So last week the question was raised whether Epic's Unreal Engine 3 is a sleek, sexy little otter capable of churning out something like Gears of War, or whether it's a busted piece of shit that's the cause of Too Human's troubled development. We're no closer to an official answer today. What we do have, though, is a bunch of developers chipping in over at Shacknews on their experiences with the engine.

Josh Jeffcoat, former Gearbox level designer:

UE3 isn't perfect by any means, but I don't feel Epic misrepresented it in any way when we licensed it.

Mike Jaret, Running With Scissors:

Epic does make a great product and while I don't hold anything against Epic personally, we are a small indie developer and we are at the mercy of the licensor. It just wasn't the best relationship for us.

"Programmer working on 360 title at major developer":

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.

Laura Heeb Mustard, Chair:

We have been following the news of this lawsuit since it broke. Our team has been working with Unreal technology for several years and have been using Unreal Engine 3 exclusively for the past two years. We have found Epic to be an extraordinary partner and the UE3 engine to be exceptional. Epic has always been very supportive of our efforts and their technology has been instrumental in allowing our company to develop high quality products.

Messy. Though these statements do shed a little more light on this whole clusterfuck. It's starting to look like Epic didn't purposefully withhold stuff from Silicon Knights, as the lawsuit alleges, rather Epic may have just bitten off more than they could chew by developing Gears AND licensing out their tech to so many companies at the same time.

Developers on Unreal Engine 3 and the Silicon Knights Lawsuit [Shacknews]