Doom Eternal has shown just how good this engine is, and considering Zenimax didn’t allow any third parties to use it, there is alot of scope for MS with this engine.
They will have to change it over from Vulcan API to DX, but after that I’m sure this engine will get handed out to the other MS studios. Imagine if 343i had idtech to use instead of slipspace?
Would MS want to make idtech a third party alternative to unreal?
Would it benefit MS to do this?
More about time to have the X(box)-Engine. You got gamestack, direct x12u, havok, azure ml and so many studios with knowledge and talent, preserve it for the future in a engine. A modular based game engine that is easy to use also and licensed for indies, user content/mods… just sayin…
I agree. I think this gen they should get the studios together and brainstorm an engine to ween many of them off of Unreal (if Tencent is going to be a bigger competitor in future) and maybe even Creation if the new updates still don’t fix the foundational issues with it. Make something as accessible as both while really leveraging the power of the Microsoft tech.
Id Tech, Forzatech, Arkane Engine, Creation (if fixed) and Slipspace are all cool on their own. They are in house engines.
I also forgot simplygon and github. ^^ But yeah they have so much tech inhouse and it just keeps growing, especially with machine learning/deep learning there is amazing stuff ahead. Auto generated animation, human like voice generation… ninja theory plays around a lot with research, trained an ai to play the objective in bleeding edge, minecraft now test around with the new network tech to get 1k player on one server.
I don’t say one engine to serve all, there is time where it makes sense to do your thing. But i still feel like they now reached a point of tech, research, cloud and studios that it could actually be a big plus longterm. Water shader from Sea of Thieves for example, the open world streaming from forza tech, there is really a lot of tech gold these studios create and could be benifitial for future projects, even more for the smaller second teams each studio seems to create. Play around and keep the engine growing with assets/functions/shaders etc.
Different engines have different strengths. 343 isn’t going to switch engines. They’ll continue to iterate on their engine because it’s important that Halo feels like Halo. It’s also a different focus in terms of AI, sandbox and size of environments. Choosing an engine goes beyond graphics. What’s interesting is that these devs have access to multiple tools and can pick and choose what works best for them in a given situation. Unreal is still the most versatile and one of the big advantages you have using Unreal is that AAA developers throughout the industry are familiar with it which I assume helps with outsourcing and scaling up contract work. Microsoft’s studios also modify the Unreal engine to their needs. I do like the suggestion that Microsoft take all the knowledge and talent behind these tools and keep iterating to become more versatile.
