Taking on a mod project only to fail these days.

[LordDz]

Meh, Engine performance wise I still feel like It is superior over UDK. UDK may be free and well documented but power wise I think Frostbite 2 takes the cake. I personally have never seen HUGE VAST environments etc in UDK.

Thats about 10x as big as any BF3 map

How many props are there in that level compared to a bf3 level? You have to take those things in account too.

[MrTwoVideoCards]

Frostbite 2 excels at DX11 features though, such as instancing. So that is mostly why it can handle a huge prop count.

[joe_rogers_11155]

i would love to watch some making-of footage for building those battlefield 3 maps. any kind of behind-the-scenes footage of frostbite 2. i keep looking at the geographical area where i work (central texas, usa, army base) and its like i am living in the middle of battlefield 3. it looks very much like caspian border, except with some small neighborhoods smacked right in the middle.

now if only there were some frostbite 2 mod tools, i could re-create the area and make for some TRULY EPIC Rush battles.

[DonPunch]

They didnt release mod tools because they said

It’s going to be very difficult for people to mod the game, because of the nature of the set up of levels, of the destruction and all those things… it’s quite tricky. So we think it’s going to be too big of a challenge for people to make a mod.

In other words, we are too dumb to use their tools.

[Dives]

Its possible he's saying that frostbite 2 relies too much on 3rd party software to make maps. They could release the tools, but no one would be able to make anything without buying $4000 worth of extra stuff that needs to be loaded with plug-ins. Just a theory.

[dissonance]

Since when is realistic better than stylistic?

realism can be considered a style.

i love how engines are judged on visual quality these days. i hate to bring up minecraft as an example of anything, but mojang could probably buy themselves a space station with all the money they've made off the game, and it looks rather shit.
to pick on hammer again (or even frostbite): it's the ease of accessibility that determines, for me, the quality of an engine. not to say that visuals mean nothing, but i'll take an aged engine over an impossible-to-work-with engine any day.
so what if frostbite is indeed better than u3? the fact that it's essentially closed means it's worth fuck all to the mapping and modding community, and udk and sandbox will be the bread and butter of anyone who's not with a AAA studio.

[edit]: also, i hope dice realizes that shutting off the modding community is going to severely shorten the shelf-life of bf3.

[Gary]

They didnt release mod tools because they said

It’s going to be very difficult for people to mod the game, because of the nature of the set up of levels, of the destruction and all those things… it’s quite tricky. So we think it’s going to be too big of a challenge for people to make a mod.

In other words, we are too dumb to use their tools.

Pretty sure it's something along the lines of needing a build farm. I heard somewhere about compiling lighting probes and stuff. It's not all dynamic.

[Stormy]

I'd love to work with the naughtydog engine. The one they did Uncharted 3 with. I haven't played 3 yet but 2 was goddamn sexy and I assume 3 will be an improvement. I've also been looking at some other engines, unigine have released OilRush recently and that engine also looks sexy. Have a look at their heaven DX11 benchmark. Boner-inducing. But it all pales when you look at UDK being free up to the first $50,000 in sales. From a tiny indie perspective, if you were to ever make $50,000 from your game you would be happy to start handing over royalties. Looking at UDK from a purely tools and engine capabilities perspective it trumps the majority of the market as a contender for an indie engine, and then they allow free licensing. And after valves "big engine and tools update" that was released soon after portal 2, we all know that they aren't catering for the modding community anymore.

[Spike]

Another Source mod that has moved the engine:

Source:

UDK:

[Gary]

Well, seeing as it looked like shit in Source and like a AAA game in the UDK. I think I know why they switched.

Though, the Source version could of looked way better, it still wouldn't of been able to compete with the UDK version.

[Phott]

Age of Chivalry didn't look that bad, the gameplay felt very stale and slow however. I think it actually looks much better now with UDK. I still played it a lot on Source, it's a very fun mod with a full server.

[marks]

Needing a build farm for Frostbite2 makes sense. We have realtime radiosity in our engine at work and we have to build with idle cores on peoples PCs. I think it builds with around 150 CPU cores, and still takes too long for my liking.

[dissonance]

http://www.judpratt.com/tutorials/ec2-renderfarm/
problem (kindasorta) solved.

[ScarT]

Valve should just release the code to Source

[Stormy]

Do you think blink will add some more forums to the unreal engine section to cater for the expanding interest in it within interlopers? I have heen using the epic games forums but i like the interlopers community far more. The same forum layout as the general editing but with an unreal subheading would work great i reckon.