[LarsDu88]

Microsoft, one the world's greatest monopolists, bequeaths a game engine monopoly unto Epic Games, in one the biggest corporate blunders of all time.

If they were smarter about this, they would commoditize their compliment and open source the Doom The Dark Ages engine just like John Carmack did with the Quake 3 engine.

[mortenjorck]

Yes. As I suggested in another thread: an open-source, modern IdTech would fill the empty quadrant in the Godot : Unity :: ____ : Unreal matrix.

A few mid-size studios pitching in to fund continued development on a Blender model could turn IdTech into a major competitor to Unreal Engine in a relatively short timeframe, ultimately costing them a lot less than licensing.

[sounds]

I guess Microsoft doesn't think in those terms.

Doesn't Microsoft want fewer, bigger games locked into their Project Helix platform? Why compete with Unreal when they can sign a sweet license for the engine?

Why build an ecosystem when they are already a huge monopoly?

[mohamedkoubaa]

What does this matrix mean?

[GloriousKoji]

It's a relic of SAT verbal analogies section which was removed in 2005. The syntax "A:B::C:D" represents the statement "A is to B as C is to D".

So on the test you'd get questions such as

  python:snake ::  ___ : ___

  a) lua:satellite
  b) swift:bird
  c) java:coffee
  d) pearl:gem

and you might select A because python is an interpreted scripting language and a type of snake in the same way lua is a scripting language and a type of natural satellite but you'd be wrong because the correct answer is B because the topic was actually about comparing animals.

[mohamedkoubaa]

I was asking because I didnt understand the claim made about game engines using the given verbal analogy but thanks for sharing this

[mortsnort]

It's open source:closed source. (Though UE is source available)

[agar]

That was an incredible example and I'm frankly more impressed each time I read it at how well constructed it is. You really capture how sensitive the analogy section is to cultural or domain knowledge, and why the College Board eliminated the question type.

[anthonypasq]

huh? wouldnt the answer be D? python is a type of snake, pearl is a type of gem. neither A or B make any sense.

[Throwawaybird]

The answer is B) I believe.

A swift is a type of bird, so that would follow the same logic as the example;

ProgrammingLang:Animal

[NooneAtAll3]

I guess it's Cheap-Expensive and efficient-resource hog?

Godot and Unity can be dealt with by a small studio (or even 1 person), Godot and Id get much better performance than Unity and Unreal

[inigyou]

I think Godot/Unity: just download and play with it until you have something fun. ____/Unreal: serious library for experts. Unity/Unreal: commercial. Godot/_____: free.

[klaussilveira]

There is https://o3de.org

[Thaxll]

That's not how it works, first of all IdTech is not a general engine, it's only made to build specific games: fps.

Next you need to make a product out of that meaning a very large investment so that the engine is actually usable outside of ID, people that don't know what an engine is think of the rendering part but it's actually very minor compare to pipelines ect ... which we know nothing about, it might not even be good or painful to use.

Unreal is widely used because it can create any kind of game and the pipeline, tooling are good and well integrated.

[tadfisher]

So... exactly the same situation the Unreal engine was in, before its current open-licensing model starting with UE3?

I hear a lot of good things about modern idTech. Pervasive multithreading is one, and it's not particular to the FPS genre.

[dagmx]

Your first statement is wrong. The new Indiana jones game is not an FPS and it uses the same engine

[Thaxll]

I'm not wrong they forked the engine and it's the same studio that worked with the same engine before, id tech is made for fps it's clear.

[dagmx]

A lot of unreal engine games also fork the engine. If your bar is being forked then unreal doesn’t meet the bar for a lot of people either.

3D Engines of that fidelity are rarely genre specific. Editors might be but the engines are often fairly flexible because most genres share a lot in 3D space.

[eightysixfour]

I think they should have moved Halo onto it instead of Unreal.

[willis936]

This would have gone so hard. A return to the arena shooter roots would have been the shot in the ass the series needed.

[LarsDu88]

To be fair Unreal has rock solid netcode and Doom The Dark Ages has non-existant netcode.

[markus_zhang]

However, is it easy to work with an undocumented IDtech engine? Even a previous generation, say Rage? I think it’s very hard.

[sph]

The entire 2000s FPS scene was built on variations on the Quake Engine. And it got us Half-Life.

[markus_zhang]

I don’t disagree with that, but back then polygons are in the hundreds/low thousand, and now they have mega textures, huge models, which are simply too expensive to create. Not to say IDTech is alone in this, but I think not many companies can handle those things.

And the engine is way more complicated nowadays — UE at least has a huge community and docs.

I’m just an old man who prefers a much, much slower pace for the rendering engine. I wouldn’t mind that they grew so slow that we just got IDTech 4.

[ActionHank]

How many UE5 games run even remotely well? I've not played one.

Doom runs like butter on the switch.

Might be hard to run, I don't know, but at least it was well made.

[Ekaros]

I don't lower end rigs. But I think Satisfactory has been reasonably well optimised outside extreme cases... So certainly with effort it can be made to work.

[7bit]

I'm playing Witxhfire right now and the game runs phenomenal.

Arc Raiders runs phebomenal.

The engine is great. If games run terrible it's on the devs. Full stop.

[fullstop]

Expedition 33 ran well, at least on Xbox Series X. It runs like dogshit on a Steam Deck, though.

[superxpro12]

The recent Hell Let Loose: Vietnam beta was a disaster. Particularly the networking. In a game that prioritizes long range engagements due to its mil-sim like gameplay, they somehow left enabled a feature that de-prioritized tick updates for elements beyond 100m. The overall effect was that, for all enemies further than 100m, their tick rate dropped to 1 update /s. It was laughable.

But for what its worth, the graphics were nice. This however, was on a 4090.

[pelotron]

I can't believe a developer would make a mistake like this. That's just unreal.

[phendrenad2]

That isn't commoditizing their compliment. Commoditizing their compliment is what Unity and Unreal do, they give you the game engine for free (unless you're very, very successful) and they sell you the assets.

[LarsDu88]

Unity does not make that much money from assets. They make the majority of their revenue through licensing their engine to "whales"... the small percentage of games that make huge revenue.

They also make money through ad services... a market they seriously missed out on (look at AppLovin stock vs Unity).

Asset sales are barely a blip.

Unreal makes the vast majority of it's revenue through microtransactions on its one major whale game Fortnite

[TylerE]

What monopoly did they gift? IdTech hasn't been licensed to external companies in over 15 years, and several major versions ago.

The last non-Id release on IdTech was Brink in 2011.

[LarsDu88]

MSFT could have opened up idTech completely since they make 0 dollars from licensing the engine anyways.

Microsoft's game divisions make money through making games, so opening up the engine itself would've been conducive to their goals (cultivating an ecosystem of devs and even contractors familiar with the tooling).

idTech rendering is more competitive with Epic's Unreal technology than Unity and Godot.

They should simply open source it if they fire the devs. Else the engine and future support for the games built on it are essentially being tossed into the trash.

[Narishma]

They did the same thing with their web browser engine years ago.

[CuriouslyC]

The industry is skewing heavily indie now, and there's no money in the indie game engine segment. Maybe a few AAA titles will be unhappy that Epic can negotiate more aggressively, but mostly this is a nothingburger, particularly given idTech's rep for batteries not included.

[bcjdjsndon]

Among us made $105 million. I'd say there's plenty of money in indie, so long as your not rehashing other people's games yet again.... (Though the FPS industry, a long running doom clone saga, does just fine on this premise)