THIEF 4 - ENGINE (Unreal) & PLATFORM - General Discussion & Speculation Thread

[Viktoria]

A new thread to discuss T4's engine and platform.

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ENGINE: UNREAL
PLATFORM: TBC
This summary will be updated as further information is confirmed


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To get this thread started, we have the recent interview with Stephane D'Astous at OXM (July 2012), where he stated:

D'Astous - "With Thief, we have had more time to evaluate the different options and we've gone with the Unreal engine instead of the engine we used for Deus Ex."

"I don't want to say that engine choice is crucial to the success of a game, what's crucial is to have good people working on it. My approach is to let the team decide what technology they want to use, they had evaluated it and chose Unreal.

It's funny, Deus Ex has a completely different set of problems to what we have now with Thief. Every project has their set of challenges, but that's what keeps us alive and on our toes. It's difficult to predict our problems, what's important is how fast you solve them."

Over to you, taffers!

[cGREGgo]

Hi Vik!

DX uses a Modified Crystal Engine. I'm not a pro at this tech stuff, but to my understanding the Crystal Engine was used in DX because of 3D. Does this mean T4 is not 3D since they went with Unreal? I've never played DXHR yet (duhhh?) so I can't even confirm if it's 3D. I've watched just about every video of it though. Looks good to me!

Edit: And which one is better I wonder?

[Putkikameli]

3D works fine on Unreal Engine too. Just look at Arkham Asylum and Arkham City for example.

[cGREGgo]

I've just read on a few websites that Unreal is better at rendering long distances. If that's true, and after watching the leaked teaser trailer with the lighthouse going around in circles off in the distance... I can see one reason why they went with Unreal.

[dsung]

Right from the beginning I loved the idea of standing on some rooftops and getting an overview over huge parts of The City at night. They should build something like Life of the Party with today's technology.

[Viktoria]

Originally Posted by dsung

Right from the beginning I loved the idea of standing on some rooftops and getting an overview over huge parts of The City at night. They should build something like Life of the Party with today's technology.

I'm with you on this one.

[Tryst]

To be honest, I would have preferred if they went with the Cry Engine.

The graphics in Farcry and Crysis were totally mind blowing, especially the trees and such where individual leaves seemed to move independently to others. Also the walking animations were smoother and more life-like and the AI was far more intuitive. It left the Unreal engine way behind.

To my mind, the Unreal engine is more suited to death matches etc where you are too interested in avoiding death to stop and look at the background graphics and movement in too much detail.

[MarrowMonkey]

Pretty graphics is nice but it is probably the least important part of a game. It is important it does not require too much of the PC hardware either or else no-one will afford to play it. Unfortunately they will almost certainly target the now 7 year old consoles with all their limitations so there is no risk of EM going for high end graphics. I just hope they do not have to make too many compromises to make the game run on consoles.

[Tryst]

Originally Posted by MarrowMonkey

Pretty graphics is nice but it is probably the least important part of a game. It is important it does not require too much of the PC hardware either or else no-one will afford to play it. Unfortunately they will almost certainly target the now 7 year old consoles with all their limitations so there is no risk of EM going for high end graphics. I just hope they do not have to make too many compromises to make the game run on consoles.

I'm hoping they don't make any compromises. Develop for the PC first, then cut down if required for consoles. Don't short change PC users by developing for consoles then port over to PC as TDS did.

[MarrowMonkey]

Consider that the PS3, for example, only has 256 MB system and 256 MB video memory while any modern PC has at least 2 GB RAM, 8 or more is not unusual. A modern GPU has 1 GB video memory or more... Even if they find some clever way to dynamically scale down memory use they will have to design the game so that the base fit into less than 256 MB RAM while still providing a good experience. No doubt it will mean some sort of limitations. I am guessing it affects how large the levels can be for example.

[george12123]

I would say I good feeling that D'Astous won't up (pardon my language) but we have no idea what he is doing or what stage they are on or who they are trying to sell the game to. If they at least told us who they are trying to sell to then we could deduce what direction they could be taking the game but we have nothing. The engine of the game won't tell us anything, it's like a chef telling you "well I am using a knife to help me make this meal but I won't say anymore than that" I mean he could be making anything.

[OugaBooga1]

unreal engine scales very well & runs great on console.
I just hope PC T4 users don't get the short end like we have this console generation.
there's lots of games on console ported to PC using unreal, the last transformers WFC & the next new 1 also uses it.

[sneaksie_one]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOvfn1p92_8 (This is amazing)

For some time now I have favoured the Unreal Engine over any other. Why? Well, it has always been the smoothiest, most beautiful engine. Beautiful accessible graphics.
Then came Crysis 2 and the Cryengine 3 which also ran great in my pc, being another great engine in my opinion.

Even though Thief wont be made in the fourth version of UE (and if it were, I'd probably would have to update my machine) I'd like to see a Thief game done with that graphics quality.

[tarvis79]

It would not only be foolish, but would probably be fiscally irresponsible for EM not to release T4 for the consoles. The best we can hope for is that they do a good job porting in one direction or the other; if this means taking a few additional months to build in support for high-end PCs, so be it.

[Davehall380]

Scale the playability around the engine needed for a cross platform release . . .

[Platinumoxicity]

I just discovered the secondary important reason why the atmosphere in The Dark Project is so much darker than in the other games. The creepy ambient sounds are of course the primary factor but there is also something else. The Dark engine back then was still unable to render colored lighting. The fact that every light source is pure white light makes the whole world look cold, distant and haunting. In Thief 2, all the fires and torches emit natural, warm, welcoming yellow light. Pretty ironic considering the fact that it's Thief 2 thats theme is supposed to be about distancing humanity from nature.

If the Shalebridhe Cradle would have had monochrome lighting, I think it would have been a lot scarier. Blue is not scary.

[CaptainObvious]

What's most important is the integration of sound and AI, and art design. Games look good enough today, so a difference between looking good, or slightly better isn't really much, IMO.

[Platinumoxicity]

Some games, like Crysis 2 for example look too "good". The detail and on-screen effect amount is so high that the game actually has to resort to excessive hints, hand-holding and highlighting, just to let the player progress comfortably and see what he's doing. Not just the dumb players, but any players. There's so much stuff that nothing sticks out as noticeable, and important. You have no idea where to go because nothing looks any more like the right way than anything else.

In older games, important things are easer to find because they stick out, therefore hand-holding is completely unnecessary.

[clearing]

Thief 4 'switched to next-gen consoles'.

[Pieter888]

http://www.computerandvideogames.com...-gen-consoles/

The one who wrote this article is pretty sure about thief 4 being delayed because of the next consoles...


Edit: and so the word keeps spreading...
http://www.videogamer.com/news/thief...ms_report.html
http://www.gamepur.com/news/8828-thi...r-section.html
http://beefjack.com/news/thief-4-to-...-launch-title/
http://thegamershub.net/2012/08/thie...d-be-next-gen/
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...ox-game-report
http://www.examiner.com/article/repo...o-ps4-xbox-720
http://segmentnext.com/2012/08/08/th...-gen-consoles/
http://addictoffiction.com/thief-4-is-still-alive
http://www.ubergizmo.com/2012/08/thi...-gen-consoles/
http://www.egmnow.com/articles/news/...-gen-consoles/
http://forum.teamxbox.com/showthread.php?t=673155
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/a...-consoles.aspx

[video]

Well... still we should get some info from EM soon, because if not, the already minimal hype will disappear. I thought T4 is AAA game, but treatment of that title is saying something other.

[Gabriel]

Gee, I wonder if it will be mainly geared towards consoles.

[Blue Sky]

Originally Posted by Pieter888

http://www.computerandvideogames.com...-gen-consoles/

The one who wrote this article is pretty sure about thief 4 being delayed because of the next consoles...

...despite not really being sure how to spell "Thief".

Well, we'd speculated before that EM might have been holding off for the Next Gen consoles, which does make a lot of sense...

[Wulfgar]

that's just great, 4 years of checking this forum for any kind of news on t4 progress they decide to release it for the f** piece of s*** consoles. Rumours or not, this just depressed me.

[Shaikh]

If its coming sometime later next year then I have no problem with it be next-gen.