You missed my point. I said bringing idtech, forzatech and whatever other engines have merit into one interface. It would be one game engine made up of different engines. So say forzatech for racing games. Idtech for shooters. They would come together as a package, using the same interface, so you wouldn’t have to learn to use separate engines (like cryengine vs UE). All the buttons are in the same place, the same lingo etc. So think of the super engine as a game engine suite. It comes with three different engines. One for racing, one for shooters, one for openworlds etc. But being in the one suite they share commonality. I’m not saying to merge them into the one engine.
So what you’re suggesting is that they create common tools? Not the engine itself.
Like a game engine suite. I called it a super engine because it would be one program. You get the best tech from all of it, like what could idtech take from forza or slipspace etc, so fine tune the engines, then have one interface common between them, so if you were to code one game with Unity, and then your next game with Cryengine, they are different to use. So take away those differences between the engines. Then in the suite you could pick a particular engine that suits your game. This super engine would offer far more flexibility than UE, or Unity etc, and MS could make them integrate the Direct X 12 Ultimate extensions and make them easier to use. A Microsoft ecosystem with game development.
Is that a thing that can even happen? As in, is that how that works?
Given Xbox is Unreal Engine’s biggest client, I could potentially see a world where Microsoft either builds their own first party equivalent with the combined knowledge and experience of their first party stable, or they just use a combination of the various engines at their disposal going forward.
Right now they currently own id tech, Slipspace, Forza tech, Blam (I think?) and whatever engine(s), Bethesda has.
You’d think between those 4-6 engines they could cover just about any genre they like.
OR maybe MS is happy letting their studios use whatever engine they want, even if that means continuing to give Epic money.
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I am not a game developer (though I am a software developer). I assume that these engines are simply libraries that get loaded into a generic IDE (like Visual Studio) + external tools.
The engines have different libraries, different tools, and even operate differently.
Do you have any experience with software development?
Epic is really trying to dominate the third party engine market by buying up all the extensions such as RAD tools etc. Its going to make it really difficult for other companies like Crytech to compete. Epic can use this monopoly to push their game store for instance. You know, 50% discount on engine royalties if you sell your game through Epic game store. Microsoft is now the only company that could take Epic on. They have the engine tech under them, they have their API which is supported heavily by both AMD and Nvidia, and they have more software developers on staff than any other company on the planet.
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Nope.
Jup, but still I can see why Microsoft allows their studios to work with Unreal Engine as well. Some people prefer it. That said I do think that Microsoft should keep publishing their engines, if only under open source for beginning developers to use. Heck even a new “XNA” might be really interesting, although that was not an engine. It would however be nice to launch a new simple suite to take on unity and unreal with a decently performing yet simple to use game dev environment. With Visual Studio code, and all the engine developers they have aboard now, that should not be a long shot for them to start on. Might take a few years though :P.
The only chance MS had of competing against Epic was purchasing Unity. Building it out like Epic did with UE4 from a feature, pricing, grant and store aspect. They would also have needed to purchase supporting tool studio like Epic have done.
MS needs to look at purchasing these companies:
- JALI (Cyberpunk 2077 Facial Animation)
- Sonantic (Voicing Tech)
- Hadean or Improbable (MMO Cloud Gaming Tech)
- SideFX - Houdini
MS needs to focus on getting the Creation Engine, ID Tech & ForzaTech across all their projects. I know the issues that occurred with EA and Frostbite.
I expect ID Tech to the be the main engine in their Game Stack. Spencer seemed really damned excited about it. A little research showed that ID tech stacked up favorably against Unreal 4. Wasn’t open source and the tools might not be as user friendly but from a performance standpoint, it was really good and wasn’t as heavy on CPU as Unreal. With UE5’s tools, looks like Unreal has pulled ahead however with Microsoft’s backing and working together to improve the tools, my bet is ID tech become a viable alternative in the not to distant future. They probably allow their studios to continue using whatever works best for their games however it’ll be interesting to see how much ID tech improves this gen now that Spencer is on record that it’s going to be pushed in Game Stack. Despite the big improvements in the CPU, dev told me these consoles are still CPU bound which is why I think ID Tech could be a sleeper this gen.
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Just as an aside, how much work would it take to move Idtech 7 to DX12 over Vulcan? And will MS absolutely do this? Id were pretty adamant that Vulcan was the reason idtech 7 was as good as it was. Is this legit, or was id in some way connected to Vulcan and had a vested interest?
all games on xbox use dx12 as a rendering target in the end, so they already have one that works fine
A whole bunch of their stuff runs on Unreal Engine. I don’t think it is nor should ever be a goal to compete with Epic for licensees, there isn’t really engine wars anymore, because Unreal basically won it, and honestly engine fanboyism is dumb and should have never been a thing anyway. Source isn’t viable anymore and hasn’t been for a while (and is prohibitively expensive to license for indies). Unity is good for smaller projects and 2D. Game Maker mops up the rest for being good engines to start out on now.
What I’d like to see them do is resume open-sourcing the idtechs that id software was doing up until the bethesda purchase. iirc we should have gotten an open source idtech 5 by now.
Epic’s been re-investing all their money back into their engine for almost a decade now, it’s why they’re even in the Hollywood game now with Unreal becoming a VFX tool. They’re an engine developer that also happens to make games.
Also, some of these engines would damn near be impossible to meld together. Slipspace/blam handles assets entirely different than idTech that you might as well be trying to port a game from X86 to the Alpha processor architecture. Gamebryo is good at what is does, but I wouldn’t try a racing game on it. etc.
I expect MS will probably try to make idtech a truly licensable engine again, but mandating it would spell disaster, and merging any of these engines is a non-starter.
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It could be as simple as they want an MS owned engine in the market so they can offer similar licensing incentives to developers that Epic does with unreal (counterbalancing them to an extent).
The market consolidating on one engine, allowing a single engine developer to dictate to MS with regards to API and OS requirements is there main fear. MS doesn’t need to dominate the game engine space, they just need to prevent consolidation by offering a competent product.
I agree there on principle. It probably won’t have much practical impact in terms of being an engine people would use, because the workflow for the megatexture art is reportedly inconvenient and slow and most people simply use Unreal or Unity since they have no up front licencing costs anymore. But I’d be very happy if they did open source it, not like they’re gaining much by keeping it proprietary in 2021.
As an aside, idTech 6 should be open source by the old standard Carmack used to operate on. idTech 3 was open sourced in 2005, the year after Doom 3 shipped on 4. And 4 was open sourced in 2011, the year of Rage’s release. 6 produced some great results but I have no idea how user friendly it is supposed to be.
Epic is quite predatory and buy up any start up that makes a product to help engine progression. A couple of examples are RAD tools with their compression technology as used in the PS5, and Quixel Megascans which provide photo realistic texture scans, which will be used in Unreal Engine 5.
Microsoft is really the only company who can match this. They have the engines already in their studios with which to base it all off. Idtech 7 and Forzatech as two starting points. Whatever else there is is only extras, such as Slipspace, Creation, Void etc.
They then also have the compression technology to match RAD tools in BCpack, and without a doubt Microsoft have the skillset and money to make megascans to match Quixel.
The other selling point of UE5 is the lighting tech. With the advent of Ray Tracing in all new PC cards including both the PS5 and Xbox, impressive lighting will become common place in next generation games with most engines employing hybrid lighting models using both hardware and software solutions. I don’t see the UE having an advantage here.
If UE gets a total monopoly in terms of market share and tech, they will increase the costs to devs for its use.
Along with this, Microsoft has been at the forefront of API technology, promoting new extensions such as Mesh Shaders, VRS, ML and SFS. This makes it pretty easy for MS to incorporate these into their engines, making it even easier to utilize.
Like I have said, Microsoft is the only company that really has the ability or resources to take on Epic here.
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From looking at game engines and the games using them, it is pretty clear that a single studio working on its proprietary engine will most likely never have the resources and time to compete with Unreal, unless you are Rockstar or Decima/Frostbite/Snowdrop backed by Sony or big publishers.
Even Id tech as good as it is has fallen behind Unreal and the gap will probably widen with Unreal 5 unless it is significantly invested in. Unreal engine 5 is going to probably being adopted even more widely than 4 was.
I’ve argued for some time that MS needed to reduce their dependency on UE, Epic has turned from mainly an engine provider to a publisher with a decent platform in the Epic Game store and they are almost 50% owned by Tencent even though they don’t have controlling rights. This in my opinion is reason enough to build up your own engine given the number of studios has grown to 23.
MS trying to compete with Amazon with Gamestack should be another good reason to invest but this is a hard battle, UE has become the go to engine for freshers and most of the industry because of the ease of access and documentation. It is a battle they will never will but it shouldn’t stop them from at the very least from having something very competitive on their own.
MS trying to build a megascan library from scratch is going to take years, although they might have some experience with Forzatech, whatever they decide to do with idTech they will have to start quick. Recently with the metahuman editor, Epic is just making it very easy to use and just tightening their grip by cherry picking the best 3rd party tech to acquire.
I was hoping MS could have a more centralized engine team that was detached from any studio, maybe move the interested engineers from existing studios to help innovate and if there was any specific feature any studio wanted, they could add it.
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I don’t think their purchase of RAD was predatory. RAD has been a rather small outfit since the start and middleware companies have been bought left and right for the past while (MS bought Havok, Sony bought Wwise) and they usually have one or two engineers per tool that support it, so I imagine they wanted some stability and some of those guys have been supporting tools for the past almost 30 years… so some of them are about to hit retirement. Epic can provide more engineers for support and onboard peeps to take over some of the tools and keep it going without disappearing into the corporate structure like some other potential buyers.
Epic is never going to lock down RAD from anyone else. EA buying Renderware and starting to lock it up caused the entire exodus to the Unreal Engine 3 back in the 00s, so every company learned their lesson that if you buy middleware, just buy it and let it keep running like it was. Epic is a middleware company that happens to make games. I mean hell, RAD is still using their ancient website, they just slightly updated the text for each generation and purchase lol
I certainly don’t like what Tim Epic is doing - I do congratulate them for piracy comeback though. Still, PC store fragmentation is well…inevitable. With Epic who has been throwing its weight around with no stopping, and now MS publishing better ports on Windows Store…
I do expect Epic throwing its weight around with Unreal Engine to apply some pressure on devs. Not to mention their inroads into the cinema. With its UE money and Fortnite money, and Tencent and Sony backing they can do a lot.
I also don’t like their breaking into walled gardens a-la “you developed hardware but we want to use it without paying anything and also we want to profit from you”. Ironically it might be good for MS with Game Pass and its pivot towards service oriented gaming…
Maybe this is why Microsoft has talked about ID Tech, they will aggressively invest in it to eventually compete in the Middleware space. There’s a lot of synergies with MS Game Stack.
I do expect in the future that MS will enter into the middleware space and add their Middleware engines to Game Stack and price it the same as Unreal Engine. The same strategy as Office 365 and Teams and look what happened to Slack as a result.