Silicon Knights sues Epic over UE3

Friday 20th July 2007, 01:01:00 AM, written by Tim

Silicon Knights, developer of the upcoming Xbox 360 game Too Human, has filed suit against Epic Games over alleged flaws in Unreal Engine 3.0. Gamasutra has a list of the allegations from the legal filings, so we'll just summarize them quickly:

• Epic was supposed to deliver a developer-ready version of UE3 by March 2006. Instead, it was delivered in November 2006.
  
• Too Human's disastrous showing at E3 2006 was not using UE3. Instead, it was using an engine developed in-house.
• Epic failed to release updates to the engine, claiming that they were specific to Gears of War or Unreal Tournament 3 and therefore not bound by the license agreement between SK and Epic.
• Too Human is now using an engine developed in-house. At the moment, it seems that this uses parts of UE3, although the filing claims that all of Epic's code will be removed by the time the game is finished.
• SK has claimed that they are not the only licensees to have been affected, which has been corroborated in part by other developers.
• SK still has no version of UE3 for the PlayStation 3, which was supposed to have been delivered in February.

What does this mean? It's too early to say, but a few things stand out. First of all, we're not entirely convinced that the in-house engine is a full-fledged engine. Because SK continually refers to its work as "an enhancement to the engine," we're of the opinion that they've written a renderer in-house but are still using that within the UE3 framework; of course, no one outside of Epic and Silicon Knights can say for sure how much UE3 code is still being used in Too Human. Second, since Too Human is a 360 exclusive, the PS3 version of UE3 was most likely for an unannounced game to be published by Sega. Third, the news certainly paints a less-than-rosy picture for the future of games using the UE3 engine, especially if the PS3 port of the engine is still facing significant problems. Finally, this could result in id's Tech 5 being licensed faster than previously thought if UE3's problems are this pervasive.

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xbox ± ue3, epic, siliconknights, toohuman

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