[ut3] Legalities

[Ryan C. Gordon]

I'm going to answer a few emails here, but I haven't got anything to 
announce at the moment. I also haven't read most of this mailing list in 
the past week or so; I don't need to be reminded that people are still 
waiting for Linux binaries. You'll get them as soon as possible, honest.


> Questions:

(I don't speak for Epic, and have no real insight into why technical 
decisions were made. But here are my best insights.)

> Why did Epic choose GameSpy this time?

My guesses would be a) because the master server was a huge pain from 
ut2003 onward (and maybe as far back as Unreal 1), and b) GameSpy gives 
them cross-platform tech roughly analogous to Xbox Live or Games For 
Windows Live.

This is about more than just getting a list of servers. There's a lot 
more competition for a baseline feature set nowadays. The fact that 
Valve added "achievements" to the Steam version of The Orange Box titles 
suggests that this competition is only going to get more fierce. If I 
were you, I'd go figure out who the major competitors are, and get the 
login name you like on their services before someone else takes it.   :)

> Why did Epic choose Bink for videos? (Even the load screens!)

Almost every game you'll see on a console uses a prerendered movie for 
load screens (including static copyright text, like ut3 does).

Partially because it's quick to throw in contractually-obligated logos: 
usually there's a prebuilt movie from these companies they just have to 
convert to Bink. Also, it's probably easier to put a movie together in a 
movie making tool, than make the equivalent set of pixels light up in 
the engine...especially since, say, Intel Corporation doesn't keep 
people with UE3 mapmaking experience around to make logos.

Also, rendering a movie is dirt cheap from a CPU viewpoint; lots of 
games show them because Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo won't certify your game 
if the load time is more than X seconds...but the stopwatch doesn't 
start until all the logos are displayed. Many games show the movies on 
one thread, and then use this extra time to load the game on another. I 
don't know if UT3 does this, but lots and lots of Unreal licensees have 
done just that.

Also, darn near every UE2 licensee tends to license Bink, and uses the 
same piece of third-party code off the Unreal Developer Network to 
integrate it, so it probably made sense to just do the integration in 
the official UE3 codebase, since Epic would still get bug reports from 
it anyhow.

> As for PhysX I won't comment.

It's amazing to me how much hatred there is towards Ageia...I wonder if 
that's just spillover from ut200x's MathEngine contracts.

Then again, there's a lot of hate towards every piece of middleware, 
depending on what a given forum's personal conspiracy theory is. Someone 
posted a petition on this mailing list about removing GameSpy. You don't 
have to _like_ GameSpy, and I've certainly had my problems with them in 
the past, but I don't think it's fair to play Kangaroo Court with them 
when there's really no actual evidence that they are the problem.

Likewise for Ageia.

Likewise for Bink.

> Lots of other routine middleware floating around in there too probably.

I have no doubt that people will compare the final binaries with the
beta demo server for differences. It'll be interesting to see if the 
incorrect parties will amend their petitions and apologize to those they 
slandered.

--ryan.