100°

Postmortem: Midway Games' Stranglehold "Working with a half finished Unreal 3 Engine is hard"

Via NeoGaf:

In the latest Game Developer magazine, there is a pretty good post mortem of Stranglehold , and interestingly one of the bullet points under "what went wrong" is Unreal Engine 3.

"Unreal Worked really well in giving art a big head start, but keeping up with the code drops from Epic took up lots of time. We did a big merge of all Epic's new changes into our code base about once every three months. This was a difficult and error-prone task, and at times it took the whole team down for weeks while we worked out all the issues. We lost probably two months of time on the project due to completing these merges. In the end using Unreal Engine 3 was still a win, but we should have done merges less often, and found ways to insulate our content creation teams from the downtime."

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neogaf.com

[via gdmag.com]

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Cyrus365 - 685 days 9 hours ago

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Looks like another Developer, who had to work with an uncompleted Unreal 3 engine.

How many devs now have voiced concerns, besides 1 suing?

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BloodySinner - 685 days 5 hours ago

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Are you seriously going to consider what this garbage game company has to say? Have you not seen their recent track record as of late?

Check it out, seriously. You'll be shocked. Midway has no say, especially when they cannot create DECENT software.

The last AWESOME Midway game I played was Psi-Ops (2004?) and that was it. Everything before that and after that is/was rubbish.

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Cyrus365 - 685 days 3 hours ago

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I wouldn't but, it's not the only Dev that have said Epic's engine is work in progress and that's putting it nicely.

The Too Human Dev's are the ones suing them (I believe.)

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DrWan - 685 days 7 hours ago

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Really should call these segmetns PostPartum..not postmortum..these games are not dead yet..they were just out..(born)..jeez

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Cyrus365 - 685 days 7 hours ago

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Or Post celebration, for getting it done and out the door. But good point.

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Bathyj - 685 days 4 hours ago

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I'm not a game developer but I do know about manufacturing and production. When we need to make 100 of something we make a prototype. We work on that prototype until we're happy with it and then we lock it in from changes. We dont make anymore changes and we start to a manufacture copies, all the same, no mistakes.

Unreal engine is still a work in progress. I dont mean its not finnished, but its evolving and always been refined.

Seems the devs having the problems always wanted to keep adding these refinement to the engine but the problem is it was affecting the work they'd already done. It was trickling down the chain. Making changes to the prototype meant fixing things down the line.

They should have got the engine, said ok this is what we've got to work with, and then start building their game without going back and forth all the time.

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ReBurn - 685 days 4 hours ago

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I work in software development and I couldn't agree more. I've worked with all sorts of third-party tools. Once you're done with proof of concept and you're ready to start developing the version that you'll release to production you have to be careful about making changes to the components that are providing your primary workflow. It seems strange to me that they would continually merge changes into the engine while development is in progress. That's something that you should only do if there is some sort of defect that forces you to.

The way I've always done it is to complete baseline development if possible before I update any of my tools. Then you can deal with what breaks in your code after the fact. I can't imagine the amount of continual rework that those developers had to deal with.

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Bathyj - 685 days 4 hours ago

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Thanks for backing up what I said even though I didn't really know if software was the same.

I knew building games and building kitchens couldn't be that different.

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neogeo - 685 days 2 hours ago

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4 - UT3 sucks

I hate the graphics they are last gen. I may trade this game in for burnout

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Cyrus365 - 684 days 23 hours ago

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how is UT3 last gen graphics? There only few games that look better, it looks better than Gear, and most would say that's pretty damn good looking game.

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