Hello,

I would require some information about the importance of possesing the source code in the Unreal 3 engine. As you may know the commerical use of the unreal 3 engine requires the apropriate license. The two main licenses for commercial use are the standard license which is 99$ and 35% Royalties which does not provide the source code. The second license provides the source code and it's estimated price is somewhere between 500,000-1,000 000 USD. We are intending to develop a high quality MMORPG using the unreal 3 engine. While money is not a huge issue, we can afford the engine with the source code but we would not like to use a milion dollars for something that we may or may not need. While we do wish for the usage of the unreal 3 engine (For its high quality) is the source code acually needed for the production of a high quality MMORPG.


Thank you for any information

Try using the UDK first and see what you can or can't get done without the source code. No one here can answer that for you, as your project will be unique. But consider that out of the box, Unreal is an FPS engine that supports a low number of players, doing FPS like activities.

You'd be better off using a proper MMORPG framework, such as the Hero Engine.

We insist on using the Unreal 3 engine for our game, as it provides the features we require. One does not need to use their hosting features and so games using the unreal 3 engine are not limited to fps. Still looking for an answer if anyone else has any knowledge on this matter.

Whilst the U3 engine can be used to make MMO titles (several have already been done), it remains a fact that no-one can tell you if you need the source code or not, that's purely upto what the team needs to do. If it isn't a question of money then having the source code is always better and more useful from a developer standpoint. Otherwise only your own team can tell you if you *need* the source-code or not.

If you are serious about investigating the licensing of UE3 then simply talk to Epic. They will be more than willing to discuss things with you and, although they will be obviously biased, you will get much more useful feedback directly from them and entering an evaluation period.

n!

tim00252,

With all due respect, if you don't know whether the source code is worth buying, then you're not the right person to make the decision on this. You need to get a technical specification of your planned MMO to your engineers and let them make a judgement on whether Unreal can deliver what you want without the source code. Even they may not be 100% sure, because a feature that is advertised are not always the same as a feature that is practical to use or one that does exactly what you want. But nobody can tell you how important the source is to your project except someone with hands-on experience of both your project and Unreal.