UT3 For Linux Is Laid To Rest By Epic's Mark Rein

[Svartalf]

I'd kill for a new Unreal game that takes after the original game's roots, but you know its never going to happen.

You never know... Epic wasn't really the original player in making that game. Digital Extremes was the co-developer of the original title- and they're still around and completely independent.

Anyhow, if they really cared they would at least tell us what really happened, be it Ryan or Mark himself. Not gonna happen.

This is a presumption on your part. Mark probably doesn't care (much, at least...)- and Ryan very likely DOES care, but can't say anything because of an NDA precluding him from saying anything on the subject. As others have pointed out, he's already given out a bit more than he probably ought to have and rumor has it that none of this is really his fault on the matter- it's all in Epic's part of the deal.

[allquixotic]

As a followup point, this is why the Unigine engine is great for Linux: one of the design goals of Unigine is to make it stupidly easy to produce a Unigine title on all the significant platforms. Sure, you can pollute the engine with Windows-only code, but if the Unigine guys do their job, they'll have enough built-in functionality that you won't have to.

Or maybe game developers will wisen up and actually take platform independence seriously as a design goal from the start... pipe dream, I know.

[allquixotic]

Anyhow, if they really cared they would at least tell us what really happened, be it Ryan or Mark himself. Not gonna happen.

I would wager that they probably didn't anticipate the degree to which Unreal Engine 3 is tied to the Windows / Xbox platforms. If it were really engineered to work on POSIX platforms, releasing most Unreal Engine 3 games for Mac and Linux would be something tangible for most game studios, and they'd do it because of the low investment required to achieve it.

Ryan may be a good porting hacker, but for something that complex, I'm not surprised if it required more talent than was available in that one person, and they simply didn't increase the manpower to compensate for the gargantuan technical effort required.

Nowadays, Unreal Engine 3 games are so feature-laden with third party add-ons that it is nigh impossible to port them, because none of the companies selling this advanced software are interested in POSIX compatibility. Just look at the list of ISV partners that do things like skeletal meshes, physics, face modelling, lip syncing, lighting, world generation, etc. for a game like Mass Effect 2. Compare that to the relatively clean UT3, which didn't rely on that much third party software, and they couldn't even release that for Linux.

I did some significant hacking on Deus Ex back in the day, so I know how modular and portable UE1 was. I think they adopted increasingly more Windows-isms as time went on, and with UE3, the engine is pretty hopelessly tied to Windows and DirectX. It may yet be modular, but if the modules depend on Windows, or worse, if the core depends on Windows, someone involved in a porting effort would have an enormous job on their hands. Even Unreal Engine 1 was often referred to as the "Unreal Operating System" -- it's really that dynamic and that general, that the team who conceived it (Mark chiefly among them) actually called it an operating system. And in a way, it is; it's just sort of nested on top of (or within?) the operating system beneath it that interfaces with the hardware more directly.

[KeithZG]

Anyhow, if they really cared they would at least tell us what really happened, be it Ryan or Mark himself. Not gonna happen.

Mark Rein has a history of being kindof a dick. Ryan, though, is probably just legally bound (he's intimated as much at times). I'm quite certain he'd say if he could, in fact, he's probably said enough in the past to potentially get him in trouble with an NDA (whether he's gotten in trouble or not is hard to tell).

[spikestabber]

Well thank goodness thats finally over with.

Epic drank too much Gears Of War Microsoft kool-aid, I lost hope in them a long time ago since that, not just for Linux ports, but for making any decent games anymore.

I'd kill for a new Unreal game that takes after the original game's roots, but you know its never going to happen.

Anyhow, if they really cared they would at least tell us what really happened, be it Ryan or Mark himself. Not gonna happen.

[Svartalf]

Amen, it's probably also why if Steam ever comes to linux it will probably be for those mobile platforms.

Which is an...odd...way of looking at this, deanjo... There's nothing really intrinsically different except for a constrained screen size for "those mobile platforms" and for X86 Linux. In fact, the only real biggie difference is that you're technically supposed to dispatch input device and sound subsystem operations through the Dalvik runtime on Android for games- if you're needing peak performance, the game's largely the same as for WebOS, MeeGo, and X86 Linux. The GL layer's OpenGL ES as the only real difference. You'd use SDL, SDL_audio/OpenAL, etc. on all those platforms.

You'd want to target the largest possible audience, one that's placed actually at roughly the same numbers as the MacOS crowd, not including all the smartphones out there.

[movieman]

Oddly Grub-legacy and Lilo do not have this problem, so I'm obviously trolling

Except that appears to be nothing to do with Grub, and just another example of crappy Windows DRM trashing people's systems, in this case by writing to random parts of the disk which it isn't supposed to write to. Perhaps complaining to crappy Windows DRM vendors would be more productive?

Added to the fact that we're still stuck with crappy DOS-style partition tables which don't allow Grub to allocate its own boot partition; though crappy Windows DRM would probably still overwrite it anyway.

[yogi_berra]

ROFL. You mean this? http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/0...-2-Unbootable]

FAIL.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/441941

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/551721

Oddly Grub-legacy and Lilo do not have this problem, so I'm obviously trolling

[KeithZG]

Speaking of iD, I wish Carmack would do Android ports of Doom in addition to the iPhone ports he's done.
Android and mobile Linux probably has the better shot at being a viable gaming platform than desktop Linux at this point.

Carmack I think mostly programmed for the iPhone first because he uses one; he's definitely interested in Android, though:

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/21591033581
I need to decide if I am going to spend some quality time with CUDA or Android. Supercomputing and cell phones, about equally interesting?

You'll notice he announced his smartphone (for now, iOS) engine at QuakeCon. Notably, it was originally going to be part of Apple's Fall conference, but:

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/22739785428
Apple insisted that if we wanted to be part of the keynote, I couldn?t show my work at Quakecon, so I declined.

Which brings me to:

I've always liked id. They make me feel sane.

Amen.

P.S. Does anyone know a URL where I could download the original demo release of the UT3 server? Ryan once said that if you compared it with the final, full release that you'd see which middleware was responsible, I was hoping for someone more knowledgeable than me to do it but I've yet to hear of such, and hey, one of the mottos of Open Source is "scratch your own itch"

[KeithZG]

Today we have been passed along a note from Mark Rein, the VP of Epic Games and creator of the Unreal Engine...

Err, might want to fix that article, Mark Rein is definitely not the creator of the Unreal Engine. The creator is Tim Sweeney; Mark Rein isn't even a programmer at all as far as I know, he's mostly the P.R. guy (I spent many years obsessed with the Unreal Engine, basically until this whole debacle with Unreal Engine 3 not coming out for Linux).