

The Unreal Engine: Building the Empire State Building with Playing Cards - sutro
http://kotaku.com/5339057/carmack-ok-with-id-not-becoming-an-epic-or-valve#c14826268

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amitt
I used to work at epic on UE3 and can say that there's a LOT of engineering
and considerations that go into keeping the engine flexible and usable for so
many different types of games.

As a programmer on UE3, part of my job was spent responding to licensee
questions on mailing lists (usually within a fixed timeframe), looking into
bugs that held up QA'd releases (once a month code drops to licensees). Epic
really does take the concerns of its licensees seriously. The idea is that
helping licensees ship successful games using UE3 can only help Epic's
business and image.

Also, one of UE3's biggest sell points was the tools. The tools are what helps
get UE3 in the door over other tech. UnrealEd was designed to be WYSWIG and to
help artists create as much content as possible with programmer intervention.
Massive parallelization of teams is what helps save cash and ship games
quickly this gen. However it's really up to the licensee to use the tech to
its fullest. Many teams just take our demo tech and modify it a bit to meet
their needs. The business reasons for doing this are obvious (ship fast!), but
it's not really indicative of what the engine is fully capable of.

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antidaily
Great comment. Instantly reminded me of Lewis CK's “Everything’s Amazing,
Nobody’s Happy” video ([http://www.hulu.com/watch/60634/late-night-with-conan-
obrien...](http://www.hulu.com/watch/60634/late-night-with-conan-obrien-
everythings-amazing-nobodys-happy)).

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javanix
Wow, that's a fantastic analogy.

Kudos to him (or her) for placing a real, reasoned response on a gaming blog
as well.

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sho
Great comment and speaks highly of HN for highlighting it as something worthy
of note.

I think all comments, everywhere, deserve their own proper URL. Any takers?

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javanix
I'm not sure "deserve" is the right word, considering the amount of thought
that goes into most of them.

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sho
Hm, maybe I chose the wrong word. I meant that since comments are a discrete
piece of information, I think they should have unique URLs, not just anchor
tags or, worse, nothing.

I really like how this site enables linking directly to an individual comment
- I've used that functionality many times to point friends at one I've found
particularly insightful.

And who knows, maybe having their direct linkability emphasised in this way
will act to increase the quality.

