Engine

[Sub-Human]

Some of those screenshots remind me of Crysis.

I don't think they look as good, but it's still a win for InXile in my opinion. How many people will go out and buy Wasteland 2, having never heard of the original, the term 'roleplaying game' and judging the game by its graphics on Steam? This'll boost their sales, funds, and Wasteland 3 (or other RPG projects in the future) will come out as a more expanded game.

[SXX]

Donating Uniengine seems like a good marketing ploy also.
By giving it away for free, your basically indirectly advertising it.
So more serious game studios will consider the "versatility" of the engine if used.

Most of Unigine employees is Linux enthusiasts and they already announce same donations:
http://unigine.com/news/2010/11/25/uniq ... developers

It's not for advertising, but mostly for platform support.

[Madball357]

Huh, having the engine for free doesn't really mean anything. Engine choosing is, in my opinion, a make-or-brake decision. Sure, it looks eye candy, but Wasteland 2 will be a pretty complex game and inXile should be 110% sure that the chosen engine is flexible and very well documented. Because if in the middle of production they realize something's off, they won't have the time or resources to re-write, test and tweak parts of the engine.

[dmazz]

It's true, Wasteland 2 has alot of pressure in that they are making a very complex game in a one year dev window. If the engine offers any nasty surprises they will experience setbacks immediately. And the unigine engine remains largely a mystery for use in game development. It's got no history of quick game development, quite the opposite. Seems the games that use the engine never get finished.

Also in regards to the modding friendliness of a game engine. The tools used to make the game can be integrated with a game engines toolset in the free version of it's software available for download. Unity, C4, Shiva, Esenthel and Neoaxis provide free versions of their software, which can be used for modding, Unigine doesn't.

[Sub-Human]

It's true, Wasteland 2 has alot of pressure in that they are making a very complex game in a one year dev window.

Well, they've already worked on it for a year, as far as I'm aware (with Jason Anderson on board). So they probably do already have some concept, NPCs, locations, mechanics etc. of the game thrown together. Even the story's core probably finished by now. Nevertheless, true, they still need to prepare us a beta version in just 6 months

[emolitor]

$30,000 isn't as much. Choosing the right engine is important, and while Unigine does have awesome advantages on cross-platform capability, from what I've read it's not the most capable engine on Mac, and is a little focused on graphical capabilities for Wasteland 2's purposes.

I suspect that Unigine's Mac limitations won't have much of an impact on the final decision. If we are both reading the same sources they are primarily graphics related and due to the poor OpenGL stack and drivers on Mac OS. Oil Rush is one of the better native games on my MacBook, then again it is their "showcase".

I suspect that the final decision on a game engine won't come down to graphics capabilities.

[Brother None]

Well, they've already worked on it for a year, as far as I'm aware (with Jason Anderson on board). So they probably do already have some concept, NPCs, locations, mechanics etc. of the game thrown together. Even the story's core probably finished by now. Nevertheless, true, they still need to prepare us a beta version in just 6 months

Jason worked primarily on story. Things like combat, character system design, detailed level design, etc etc is all not done.

The beta won't launch in 6 months. 6 months is when they bolt down into the design phase. It'll take much longer before they're ready for a beta.

I suspect that Unigine's Mac limitations won't have much of an impact on the final decision. If we are both reading the same sources they are primarily graphics related and due to the poor OpenGL stack and drivers on Mac OS.

That and the fact that the Mac capabilities seem to relatively "fresh", added something like half a year ago on top of Linux, Windows and the rest. I think. But yeah, it shouldn't be a huge problem.

Huh, having the engine for free doesn't really mean anything. Engine choosing is, in my opinion, a make-or-brake decision. Sure, it looks eye candy, but Wasteland 2 will be a pretty complex game and inXile should be 110% sure that the chosen engine is flexible and very well documented. Because if in the middle of production they realize something's off, they won't have the time or resources to re-write, test and tweak parts of the engine.

Yes. Unigine is a serious candidate because of its capabilities and multi-platform support, not because it's free. It's not totally free anyway, the Unigine CEO offered a license for free. inXile wants a source code seat and continued support throughout development, which the Unigine CEO did not offer for free, so they're currently talking about how much this would cost while considering the Unigine option.

[dmazz]

If that's the case sounds like more of a discount than a free license, kind of dodgy since the team obviously needs a full source license.

Unigine corporation would also have little experience providing support for games development, which is not good at all. Apart from asking other unigine dev team users, judging the quality of support sounds difficult.

[Brother None]

If that's the case sounds like more of a discount than a free license, kind of dodgy since the team obviously needs a full source license.

Sort of, but to be fair, support actually costs the Unigine Corp money to give, and source code isn't something you give out freely. Engine licenses by comparison are just worth less, and you can only expect so much for free.

Unigine corporation would also have little experience providing support for games development, which is not good at all.

Wouldn't know. They've been around for some years, they might have some know-how about support. As long as they know their own engine and plenty of tricks, it should be fine. It also sounds like they've been hard at work upgrading the tools, of late.

[Madball357]

Thanks for the clarification, BN.

[dmazz]

Are you looking to license the Onyx engine from them? Has inXile decided on an engine?

BF: We have narrowed it down to 2 engines (not Onyx) and are now running art tests to make sure it can accomplish the look we want. The other important factor is it needs to be set up so that we don't need high level programmers and artists to get the assets in. There will be SO many world states, quests and interactions for the player that we need to be able to throw enough scripters in to capture all the ideas and outcomes. This is critical.

Brian's seems to want to maximize his teams work power. By making every person in charge of their own separate area, and then giving them the power to put art assets into the game themselves and script almost everything themselves.

For this to be accomplished, they'll need an easy to use art pipeline and a easy to use scripting system. The easiest to use scripting system is visual scripting. And the only relatively cheap engines I know that have visual scripting capabilities are Unity and Unigine. The unigine engine has a visual scripter in alpha form not ready for production use, but it's possible they might finish it if Inxile asks them to. Inxile would be familiar with the advantages of visual scripting as the Unreal engine has one.

Another time saver would be visual scripting of A.i behavior. Unity supports such middleware.

So the two engines they probably have narrowed down to are Unity and Unigine. Brian mentions them testing out the engines with their art to see if they can get the look they want. In this regard Unity is a great disadvantage as Unigine is alot more capable graphic wise.

ps
Incidentally. You know how unigine requires you to fill out a form to evaluate their engine? Perhaps they found out inxile was looking for an engine and was evaluating theirs, and this is waht prompted them to offer a free license. (or discount).

[Zylinski]

Unigine looks pretty promising and has support for win, mac & linux. Oil rush is a good example of how it could be used to create a top down camera:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12NOFryQxKQ

[xusnorris]

For Your Interest:
Steel Storm is a top-down indie game made with Unigine for Windows, Linux and Mac , with low requirements , and one of the winners of Unigine's linux game development contest.
http://unigine.com/press-releases/101213-linux-winners/

Not isometric, but...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmFLEHE5Mn8

[Enclave]

I think the game engine should on open gl and be 32 bit that way it could run on nay windows os from 98 to windows 8 and mac and linux and just about any console the xbox 360 is the only console that doesn't rn any form of open gl.

Why is anyone still running windows 98? And why would scarce development dollars be spent so that 117 people who still insist on running this system can play the game?

Ignoring what the dude said about Windows 98, it's a very good idea to avoid DirectX and instead use Open GL. It makes porting the game to MacOS and Linux much easier. Besides, there isn't much that DirectX can do that Open GL cannot anymore, not since all it's improvements after Microsoft was no longer able to hold back Open GL's feature set.

[DerRidda]

For Your Interest:
Steel Storm is a top-down indie game made with Unigine for Windows, Linux and Mac , with low requirements , and one of the winners of Unigine's linux game development contest.
http://unigine.com/press-releases/101213-linux-winners/

Not isometric, but...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmFLEHE5Mn8

Steel Storm runs on the DarkPlaces engine (http://www.desura.com/engines/darkplaces-engine), not Unigine. They just won a Unigine license for this game. Otherwise what would be the point in winning a license for an engine you could already afford to make your contest game with?

[xusnorris]

For Your Interest:
Steel Storm is a top-down indie game made with Unigine for Windows, Linux and Mac , with low requirements , and one of the winners of Unigine's linux game development contest.
http://unigine.com/press-releases/101213-linux-winners/

Not isometric, but...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmFLEHE5Mn8

Steel Storm runs on the DarkPlaces engine (http://www.desura.com/engines/darkplaces-engine), not Unigine. They just won a Unigine license for this game. Otherwise what would be the point in winning a license for an engine you could already afford to make your contest game with?

Oooops!
I apologize, it's good to known the level of knowledge in this forum is higher than mine

[Zylinski]

Choice of engine is ultimately up to the developer and I can't stress enough that they should use one which they feel comfortable with and have the proper competence to develop with. If they don't do that, the game will be shaite.

[Bryce777]

Can't seem to find anything on this Obsidian engine. Is it that obscure?

In regards to the A.i, wouldn't a off the shelf A.i middleware product actually improve the A.i?
And this game will have alot of A.i needs, the turn based combat system, reputation system, and npc + party behavior at minimum. If the Onyx engine is chosen maybe they can get someone at Obsidian working on integrating the engine with a A.i middleware product. Since obsidian will be using the game engine for their own games, they'll have to do that in the future anyway.

Ai doesn't really work like that. You can't get much useful out of a game engine for AI unless it happens to be exactly what you need and you can easily add in stuff that's freely available if you feel you need it.

There's graphical scripting in C4 too but I doubt that they really need that or would use it.

For any engine it's pretty easy to add in scripting support if you have the source so it's really not an issue.

[TheEmissary]

There is nothing stopping them from creating a graphical front-end for what ever they end up using. They are most likely going to have to create custom tools anyway for internal use and the MOD SDK.

[bloodyDziq]

UnrealEngine3 anyone ?