Tim Sweeney News entries for 2000

9 out of 10 doctors say now would be a good time to prune the Unreal tech page, and that sounds like a good idea to me. I'd like to start over by talking about a bunch of things I've been meaning to cover, but never found the time.

Common Questions I'm Asked

Q. I'm an aspiring game developer and I want to get into the business.  What's the best way to be hired?

A. The single most important thing game companies will look for is past experience: what cool stuff you have worked on previously.  This might sound like a Catch-22: "You need experience to get a job, and you need a job to get experience".  But nowadays, the mod communities around leading games like Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, and Quake 3 Arena are great proving grounds where aspiring game developers can work on projects freely (mostly in their spare time), and build levels, mods, and other game-play enhancements.  In the past few years, the majority of new talent Epic has hired have been people from the Unreal and Quake communities:

• Steve Polge, creator of the ReaperBot mod for Quake.
• Brandon "GreenMarine" Reinhart, early Unreal mod maker and writer of cool UnrealScript programming tutorials.
• Jack "mek" Porter, Unreal mod maker and PlanetUnreal news correspondent.
• Alan Willard, maker of cool Unreal and Quake levels.
• Shane Caudle, amazing artist and level designer who was building his own Quake TC.

While past work on cool projects is the number one criteria for most game developers, having a University degree is a major advantage.  While this isn't a must at Epic, most larger game developers place more emphasis on having a degree.  Besides that, college is a great opportunity to learn useful stuff.   My degree is in Mechanical Engineering (University of Maryland) -- by the time I was in college, I had been programming for about 10 years and didn't feel getting a computer science degree would be challenging.  So, I chose engineering, and that turned out to be a major challenge, and incredibly valuable.

The math I learned there, including vector calculus and finite element analysis, which are directly applicable to 3D games, is something I never would have studied independently.  Self-taught programmers pick up algorithms just by looking at other code and reading the occasional book (that's how I learned to program).   But differential equations are just not the kind of thing you're likely to rediscover on your own, though understanding them brings clarity to lots of real-world problems you'll encounter.

Q. What do I need to get started making mods for popular games?

A. Just a copy of the game, the editing and compiling tools, and access to the web sites that contain information for mod authors.  For Unreal Tournament, you just need a copy of UT, which includes the editor (on CD#2) and all the UnrealScript code for the entire game; visit the Unreal community web sites (listed at the top of this page) for tons of pointers to Unreal information.  For Quake 3 Arena, you need the retail game and the utilities; visit PlanetQuake to get started.  For Half-Life, get the game and see PlanetHalfLife for tips.

Q. I'm working on a project; do I need to license the Unreal Tournament engine or sign any paperwork?

A. That depends on what you're doing:

• If you are making a freely available mod, all you need is the retail version of the game.
• If you are using the engine for non-commercial academic purposes, all you need is the retail game.  Lots of people have been using the Unreal Tournament engine as part of university projects and theses.
• If you are a startup game developer and are prototyping a game in the Unreal Tournament engine (using the tools available in the retail version), you don't need a license agreement while you're prototyping the game. You do need a license agreement in place before you advertise a game, sign a publishing agreement, or otherwise profit from the game.

Programming Languages

Ever since my GameSpy Developer Week article, "A Critical Look At Programming Languages", I've been getting questions about whether we plan to "do something about it" and define a new programming language.  The answer is, we're already doing that to a certain extent with UnrealScript, which is a high-level, object-oriented, platform-independent language with some cool extensions aimed at game code development.

As an engine developer, we'll always be involved in language design to a certain extent.  In the future, the scripting language could evolve into a simpler form, more true to the "scripting" term: controlling sequences of in-game events.  Or, the scripting language could grow to subsume even more of the engine code.  We'll be evaluating these options anew with each major iteration of the engine, doing whatever is most appropriate for the technology, recognizing the benefits and drawbacks of going with well-known proven tech, versus creating newer, better tech.

Also...

• The cool soon-to-be-public site Linux Newbie already has posted a cool article on how to get started with Unreal Tournament under Linux.  This site is a great idea; the biggest barrier to widespread Linux adoption right now is the difficulty of getting started, and now in standard decentralized Linux fashion, sites and resources are starting to pop up to address this.
• Common answers to UnrealScript questions on ChessMess.com (saw this on Blue's News).

-Tim