Digital Nightfall on 2/12/2007 at 03:40
DX3 will use the latest Tomb Raider engine. I had thought that TR was a complete stranger to the types of settings we'd naturally see in a Deus Ex game. Turns out I was wrong:
(
http://www.deusex-machina.com/shownews.asp?id=1221)
I am pretty rusty on my TR triva, but I think that's from the two games ago; the first one to use the current engine... i.e. the one the DX3 team will be using. Looks more like DX did than IW. Of course, they could wind up going in a totally different direction with it, too.
Just don't go 3rd person, for God's sake...
Mercurius on 2/12/2007 at 07:56
Actually I think it'd be awesome to play a nano-augmented adventurer who scours the ruins of cities and ancient MJXII facilities to find long lost secrets from the pre-cataclysm era. Like you could fight dinosaurs and shit, cyborg skeletons and ghosts with skull-guns.
And the best part would be the main character could be a chick with huge bouncing funbags. zomg the nude patches rofl!
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Kidding aside, I was flabbergasted at the number of people who seriously thought that Fallout 3 would inherit all of the features of Oblivion (with guns) simply because it was using the same engine. Turns out THEY WERE RIGHT but thats completely Bethesda's fault, very few engines inherently limit the developers to making a single type of game with a single set of features. With a decent group of programmers, you can make any engine perform any trick. With a decent group of artists, you can make any engine produce any style and environment.
That's not to say that we're not going to end up with Deus Raider Ex but so far the development group hasn't said anything that makes me think they're that suicidal.
Scots Taffer on 2/12/2007 at 08:23
If the textures etc were all given a thorough upgrade, that wouldn't look half bad for DX3... given how woefully DX:IW deals with environments as I'm discovering. Big open-ended environments with lots of little details and lots of smuggle/hiding spots, little dark alleys for meeting thugs, grand structures for officious buildings and dirty little hovels for bars etc is what I remember when I think of the levels in DX. So far I'm most upset in DX:IW by the lack of distinguishing features in 99% of the architecture.
Ask someone: Church of the Order?
Someone: Sure, it's in that warehouse with the sliding door that's WAY across the street (practically nothing else is on the street). Surprising it's not another one of those miscellaneous wooden panelled doors...
In fact, that's a really big criticism, there's hardly any extraneous space in DX:IW at all. Everywhere is a place you need or should be visiting, otherwise it's nothing, just blank wall. Hardly even any separation between buildings etc.
DaveW on 2/12/2007 at 13:04
Quote Posted by Digital Nightfall
DX3 will use the latest Tomb Raider engine. I had thought that TR was a complete stranger to the types of settings we'd naturally see in a Deus Ex game. Turns out I was wrong:
An engine doesn't mean that it has to be the exact same game. It's a
renderer with scripting. Unreal Engine can be adapted to many different types of game, just like practically any engine.
I'm astounded by how many people think that this means that it will be JC Denton jumping about raiding tombs in a third person game. It's the
ENGINE they're using, it has
NO impact on what the gameplay or settings are.
Scots Taffer, that's a well known problem that was caused by the Xbox sucking. Although, I'm sure they could have found a way around it. Plenty of games on the Xbox have larger levels than that.
Scots Taffer on 2/12/2007 at 13:43
Quote Posted by DaveW
Scots Taffer, that's a well known problem that was caused by the Xbox sucking. Although, I'm sure they could have found a way around it. Plenty of games on the Xbox have larger levels than that.
platform development would do it, but that costs money.
And oh by god, despite it having a "dynamic shadows system" or whatever, the texture detail is complete ass. I might be imagining it but I thought DX looked better than this.
Papy on 2/12/2007 at 14:02
Personally, I think Seattle was one of the worst level (or I guess I should say : set of levels).
Scots Taffer : I'm curious about your opinion on IW... I'd particularly like to hear what you think of IW gameplay compared to BioShock or other more recent game.
Mercurius on 2/12/2007 at 14:45
Quote Posted by Scots Taffer
True platform development would do it, but that costs money.
And oh by god, despite it having a "dynamic shadows system" or whatever, the texture detail is complete ass. I might be imagining it but I thought DX looked better than this.
Actually a bit of optimization would have done it too. Optimization is one of those incredibly vital things that amateurish programmers/artists don't seem to think very highly of. Surprise deadlines don't care much for it either.
Digital Nightfall on 2/12/2007 at 17:16
DaveW, I am curious about who you think is misunderstanding the purpose of an engine in this thread. ;) Were you just venting frustration over a common misconception, even though no one with that misconception was within earshot?
And yes, Seattle was fairly awful; but did a fair job of checking expecations for the rest of the game. Never would you hope to find yourself in "a city" but rather a few corridors with maybe a skybox.
The_Raven on 2/12/2007 at 17:43
The screenshots posted in that update on deusex-machina.com seem to be from Angel of Darkness. This is a completely different engine from the one used in Legends/Anniversary. In terms of what the engine is capable of, the only thing I managed to get with a search is this post by a Crystal Dynamics dev at DevMaster.net.
Quote:
Tomb Raider: Legend uses a custom made engine. Or should I say engines, because they're technically custom made for each platform. We have a generalized rendering interface and a scene-management/culling system, but the next-gen PC path is the only one utilizing it - the engines for PC prevgen and all the other platforms (except for the handhelds, I don't know anything about them) were manually handcrafted, so to say. I wouldn't even call it an engine, it's too down to earth for that.
While this isn't a very efficient approach in terms of labour, it very much was in terms of performance. It does what it has to do and nothing else, so it can be completely optimized for the game and the platform. However, this isn't the long-term approach we're heading as I'm currently porting our general next-gen engine from PC to Xbox360 (a quite joyful experience I might add, it's a great platform to develop for - but that's a previous PC fanboy talking, haven't got any experience on any of the other consoles ;)).
As for the yankee part, the game was indeed developed by Crystal Dynamics (Menlo Park, California). But the company has a long history with the Dutch Nixxes Software BV (where I work), which originally had porting of games as it's core business. But nowadays we're more like a co-developer, focussing on both tech and tools.
It sounds like it's very low-level/spartan. I guess that would make it fairly easy to customize for a different game.
