Point of Slipspace Engine?

Games Halo Infinite
#1

Before anyone gets mad at me, this isn’t meant to throw shade at 343i, I’m just confused and would like answers.

I’ve played mp since the flights and beta (loving the gameplay by the way even though there are lots of issues), and I’m about 1/3 through the campaign, and I’m just sitting here wondering what the point was of going with their slipspace engine?

From my understanding, after they wrapped up development on the major content drops for Halo 5, they started full time on Infinite. They wanted to go with a new engine and were using Unreal Engine for a good chunk of development and then realized they needed something else to fulfill their vision. This lead to them dropping Unreal and creating their own.

My question is, why? What in this game could Unreal not fulfill? You could say the mp is bigger with 12v12 BTB, but that’s not really an excuse because H5 had 12v12 warzone with arguably even more going on with the req system and PvE on top of the 12v12 PvP. Not to mention, with slipspave you even get frame drops on the high power map for example and I’m playing on an XSX. So how exactly is this engine better than Unreal? Would the performance be even worse if they hadn’t gone to slipspace somehow? I know they dropped the H5 engine because it supposedly was very hard to add and change content, so maybe slipspace is better in that regard, but the question still remains why drop Unreal after spending so much time with it already?

Then we go to campaign (which I am also really enjoying) but there too I am confused on what this engine can do that Unreal cannot. Again I’m on an XSX and even in performance mode which downgrades the visuals, the game isn’t a smooth 60fps. The more linear sections feel fine, but once you go into the open world it takes a hit. The actual graphics aren’t even impressive either. The art style is phenomenal, but in terms of textures and the like, the game definitely does not impress. Not that I even care much about graphics, I really just see nice graphics as a cherry on top. As long as something isn’t genuinely unpleasant to look at, I’m good. It just confuses me why the performance (which I care about way more) is so bad even when the visuals aren’t crazy good.

Oh and another thing I wanted to bring up. This is supposedly going to be a 10 year game with a brand new engine that apparently was necessary… yet we’re just a few weeks in and have “UI limitations”? What in the world is that about? How do you build a whole new engine that apparently can do things others can’t and let’s you accomplish your vision, but the UI is already running into limitations? It sounds and looks like this engine still needs a lot of work done to it.

TL;DR: Just confused as to their decision to drop unreal for slipspace. What can slipspace do that no other engine available could? Because this one does not impress im terms of performance or visuals.

1 Like
#2

Probably has to do with the back end engineering that’s allowed a game of this size to have a small foot print on the SSD. In other words Microsoft knew SSD space on Xbox would be limited and wanted to keep the overall download size small.

1 Like
#3

Halo wasn’t on Unreal in the first place, it was on Blam!

But as @IntoVaIhalla said, it has to do a lot with back end engineering and layers and layers of old code. By making a new Engine it provides more creative freedom and flexibility. As for not wanting to use Unreal to use Unreal you have to pay for a license.

1 Like
#4

Were they ever using Unreal? I thought they went straight from Blam! to Slipspace. Either way, on the technical side there’s most likely something somewhere they added into the Slipspace engine that isn’t offered in another engine without having to build it themselves anyway. Also, there’s some crazy licensing fees on Unreal, they own this engine and don’t have to pay fees to use it.

#5

Makes sense, the game is a lot smaller than I was expecting now that I think about it. I was expecting 100+ to start but it’s only like 50 or somewhere around there? So that’s pretty good. Doesn’t change the fact that its unfortunately disappointing in terms of performance and visuals. Hopefully that gets better in the future.

#6

I know Halo in general used to be on BLAM but Infinite itself was on Unreal for a good amount of time, that’s what I was referring to.

About the back end stuff, is that not possible with something like Unreal? The licensing makes sense, but if that was the only case for them dropping it that’s good for them but kinda sucks for us considering the state of the game.

#7

They went from BLAM to Unreal for the start of Infinite’s development and then dropped it and made slipspace. Said they couldn’t execute on their vision with Unreal so I’m just wondering what exactly that reason was. I totally get the licensing bit though.

#8

Well I’m guessing slipspace was built and optimized with the technical specs and kernel of the XBone and Series in mind, whereas unreal can only be configured so much. Most of what an engine handles at a minimum is graphics and game physics, and UE has a lot of bloat to make it easier for devs to make stuff.

Which means you can reduce that bloat if you know (or learn) exactly what you need and build it from the ground up. As UE isn’t fully open source you can’t change the source code, even though you can build whatever you want on top of it. It’s not optimized

2 Likes
#9

Thanks for the insight that makes sense