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could this be the reason Epic shelved ut4...?

Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2019 8:01 pm
by darksonny
an insteresting (theoretically speaking) point of view from a user forum at official ut about the quitting of ut development, anybody thinks this could be the reason?

https://www.epicgames.com/unrealtournam ... post404427

Re: could this be the reason Epic shelved ut4...?

Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2019 8:37 pm
by Hellkeeper
Does anyone need a full-length post to wrap their mind around such a simple notion?
Epic starts a game, it takes ages, 5 people are happy about it, they know very well at least 30% of the potential customers will be unhappy about it. They release a game which becomes one of the best-selling games of all times and brings billions.
Of course they ditched UT4.

Re: could this be the reason Epic shelved ut4...?

Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2019 1:24 am
by Higor
Sounds like a good opportunity to ask for permission to work on UE1/UT99.

Re: could this be the reason Epic shelved ut4...?

Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2019 5:16 am
by JackGriffin
Those posters have no clue what's involved. "Just a few devs and a little time"...SMH. Those days are over.

Anyone good enough to work on a new UT is stupid to do that anyway. They should be doing something that pays them for their skill and effort.

Re: could this be the reason Epic shelved ut4...?

Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2019 7:59 pm
by darksonny
Higor wrote:Sounds like a good opportunity to ask for permission to work on UE1/UT99.
Thats zero possibility to do freely without charge...

Re: could this be the reason Epic shelved ut4...?

Posted: Fri Jan 25, 2019 11:20 pm
by Hellkeeper
They already said a million times they will not and they said why.

Re: could this be the reason Epic shelved ut4...?

Posted: Sat Jan 26, 2019 2:37 pm
by Feralidragon
Hellkeeper wrote:They already said a million times they will not and they said why.
They did? Where?
As far as I know they never gave a clear answer on this, other than not having enough resources to follow the project ("bandwidth")...
And I asked it myself to Flak directly once, same answer.

Re: could this be the reason Epic shelved ut4...?

Posted: Sat Jan 26, 2019 8:42 pm
by Hellkeeper
They did, I don't know where exactly.
But their given reason is that even new versions of the engine include elements from previous ones and they won't allow some things to be made public.
The bandwidth thing is clearly a "diplomatic disease", an official reason everybody knows is fiction but serves its purpose. Especially in the days of fiber optics when bandwidth is closer than ever to being infinite.

Re: could this be the reason Epic shelved ut4...?

Posted: Sat Jan 26, 2019 10:02 pm
by papercoffee
Hellkeeper wrote:They did, I don't know where exactly.
But their given reason is that even new versions of the engine include elements from previous ones and they won't allow some things to be made public.
The bandwidth thing is clearly a "diplomatic disease", an official reason everybody knows is fiction but serves its purpose. Especially in the days of fiber optics when bandwidth is closer than ever to being infinite.
bandwidth is meant as "manpower" and "time" :wink:

Re: could this be the reason Epic shelved ut4...?

Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2019 4:11 pm
by fudgonaut
Hettinger wrote:when you have infinite resources
As someone who has worked in the game industry as a QA tester, Designer, Project Manager, and Producer on 22 different titles, I can tell you that man hours are always a bottleneck — no matter how big or small the project (or the game studio) is.

Re: could this be the reason Epic shelved ut4...?

Posted: Wed Jan 30, 2019 9:20 pm
by Feralidragon
As someone who just works in the development industry overall, and as someone who recently had a brief insight on how Fortnite developers build their code (bug symptoms, and one or another comment the devs do on reddit times to times), what I can say is that there's no such thing as "infinite resources".

There's a saying: "what 1 developer can do in 1 month, 2 developers can do in 2".
Meaning you cannot really just add more developers to a task, and expect it to finish faster, it may actually finish slower.

Also, you could have all the money in the world, but the gold supply is still more valuable and rarer than copper, and no matter how much copper you have, gold is still much better.

What I mean is that great developers are hard to come by these days, and the market is flooded with mediocre to "just competent enough" developers, not necessarily good developers (even if you limit to seniors), not even necessarily passionate developers, and good and great developers are scarce and highly valuable.

I have interviewed probably over 100 candidates myself in my lifetime, to either join my team or some other similar team, and have looked at the test results of probably 3x that (from a test I created, with one or another trick or difficult question, but mostly very simple stuff), and even when I lower the standards of entry, many still manage to surprise me negatively, and it doesn't matter if they have 2 years of experience or 10, or if they graduated from college or not, either developer has "it" or not, very simple.

In the case of Fortnite, it's clear that they may have maybe a few great developers there, but the rest is just competent enough to secure the job, and not any better.
I am sure they have passion, the game itself is very cool and really popular, but you can tell simply by how they build their things and the bugs which arise from such practices, that it's not exactly a place oozing with talent, in respect of programming at least. But generally speaking, no place is either way.


Having that said, UT99 is and will always be what boomed UE1 forward, and as far as projects of this kind, they don't want to promote what essentially is an extremely old game, and if someone had to monitor a community project to fix it and improve it, they would need someone very very trustworthy from the community AND someone who actually originally worked on the game or knows all its ins and outs, and those folks are either gone from the company or working as seniors on Fortnite, thus they indeed have no resources for this.

They cannot hire just anyone to keep a look on these things on part of their time, and anyone whom would actually be good enough to do this, would probably be good enough and important enough to be added to the Fortnite team as a full time job instead, because again, good developers are hard to come by nowadays.
Also, anyone good enough for such a job, probably wouldn't be interested in checking an almost 2-decade old engine, it would always to be to work on UE4 or newer.

Re: could this be the reason Epic shelved ut4...?

Posted: Tue Nov 21, 2023 10:45 am
by Hellkeeper
fudgonaut wrote: Wed Jan 30, 2019 4:11 pm
Hettinger wrote:when you have infinite resources
As someone who has worked in the game industry as a QA tester, Designer, Project Manager, and Producer on 22 different titles, I can tell you that man hours are always a bottleneck — no matter how big or small the project (or the game studio) is.
You answered to a spam post who inserted a link for medications in a quote (of me, which is why I was notified).

Re: could this be the reason Epic shelved ut4...?

Posted: Tue Nov 21, 2023 5:10 pm
by fudgonaut
Hellkeeper wrote: Tue Nov 21, 2023 10:45 am You answered to a spam post who inserted a link for medications in a quote (of me, which is why I was notified).
My bad.

Were you notified just recently? That post was nearly 5 years ago... who knows how many subsequent quotes will come back to haunt me :lol2:

Re: could this be the reason Epic shelved ut4...?

Posted: Tue Nov 21, 2023 8:41 pm
by papercoffee
I deleted the post and banned the spammer.

And because it's an obsolete thread.
=CLOSED=