for supported devices although I can understand why Epic wouldn't bother with official support. Same for Vita actually.
what if Nomura was like "FUCK FFXV and EVERYTHING related to it including luminous."
Nomura probably hates the engines guts because he spent miserable unproductive years with it on FFXV lol
I was actually surprised that they weren't using it on FFXV. I thought for sure it would move to that after all the drama around Luminous since they have a huge blanket license for it. It's likely for the best. S-E's tech team is a mess and FFXIII and XV were slowed down considerably because of engine development.
ArchedThunder
Banned
RIP in piece Luminous. Maybe it'll get used for some FFXV sequels, unless SE decides they like UE more and do XV-2 on it instead.
The Last One
Member
If they were having problems with the luminous engine this is really a better decision than wasting time in delivering almost nothing for an entire generation thanks to a bad developed engine, like they did last gen.
I mean in reality it probably went down like "hey you're slowing us down so we have to switch engines so we can get this done in proper time."
But after the burning anger "DON'T YOU TOUCH MY BABY."
MrCunningham
Member
Yeah, when you look at a lot of the underlying text when they talk about the Luminous engine, development doesn't sound like it is going very smoothly for them. Capcom seems to be going through some of the same next gen troubles with their Panta Rhei engine as it sounds like it is lacking in features behind MT Framework in some ways.