Was debating whether to put this here or in the uberent section, but figured it'd fit here nice and snug. A long while ago someone at Uber had mentioned selling or renting off the engine for other people to use. Similar to how the CryEngine, and other such engines were sold off. My question is- is this still feasible? And what would the price range be? Would It be closed to in house deals or open to a wider audience of interested casual developers? (Related to price range question.)
I really doubt Uber will ever do that. Selling engine means making proper official documentation, having support for it and making it open for everyone, and easy to use. Uber made engine by themselfs for themselfs for specific tasks and future proofness in some aspects. They are company full of good engineers with experience and they know engine good, and thanks to that they can work fast and be good in it. If they would give it to someone they would probably have no idea what to do in it.
They could make major bank by licensing the PA engine and selling to other developers who want a good game engine for projects. Although really, this is all based on speculation anyway. Uber is the only one who would be able to contemplate such a decision.
The engine is pretty much all there to modders at the moment as long as we are ok with the restrictions that come with it. We get no low-level control and we have to assume our users already own PA. I imagine it wouldn't be that difficult for a small company to make a deal with Uber to allow this engine to be packaged and sold with a game (essentially just a mod).
They've commented on this before, and I believe the response was along the lines of not being able to, because it could violate copy-right protection because their software may be too similar to another's, and the purposefully stay ignorant so that they don't have to worry about changing it and they face minimal legal charges, if any, were there to be a claim filed. Actually, this might have been in response to open-sourcing PA for us to help develop, so it might not apply here.
People don't buy engines, they buy tools. Unreal, Unity, CryEngine, they all have an impressive suite of tools. There was a kind of true joke in the 2000s that people only got the Unreal Engine for the editor; several games were released that were made using UnrealEd but a completely custom renderer and game engine. As I've said in other threads out only custom tool we use is the command line papatran, and it's not all that good.
The Too Human case is a weird one. Silicon Knights' and Epic's definition of a "functional game engine" differed. I don't know the specifics, but obviously they were expecting more functionality than the engine offered. Epic is really good at using the tech it has to make amazing looking stuff, and there's a lot of people who believe the amazing stuff is a result of their tech and not their artists. It's always the artists.
Honestly, I think the UE3 did even hurt some games. Some of the reused shader effects (or light, fog, post proc, no clue) did really tell to anyone 'this is an UE3 game', because they looked so incredibly artificial. E.g. some parts of UT3 were incredibly detailed, but everything looked so sterile the effect just got ruined.
UE3 (at least at first, 3.5 helped things a bit) had non-HDR bloom and loved it (at least going by UT3's initial release having bloom intensity be one of the few graphics options), as well as some pre-packaged noise normal maps (go burn something in Bioshock, you'll see it). It also has its texture sampling patterns for various post effects (even into 3.5 with the volumetric lighting, something I noticed in Life is Strange). I'm sure the character animation system has quirks that typically just get used wholesale, thus adding to the UE3 look. Overall, the UE3 look seems like a combination of developer cost-cutting (by using stock shaders, lighting, and animation code. I'm not slighting them, cutting costs was the point), and the engine being designed to a specific balance of effect accuracy and processor usage, so most games share the same signature visual artifacts. Guilty Gear Xrd is the only UE3 game that comes immediately to mind that doesn't look like UE3, mostly because it went fully non-photo-realistic. Anything trying to be photo-realistic with UE3 is probably going to be dealing with its limitations, and thus its look. Apparently UE4 is a lot more flexible for the artists and coders, but even then stuff like the basic screen space reflection shaders (not the best example, I know) have obvious corner-cutting, so we'll have to see how that goes. At least with the reportedly greater flexibility other developers can better choose their balance of accuracy to processor usage. Once again, that comes down to @bgolus's comment about the artists.
The new console focus probably added to the UE3's stock effects being relatively cheap, combined with the rising development costs. PS360 weren't exactly strong, and the early texture streaming was horribly immersionbreaking, even on PC where you got more than 512 mb ram. Biohock btw, and that's often confused, used a modified variant of the UE2.5, which I personally prefer to a lot of the stuff the successor produced. That games art-style reminded of some UE3 games, but was very consistent for the most part. Also beautiful. There are ofc games that don't look like the UE3. Some more unique shaders could already change a lot.
