For the last time, the fact that things 'look cartoony', or what colors are used in Unreal Engine 3 games does NOT HAVE TO DO WITH UNREAL ENGINE 3. It amazes me that people think that a game engine determines how gritty or cartoony a game is.
These things are caused by the engine:
-Pop in (although this can be minimized by preloading textures into memory)
-Assets handled by middleware tend to look similar (speedtree).
-Some shaders used in UE3 games clearly haven't been modified much from the stock ones, which tends to make things look similar (again, this is an artistic decision).
It pretty much ends there. A lot of UE3 games overuse shader effects like bumpmapping and gloss, as well as HDR, but that's a purely artistic decision.
The fact of the matter is that the Unreal engine is quite an excellently optimized engine with an unparalleled, extremely well supported (better than any other engine) toolset, and it is very extensible and flexible.
That is not to say that there aren't more powerful game engines. However, one has to consider that:
-A game engine built specifically for a single console (Naughty Dog's engine, for example) has it much easier than one built primarily for cross-platform compatibility (UE3)
-Building a game engine from scratch is far beyond the realm of possibility for most studios.
-The Unreal Engine IS occasionally shoe-horned into games it wasn't designed for. It's not really designed for large terrains/open worlds.
Posted 3 weeks, 4 days ago
