Canadian game developer Silicon Knights last week filed a lawsuit that alleged that Epic Games misrepresented its Unreal Engine 3 technology, which caused losses in revenue and delays in game development.

The lawsuit further alleged that Epic never intended to deliver Unreal Engine 3 as a fully functional game engine as promised. Instead, Epic collected licensing fees from Silicon Knights and others in order to fund the development of its own video game, Gears of War.

Silicon Knights isn’t the only developer using Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 technology. Many other developers have had to face the same challenges that Silicon Knights described. Shacknews spoke to some of the developers who have had experience with the Unreal Engine 3, with some corroborating Silicon Knights’ complaints, while others having nothing but positive things to say.

Josh Jeffcoat, a former Gearbox Software level designer who worked with Unreal Engine 3, said that the technology did have limitations, but did not believe that Epic intentionally mislead any of its licensees. "UE3 isn't perfect by any means, but I don't feel Epic misrepresented it in any way when we licensed it," said Jeffcoat. "It's not that UE3 is the best at any one thing it does, because it's not. It's just better at more of them than anything else, and the ten-plus years of maturity it's been through has yielded a better-than-average art and design pipeline.

"I am unable to account for the engine's current status, but as I left, I was aware of several of UE3's limitations--the lighting model is dog slow for anything dynamic, the streaming support has issues; I believe SK mentioned these--but most of these were apparent from the day we first got the code, and we designed accordingly," added Jeffcoat.

Another developer, who wished to be anonymous, said, "It is true that Epic was very late in delivering key features to UE3 during the development of Gears of War. They had promised one of the most important feature of UE3, the multi-threaded renderer, many many months before it was finally delivered. Since the key to having fast performances on the Xbox 360 is multi-threading, it made the engine somewhat subpar if you wanted to run your game with good graphics on a console."

In defence of the late delivery of certain engine features, he said, "I can understand why some features were delivered late to the UE3 licensees. Some of them were very complex while others would cause a ton of headaches to licencees if they were unstable or unfinished. This was also the reason why GoW had some UE3 features implemented and tested first before they were introduced to the official codebase. There is no better way to know if your stuff works. The Epic programmers were always upfront about the situation and never hid themselves or stopped answering questions to licensees."