Gamebryo and Torque - Engine Blues

*Sigh*

Okay well there's a simple and boring reason reason bethesda would not purchase rights to Gamebryo (at least for the purposes of continuing to develop it). Emergent is the second company to fail to make Gamebryo profitable. They started turning a small profit this year finally, but have lost 30-40 million during their stewardship of the technology. Even if one were to assume whoever purchased the property could hold on to all existing clients and convince as many to re-purchase as would have before the sale- Bethesda is long out of practice and has long since steered their business model away from in-house engine creation let alone engine creation as a licensed IP. This would be like Riadioshack buying up the inventory of an electronics component wholesaler or hardware store chain. Yeah they used to sell all the component parts you'd need to build or repair any number of electronics yourself but they realized they couldn't make money doing it anymore so why would they buy up the inventory of a bankrupt parts wholesaler right? But that's a boring explanation and I feel the need to ramble more. If I stopped there people might actually have the patience to read my whole post; I simply will not allow that.

Wrote a huge essay on the subject but just a second ago I accidently hit "CTRL+R" instead of "CTRL+Y." My lack of fluence with keyboard editing shortcuts saves you all from listening to a 3000 word rambling essay where I pretend to know what I'm talking about. Since I don't have the will to retype what I consider to have been my magnum opus of "talking out of my ass" I decided to write this rambling introduction to the uncharacteristically concise response to follow.

Bethesda decided to license Gamebryo because it found the prospect of developing an engine internally to be bother undesirably and increasingly expensive. They'd likely purchase the rights to Gamebryo if the price is right for the the sake of projects to be released in the medium term of about 5 years or so - for which they may consider the current version (2.6) to be acceptable. This would also likely be for the sake of DLC for those projects - for which licensing is often not finalized (agreements associated with right to sell commercially as opposed to development support) until shortly before its release.

After that though, version 2.6 will no longer be sufficient even if dated engine technology was considered to be perfectly acceptable. This is because in considerations of time frames greater than 5 years one is forced to consider new major platform releases such as the next windows or follow on to the current generation of consoles. Long term compatibility of the current engine is not only not-guaranteed for these but, in the case of the consoles, not necessarily even likely. So, at some point when those distant projects enter the earliest stages of development, they will have to either decide to do all the things they decided to get away from when the chose to license the Gamebryo engine or they will have to chose a new engine to learn to create games for.

What they decide at that point will be determined by whether there is an acceptable alternative to the Gamebryo engine for the kind of games they make and how heavily they weigh the potential costs and risks of developing an engine internally. Given how long their development cycle is though, they may have to make this decision very soon. If the IdTech engine is the best alternative (and they have very publicly stated they do not consider it to be an acceptable one) then I don't imagine they will have an easy time of it.

Yeah, that was me being concise. Sad.

I dont really think its hundreds of games for Gamebryo, I know of about 30 titles and many of those use 10.2 instead of the latest and greatest because I think it was cheaper to license if there was a preexisting contract with NetImmerse.

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I'm pretty sure 2.6 is the latest version and most of the recent Gamebryo based games use at least 2.3 or later (Fallout 3 used 2.3)

Did NetImmerse use a completely different versioning scheme?

Anyways, the developer packages are usually licensed for 5 year periods in terms of use and support and on a per-product basis in terms of right to sell content created containing it. I'm not sure if NetImmerse licensed their product under completely different terms, but this is fairly standard when it is not merely a content creation tool but a technology contained in the actual product. I guess it's like the difference between selling a product written on a product designed on a windows computer as opposed to selling a computer with windows installed on it.

EDIT: Sorry for the double-post. I guess that makes me a double poster AND a rambler - I am to a forum thread as a grandfather who is sharp enough to remember his favorite story yet senile enough to forget he just finished telling it is to a family reunion.

For those who think the Gamebryo engine is perfect - here's a post from an Oblivion modder (from a couple of years back):
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=113528

"On top of all that, the game still runs horribly with no mods or tweaks. I can safely say that the Gamebryo engine is the worst game engine currently used in triple-A titles. There is no reason that Morrowind, a 6 year old game, should still have slow parts on a modern system and that Oblivion should have so much stuttering, freezing and generally crappy framerate. "

Um, kind of unfair to use Oblivion and Morrowind as an example, no? I dont think anyone have said that Morrowind was perfectly optimized, or Oblivion.

FO3 runs great (havent tested Vegas), not pauses or stuttering at all so i think they've done a pretty good job with making it better.. it also loads extremely fast, just a couple of seconds are you're into the game playing.

CutLunch said:

For those who think the Gamebryo engine is perfect - here's a post from an Oblivion modder (from a couple of years back):
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=113528

"On top of all that, the game still runs horribly with no mods or tweaks. I can safely say that the Gamebryo engine is the worst game engine currently used in triple-A titles. There is no reason that Morrowind, a 6 year old game, should still have slow parts on a modern system and that Oblivion should have so much stuttering, freezing and generally crappy framerate. "

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The direct competition amongst open world engines isn't that great either. ZenGin (Gothic, Gothic 2) also scales horribly although it is much older than the version of Netimeerse that was used for Morrowind. Genome (Gothic 3, Forsaken Gods, Risen) isn't much better. The version used in Risen performs adequately, but Risen also has much less content and much smaller landmass than Gothic 3 or Bethesda games. Also Piranha bytes engines were not licensable afaik. The engines used for Two worlds games are better performance wise, but are also not licensable. As for viable RPG engines that's about it. There are several licensable engines for FPS and Action games, but they would need extensive modification first to build all neccessary systems for a RPG.

CutLunch said:

"On top of all that, the game still runs horribly with no mods or tweaks. I can safely say that the Gamebryo engine is the worst game engine currently used in triple-A titles. There is no reason that Morrowind, a 6 year old game, should still have slow parts on a modern system and that Oblivion should have so much stuttering, freezing and generally crappy framerate. "

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No, that's based on Bethesda's modifications to Gamebryo. Unreal Engine 3 can look horrible and play terribly, but a developer has to do that to the engine, normally it looks and plays pretty well. Look at it in Mass Effect (PC) - It's buggy, it's not optimised, it's not 100% stable, but then look at Mass Effect 2 (PC) or Mirror's Edge (PC) - Stable, optimised, looks absolutely stunning.

It's not the engine, it's how it's used. Bethesda created some serious issues within the engine as they modified it to their use, and they haven't done much to alleviate them.

It's like an actual car engine. Ford could make a stellar engine, but if someone comes and hits it with a sledgehammer a good number of times, it's not going to be as good as it was - And it's not Ford's fault that it's so.

I think Divinity 2 uses Gamebryo, too, no ?

Dhruin said:

Gamebryo has been used for hundreds of games but if I were Bethsoft, I'd be leveraging id for the next tech. Why buy an outside engine when you own one of the most famous engine developers in video game history?

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This worries me though. While Gamebryo was fairly flawed, it was excellent for modding. And when it failed even for modding, other modders usually found ways to fix that. Most importantly, it supported integration of multiple mods somewhat smoothly (albeit sometimes requiring yet other mods to accomplish).

Personally, I only enjoy Morrowind and Oblivion once very heavily modded. And once I've done that, I actually love them. id isn't completely mod unfriendly (despite some distressing comments from Carmack). They have a history of releasing client-side source, for example. It wasn't hard to write mods for Doom 3, but merging multiple mods together was a miserable manual process. Using dozens of mods at the same time as I do with the latter Elder Scrolls games would be out of the question. Might Bethsoft implement it on top of id's tech? Maybe. But, Bethesda barely got the already existing modding tools out for Fallout 3 (although kudos to them for making the right decision in the end).

Dragon Age with all it's flaunted mod-friendliness (and it's not bad) still doesn't provide nearly as many tools for modders as Gamebryo did. And despite the exceedingly healthy modding community for Elder Scrolls, modders and mod consumers are still a small group compared to their sales numbers. So I remain quite concerned about all this.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

I think Divinity 2 uses Gamebryo, too, no ?

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Yes, it does. Again, Larian didn't optimise that too well either, and I don't think it has any capacity for mods.