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Author Topic: Silicon Knights sues Epic. Drops UE3 for Too Human.  (Read 42727 times)
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on: July 19, 2007, 05:41:40 PM

Silicon Knights sues Epic. Drops UE3 for Too Human.

Gamers ask: "What the hell is Too Human?"

Silicon Knights (quick refresher: The people who made Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem for the Gamecube, as well as Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes) is suing Epic games, claiming that their Unreal 3 engine isn't up to snuff for game development and that it isn't delivering what Epic promised.

Oh yeah, they're obviously dropping the U3 engine for Too Human, a planned trilogy with a $10 million per-game budget that has been in development since 1996.

Vaporware much?

Props to Gamasutra, who has a copy of the lawsuit and some (pretty typical lawyerish) reactions from SK.

Comment by Schild to follow (hopefully, lest I look like a jackass).
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Reply #1 on: July 19, 2007, 05:57:17 PM

When Nintendo lost SK it looked bad, in retrospect it don't look so bad any more. Too Human has been in development for so long, *now* they are dropping the underlying engine? Wow.

That said, the lawsuit does make some pretty specific allegations and if they can get other developers to corroborate it might go somewhere.

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Reply #2 on: July 19, 2007, 06:05:29 PM

Not indicative of anything, but...

From Neogaf
Quote
BIA: Hell's Highway - delayed
 Bioshock - delayed
 Elveon - delayed/cancelled
 Fatal inertia - delayed
 Huxley- delayed
 Lost Odyssey - delayed ?
 Mass effect - delayed
 MOH - delayed
 Stranglehold - delayed
 Rainbow vegas - ps3 version delayed
 Too human - delayed
 Turok - delayed
 Frame City Killer - cancelled
 Endless Saga - cancelled
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Reply #3 on: July 19, 2007, 06:06:19 PM

If I look those up, are those all on UE3?

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Reply #4 on: July 19, 2007, 06:06:57 PM

If I look those up, are those all on UE3?

Yes.
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Reply #5 on: July 19, 2007, 06:10:09 PM

Damn, the Neogaf thread, while not worth wading through 17 pages is full of hilarity.

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Reply #6 on: July 19, 2007, 07:00:59 PM

MS is certainly in an interesting situation as a result of this.

On one hand, GoW and it's mad mad moneys.

On the other, a (3 game contract = 'for all practical purposes') internal dev that's mad pissed and possibly rightfully so.

Good times.
« Last Edit: July 19, 2007, 07:02:52 PM by MisterNoisy »

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Reply #7 on: July 19, 2007, 07:15:48 PM

Not coming in with an "official" position on this, but a couple of things to discuss/note:

--A game engine provides functionality, not skill.

--It's pretty common for a game engine company to use their own technology to make a game, and have evolutions of that game code that develop through the process of using said code. That's a good thing, not a bad one. Commonly, they may refactor the lessons learned into future products, but it's not a requirement.

--No comment on the contractual clauses discussing releasing updates specific to a hardware platform within a set time of that hardware platform being released, although I personally don't think that was a smart clause to allow.

--If you look very carefully, and read between the lines, SK is implying that they are re-engineering the engine and want to use it royalty free. They are claiming that they should both not be responsible for paying license/royalty fees, and can continue using the engine with the goal of "making their own engine".

This could potentially open up the age old copyright argument and common licensing agreements that exist in the industry today, and if they win this portion (gaining the right to basically re-write their own engine using Unreal as a template), it will not bode well for game development in the long term. In my eyes, this is almost the exact opposite of the "patent anything and protect it forever" misuse that we are seeing from patent holding companies regarding things like orbit cams, etc.

Disclaimer: it's in my sig, but this is Stephen Zepp the internet dork's opinion, not Stephen Zepp the GarageGames employee's position, and should be taken as such.

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Reply #8 on: July 19, 2007, 09:12:29 PM

Thanks for reminding me, as I was getting some funny ideas as to how GG operates.  tongue

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Reply #9 on: July 19, 2007, 09:14:11 PM

Not indicative of anything, but...

From Neogaf
Quote
BIA: Hell's Highway - delayed
 Bioshock - delayed
 Elveon - delayed/cancelled
 Fatal inertia - delayed
 Huxley- delayed
 Lost Odyssey - delayed ?
 Mass effect - delayed
 MOH - delayed
 Stranglehold - delayed
 Rainbow vegas - ps3 version delayed
 Too human - delayed
 Turok - delayed
 Frame City Killer - cancelled
 Endless Saga - cancelled

Heh -- needs one more line added to the list:

All other games currently in production except for Madden - delayed
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Reply #10 on: July 19, 2007, 09:33:54 PM

Thanks for reminding me, as I was getting some funny ideas as to how GG operates.  tongue

Heh..not sure how to take that  evil

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Reply #11 on: July 19, 2007, 10:03:21 PM

GG is a political action committee. tongue

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Reply #12 on: July 19, 2007, 10:07:39 PM

Not indicative of anything, but...

From Neogaf
Quote
BIA: Hell's Highway - delayed
 Bioshock - delayed
 Elveon - delayed/cancelled
 Fatal inertia - delayed
 Huxley- delayed
 Lost Odyssey - delayed ?
 Mass effect - delayed
 MOH - delayed
 Stranglehold - delayed
 Rainbow vegas - ps3 version delayed
 Too human - delayed
 Turok - delayed
 Frame City Killer - cancelled
 Endless Saga - cancelled

Whoa, hey. These are all just announced to be delayed?

But that Captain's salami tray was tight, yo. You plump for the roast pork loin, dogg?

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Reply #13 on: July 19, 2007, 10:45:59 PM

GG is a political action committee. tongue

Heh..still not sure how to take that, but I firmly believe there is a deeper implication to this suit than contractual disagreement. An analogy that may suggest what they are trying to do: "The car sales guy said this vehicle would go 0-60 in 4.9 seconds, but I took it to Denver and it didn't do that, therefore I can add some stuff to the car, and then turn around and have rights to mass produce it in other colors and sell the result in direct competition to the original producers".

If that passes in the suit and SK is granted their claim for recompensation, it will put middle ware game engines out of business, which will set the industry back decades, and may be unrecoverable. Call that chicken little screaming if you like, but it's drawn my attention in a big way.

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Reply #14 on: July 19, 2007, 11:02:09 PM

I don't know if it would kill middleware off. I'm not legally trained, so I don't know exactly how well they hold up in court, but I expect that, if they won the right to build their own engine based off of the knowledge extracted from examining and working with Epic's tech, you'd instead see something else suddenly popping into all middleware contracts: A noncompete clause.

Essentially, if you license our middleware, you agree to not create or market your own for-profit game engine for the next X years.

Also not great for the industry, especially for dev houses that have homebrew-engine games coexisting with licensed-engine games (c.f. Bioware, self-developed stuff for NWN, licensed stuff in Bioware Austin's Project, and I believe some licensed stuff in Bioware Pandemic's projects). Some of it might be circumventable by balkanizing your business units into separate corps wholly or primarily owned by a holding corp (again, not sure of the law here). Or it might just balkanize the industry into pockets of dev houses, each a one-engine-tech shop.
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Reply #15 on: July 19, 2007, 11:06:32 PM

Let's look at it piece by piece, in accordance with the GamaSutra claims:

Quote
"Rather than provide support to Silicon Knights and Epic’s other many licensees of the Engine, Epic intentionally and wrongfully has used the fees from those licenses to launch its own game to widespread commercial success while simultaneously sabotaging efforts by Silicon Knights and others to develop their own video games."

Inflammatory at best, impossible to prove as well. while simultaneously sabotaging efforts--another way to read that is "we couldn't figure out how to use the API, but they did--therefore they were intentionally sabatoging us".

Quote
"However, that deadline came and went without Epic providing Silicon Knights with a functional version of the Engine. Indeed, it was not until much later (November, 2006, far too late for time and cost-sensitive projects like SK’s videogames) that Epic ever provided anything resembling working Xbox 360 code to its licensees.

How do you define "anything resembling working XBox 360 code"? Again,  this points directly to "we couldn't figure out how to make the API do what we wanted, so it's their fault".

Quote
The lawsuit charges: "In particular, at the same time that Epic was supposed to be supporting its many licenses to the Engine (Silicon Knights’ among them) Epic was also racing to complete and market its own games: “Unreal Tournament 2007” and “Gears of War.""

Epic game developers are not going to be people answering support questions. Period. "racing to complete and market its own games" is a ridiculous reason to try to provide for why SK was/was not getting the support they felt they were owed due to the contract.

Quote
The support Epic had misrepresented it would provide Silicon Knights... became increasingly inconsistent as both Silicon Knights and Epic progressed toward the target launch date for their respective games. Epic has attempted to avoid its obligations under the Agreement by representing to Silicon Knights that the support,
modifications, or enhancements to the Engine – all of which are essential to the Engine’s proper function – were “game specific” and not “engine level” adaptations, and that Epic therefore need not provide them to any of its licensees, including Silicon Knights."

Absolutely off the wall. I ran the support division at GG for two years, and support does not mean writing or troubleshooting game level code for anyone. That's like suing a hammer production company because the hammer can't cut holes in drywall. If you don't have the skill to build a house, you can't blame the architect for not explaining how to lay a foundation.

Quote
It's claimed: "That representation is false, as evidenced in part by the fact that Epic later provided nearly all the Gears of War code to all of its licensees, at no extra charge, in a belated effort at damage control."

They are complaining because Epic provided post-mortem demonstration code of a successful game to demonstrate to future customers reference implementations, but didn't provide this value-add in time for SK to make the game that SK couldn't do on their own.

What that means is that game engine companies should never provide example code, because someone can say "hey, if you would have provided that code last year, we would have made millions by copying it, therefore it's your fault we didn't make millions".

Quote
It's also revealed: "Progress on the Silicon Knights’ Engine continues to date and, at this time, the Silicon Knights Engine is completely independent of Epic’s Engine and certainly derives no benefit from the unworkable source code provided by Epic."


or, if you read between the lines,

"Hey, we learned nothing at all from an engine that has been used to make more games than any other in the business, so we're going to go ahead and, starting completely from scratch with no input whatsoever from this example that has had zero success, ever, accomplish something that took you almost a decade and more dollars than we could ever make in our company's lifetime, in time to make our game. Oh, and it's ours.

Quote
"In fact, at this juncture the Silicon Knights Engine should, at a minimum, be described under the Agreement as an “Enhancement” of Epic’s Engine, which, as defined by the Agreement, is technology developed by Silicon Knights that improves upon the Engine and is therefore the property of Silicon Knights. Moreover, as development of the Silicon Knights Engine continues, the amount of code from Epic’s Engine employed by Silicon Knights continues to decrease. After the release of Silicon Knights’ Too Human, all Epic code will be removed from the Silicon Knights Engine."

"Ahh, well, ok so maybe we aren't completely independent of your code, but it's the thought that counts--and, uhh, by the time we are independent, we'll be, err, independent! And yeah, even if we weren't independent of your code (*cough*), we're, errr, yah, enhancing, so it's ours anyway!".


Anyway, there are several other points in the GamaSutra article that could be responded to, but it all boils down to "we tried to do too much, failed, and it's your fault--and we can prove it because you were able to do better!!!".
« Last Edit: July 19, 2007, 11:11:49 PM by Stephen Zepp »

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Reply #16 on: July 19, 2007, 11:10:15 PM

I don't know if it would kill middleware off. I'm not legally trained, so I don't know exactly how well they hold up in court, but I expect that, if they won the right to build their own engine based off of the knowledge extracted from examining and working with Epic's tech, you'd instead see something else suddenly popping into all middleware contracts: A noncompete clause.

Essentially, if you license our middleware, you agree to not create or market your own for-profit game engine for the next X years.

You mean something like: (GG EULA snippet)

Quote
(c) Licensee may not: (i) create any derivative works of the Engine, including translations or localizations, other than the Games; (ii) reverse engineer, or otherwise attempt to derive the algorithms for the Engine (iii) redistribute, encumber, sell, rent, lease, sublicense, or otherwise transfer rights to the Engine; or (iv) remove or alter any trademark, logo, copyright or other proprietary notices, legends, symbols or labels in the Engine.

I can guarantee that Unreal has a similar clause.


Quote
Also not great for the industry, especially for dev houses that have homebrew-engine games coexisting with licensed-engine games (c.f. Bioware, self-developed stuff for NWN, licensed stuff in Bioware Austin's Project, and I believe some licensed stuff in Bioware Pandemic's projects). Some of it might be circumventable by balkanizing your business units into separate corps wholly or primarily owned by a holding corp (again, not sure of the law here). Or it might just balkanize the industry into pockets of dev houses, each a one-engine-tech shop.

Effectively taking us back to requiring each game developer to build their own engine, from scratch, thereby losing the benefits of middle ware in the first place.

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Reply #17 on: July 19, 2007, 11:14:37 PM

Hard to say without further action or access to the original contract. It sounds like SK is trying to cover their asses against a counter-suit with the later claims or some sort of development cease-and-desist. Basically they want a loaner, because without one they can't meet milestones and would effectively be out of business. That's my take anyway. If they have to return the defective product what do they show the schedule nazis at the next meeting?

Without knowing what the support contract was and other details who knows? It could be SK sucks, or it could be the engine really did suck ass. I suspect it will get bogged down in what "workable" etc means. Which is why corroboration could be the linchpin. If a bunch of other devs line up and say that they too found it unworkable and the support not up to contract then it could really be something.

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Reply #18 on: July 19, 2007, 11:19:50 PM

Valid points I guess, but it comes down to proper use (and of course proper marketing/sales, from the engine company side) of a product. I'm obviously not a lawyer, and while I certainly don't want to be fighting for Unreal (direct competitor in theory, if not market segment), to me the only thing I can see them winning on is proving failure of warranty of merchantability, which suggests that they have to prove that Epic told them Unreal had a big red "Make My Game" button, and it didn't.

Hot topic for me so heading to cool off, but the entire lawsuit to me is just fundamentally wrong on every level.

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Reply #19 on: July 19, 2007, 11:23:02 PM

I don't know if it would kill middleware off. I'm not legally trained, so I don't know exactly how well they hold up in court, but I expect that, if they won the right to build their own engine based off of the knowledge extracted from examining and working with Epic's tech, you'd instead see something else suddenly popping into all middleware contracts: A noncompete clause.

Essentially, if you license our middleware, you agree to not create or market your own for-profit game engine for the next X years.

You mean something like: (GG EULA snippet)

Quote
(c) Licensee may not: (i) create any derivative works of the Engine, including translations or localizations, other than the Games; (ii) reverse engineer, or otherwise attempt to derive the algorithms for the Engine (iii) redistribute, encumber, sell, rent, lease, sublicense, or otherwise transfer rights to the Engine; or (iv) remove or alter any trademark, logo, copyright or other proprietary notices, legends, symbols or labels in the Engine.

I can guarantee that Unreal has a similar clause.

Almost, but not quite. When I said "create or market", I should've included the clause "even for entirely internal use". I.e. Thou shalt not write thine own engine in-house for a game you intend to sell (or, obviously, for sale itself). Your license only provides for "derivative works" - although that sounds like an apt description of what SK is creating.

Further, I'm not sure whether UE3 is supplied as source or prebuilt modules. Their comment about providing "working 360 code", among other things, leads me to believe that it's provided as source. The reverse-engineering clause doesn't really make sense when you can just peek at the source instead of actually having to do work to reverse-engineer the algos.

Quote from: Stephen Zepp
Quote
Also not great for the industry, especially for dev houses that have homebrew-engine games coexisting with licensed-engine games (c.f. Bioware, self-developed stuff for NWN, licensed stuff in Bioware Austin's Project, and I believe some licensed stuff in Bioware Pandemic's projects). Some of it might be circumventable by balkanizing your business units into separate corps wholly or primarily owned by a holding corp (again, not sure of the law here). Or it might just balkanize the industry into pockets of dev houses, each a one-engine-tech shop.

Effectively taking us back to requiring each game developer to build their own engine, from scratch, thereby losing the benefits of middle ware in the first place.

I don't think so, it would just make the formal business arrangements more complex and multi-game houses more expensive to set up. You'd effectively form a corporation for each engine license (or group of licenses, as Bioware Austin's case would necessitate). These would then be owned and managed by a holding corporation that holds the rights to the company brand and "licenses" the brand to the subordinate corporations. Operating income from the subordinates is then repatriated to the holding corp in the form of dividends.

In the alternate case, going back to a one-engine-tech shop also doesn't entirely eradicate the benefits of middleware, as you would probably still be able to license various pieces to chuck together, but it does seriously constrain the industry in terms of flexibility.

(stuff)

Hot topic for me so heading to cool off, but the entire lawsuit to me is just fundamentally wrong on every level.

Yeah, I agree, the lawsuit, as described by Gamasutra, seems to more or less be bullshit cooked up to throw off contractual obligations to not rip off Epic's code.
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Reply #20 on: July 19, 2007, 11:26:12 PM

One final thought:

I do realize/recognize that what appears to be their fundamental argument is one that was used against Microsoft back the anti-monpoly suits--"(they) had insider info and advantages they didn't provide others", and while I see it as potentially arguable, I don't in any way see it as valid. the argument worked (I think?) against MS because it was a documentation issue--MS didn't document everything that was in the OS, therefore they could be "sneaky" and use the more optimized stuff to produce better apps.

Where that breaks down for me is that Unreal is not a monopoly, and it's not a required asset for successful game development.

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Reply #21 on: July 19, 2007, 11:31:53 PM



Almost, but not quite. When I said "create or market", I should've included the clause "even for entirely internal use". I.e. Thou shalt not write thine own engine in-house for a game you intend to sell (or, obviously, for sale itself). Your license only provides for "derivative works" - although that sounds like an apt description of what SK is creating.

I need to stop posting!

However,  while I don't have legal arguments to support, this still screams at me copyright/licensing violation somewhere.

Quote

Further, I'm not sure whether UE3 is supplied as source or prebuilt modules. Their comment about providing "working 360 code", among other things, leads me to believe that it's provided as source. The reverse-engineering clause doesn't really make sense when you can just peek at the source instead of actually having to do work to reverse-engineer the algos.


Unknown either (I don't know enough about Unreal's licensing options, but I'm reasonably certain it doesn't provide raw source code for most licensees). This exact discussion came up at work today though, and the example discussed was something to the equivalent of:

Code:
for (x = 0; x < 10; x++)
{
  // do stuff
}

vs

Code:
for (someReallyLongVariableNameToProveAPoint = 0; someReallyLongVariableNameToProveAPoint < 10; someReallyLongVariableNameToProveAPoint++ )
{
  // do stuff
}

How do you measure if the second code block is a copyright violation of the first? It's arguable that 'the code is 60% different!!! (number made up)", or it's arguable that "the algorithm is exactly the same". The example can be taken to whatever extreme you like.
« Last Edit: July 19, 2007, 11:33:33 PM by Stephen Zepp »

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Reply #22 on: July 20, 2007, 03:19:53 AM

The whole thing sounds fishy.  The complaints against Epic would get them in a lot of hot water with several companies.   The delay particularly should of heavily damaged several companies to the point that they would seek whatever damages they could get.  They could all be true but why is SK the one to actually go for it?  We don't know enough but the surface of things sure makes it seem like a desperation play by SK.

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Reply #23 on: July 20, 2007, 03:36:20 AM

Anyone have public knowledge of what it costs to license the engine? Are there different types of that engine you can license?

I remember reading on a website that to email Epic Games, they will work with you in your attempt to license the engine.
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Reply #24 on: July 20, 2007, 03:40:10 AM

An assessment on another site is > $750,000. Which is to say, after 10 years of SK's work on Too Human and the amount of money they've thrown at the project, it's a drop in the bucket and they need better programmers! BUT! The number of delays on UE3 based games is... well... probably more than games based on established engines. Final BUT!

UE3 is bleeding edge. You get what you pay for. In this case, you paid for buggy unfinished, unestablished engine-ware. Whoops.

Yes, I know I just made up the word Engine-Ware. Deal with it.  Raspberry
« Last Edit: July 20, 2007, 03:42:02 AM by schild »
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Reply #25 on: July 20, 2007, 06:59:25 AM

Uhh...Mass Effect is not delayed unless it happened today. It's coming out in November and that's the first release date they've announced. Alot of people were speculating it'd be this summer but that was just speculation and Bioware had nothnig to do with it.

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Reply #26 on: July 20, 2007, 07:26:38 AM

When you say Bioshock is delayed do you mean it was delayed already or do you mean it isn't coming out next month as planned?
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Reply #27 on: July 20, 2007, 07:48:49 AM

It sounds like Epic:
1) Was very late delivering the engine.
2) Delivered a badly done hack job.
3) Delivered little to no documentation since they were late and in a hurry.
3) Was too busy working on their own games to provide support.
4) Had to rewrite huge swaths of the engine to actually get Gears of War to work.
5) Didn't provide their licensees with the needed updates until much later.

If any one of those points was in an a contract or service level agreement the lawsuit is warrented and they will probably win.  I've even heard talk that Epic used the money they got from U3 licenses to work on Gears of War instead of finishing and supporting the engine.
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Reply #28 on: July 20, 2007, 08:18:29 AM


I agree with Stephen Zepp that it's intellectually dishonest for SK to claim that slowly "replacing" each bit of the U3 engine is anything like writing an engine from scratch. 

(I say this as a programmer who has helped build a game from scratch (CoH) and is currently helping build a game from an Unreal 3 license (Global Agenda).)

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Reply #29 on: July 20, 2007, 09:13:00 AM

Well, poor programmers perhaps, but you should still get what you pay for. A few months delay is a lot when a better part of you dev team depends on the engine being delivered on time in order to be productive, we're certainly talking a lot of money lost here, perhaps more than the actual cost of the licenses.
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Reply #30 on: July 20, 2007, 09:44:32 AM

Well, poor programmers perhaps, but you should still get what you pay for. A few months delay is a lot when a better part of you dev team depends on the engine being delivered on time in order to be productive, we're certainly talking a lot of money lost here, perhaps more than the actual cost of the licenses.

Some of the points in the contract dispute may actually be valid--but when you take the suit as a whole, and look at what they want as compensation, it demonstrates just how ridiculous the entire thing is.

They not only want to be able to re-engineer the entire game engine and claim it as their own, but they also want Epic to lose all the profits from GoW.

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Reply #31 on: July 20, 2007, 09:53:23 AM

Quote
Further, I'm not sure whether UE3 is supplied as source or prebuilt modules. Their comment about providing "working 360 code", among other things, leads me to believe that it's provided as source. The reverse-engineering clause doesn't really make sense when you can just peek at the source instead of actually having to do work to reverse-engineer the algos.

Unknown either (I don't know enough about Unreal's licensing options, but I'm reasonably certain it doesn't provide raw source code for most licensees).

Let's look at the UE3 website! Linkies!

Quote from: UE3 licensing FAQ
Can you tell me more about licensing the Unreal Engine?

We license the Unreal Engine to experienced professional game developers.  Licensees receive full source code for our engine, tools and most recent games.

Emphasis in italics mine.

I agree that your example is ambiguous, at least semantically, but that is in part because it's ridiculously simplified. Thing is, there's tons of ways to implement a given algorithm in code, and multiple ways to arrive at that algorithm in the first place. Indepedent development or reverse-engineering I support; however, as with SK's case, "rolling your own" by slowly "replacing" parts of a licensed product is rather unambiguous theft rather than reverse-engineering.

Intellectual property arguments, eugh.
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Reply #32 on: July 20, 2007, 10:01:20 AM

Quote
Further, I'm not sure whether UE3 is supplied as source or prebuilt modules. Their comment about providing "working 360 code", among other things, leads me to believe that it's provided as source. The reverse-engineering clause doesn't really make sense when you can just peek at the source instead of actually having to do work to reverse-engineer the algos.

Unknown either (I don't know enough about Unreal's licensing options, but I'm reasonably certain it doesn't provide raw source code for most licensees).

Let's look at the UE3 website! Linkies!

Quote from: UE3 licensing FAQ
Can you tell me more about licensing the Unreal Engine?

We license the Unreal Engine to experienced professional game developers.  Licensees receive full source code for our engine, tools and most recent games.

Emphasis in italics mine.

I agree that your example is ambiguous, at least semantically, but that is in part because it's ridiculously simplified. Thing is, there's tons of ways to implement a given algorithm in code, and multiple ways to arrive at that algorithm in the first place. Indepedent development or reverse-engineering I support; however, as with SK's case, "rolling your own" by slowly "replacing" parts of a licensed product is rather unambiguous theft rather than reverse-engineering.

Intellectual property arguments, eugh.

The patent office tends to disagree with you from what we're seeing.

For example, there is currently a patent on "orbit cam", which, if successfully defended, means that every single game on the market that has any form of camera that orbits a point would be  required to pay a licensing fee. From what little information I am aware of, it's algorithm independent--simply having an orbit of a camera about a point, regardless of your implementation technique, is violation of the patent.

Agreed, IP arguments, ugh. We also have EULA enforcement issues there too--which are also a huge ball of wax.

Rumors of War
Roac
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Posts: 3338


Reply #33 on: July 20, 2007, 10:10:03 AM

I'm waiting for that case to wrap up so I can decide whether to pursue litigation of my hitponits (life, health, corporeal physical stability measure reserve) patent.

I saw the same sort of thing regarding 'ghost cars' in racing sims.  Not at all what I thought a patent was for.  Very odd. 

-Roac
King of Ravens

"Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don't learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us." -SC
Yoru
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Reply #34 on: July 20, 2007, 10:51:32 AM

Software patents, especially algorithm patents, are bullshit. Period, end of story. Patents that don't even cover a specific implementation, but rather a concept in general, are even worse. The USPTO needs to get burned down and rebuilt from the ground up. Same thing with the copyright and trademark office.

... I'll stop before I have to send my own posts to Politics. undecided
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