Please check this sentence again, I believe there's at least a verb missing.
Well it depends on what UE1 is when contrasted with UE2. As an end-user you only see the final product, but don't really have insight into the internals. <this is an exaggerated example> For all I know UE2 could be UE1 with a more capable renderer </tiaee> It'll become clearer below when I clarify engine.
Ok, so I had to look this up. I'm going to go by the definition provided by wikipedia (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_reasoning).
What is the premise that lead to this conclusion? What is the instance that you extrapolated/generalized from? If there is an obvious reason for you to state that (without the bounds of generalization as mentioned in the wikipedia entry of course) it is not obvious to me. Please point it out.
I followed everything up to the bolded part. However, your extrapolation is discarding too much of the complexity hidden behind the word "engine". Let me try to give a simple example: I assume from your experience you'll believe that with minor code changes (if any at all) you can replace the texture on a box with a different one, that might be of much higher-resolution. In this way you have increased the demands on the hardware and improved visual quality. But potentially all you did in the code was nothing if your content management system already reads the texture size from the texture asset that you provide (just the image + the size meta-data) and uses that to parametrize the GL texture object. A more interesting example is to consider that the way shaders are exposed in the OpenGL API is fairly orthogonal to the capabilities of the shader. Meaning that if your rendering component of your engine interacts with the hardware over OpenGL, you could conceivably just edit the source code for the shaders without touching anything else and your box is now a shader model 5 box with tessellation, compute and what have you.
Again, I would argue that you do not have enough information for this inductive step. What makes you say they need it? You don't know what their engine looks like.
Let me explain a little about where we might be mis-communicating when it comes to engines. What I understand as being an engine has more to do with the fundamental organization and collaboration of the contained individual software components and which concept integrate their functioning. I will illustrate this by means of the typical computer graphics pipeline:
You'll see that things have changed in the pipeline with respect to the visuals that get produced on the screen and the capabilities of its processing. However, fundamentally it is still a pipeline that accepts descriptions of geometry on the top end, breaks it down to transformed primitives, rasterizes these into fragments (which influence elements of the display), processes each fragment, and accumulates a final image. I understand an engine as being such a conceptual organization (the graphics pipeline) from which you can swap out various elements or upgrade them. When you have to go and throw out the idea of the graphics pipeline, because you've found another way of organizing how you produce visuals, then you're going to produce a new engine.
EDIT: I just realized the pipeline example above might be poor, because most people associate engines with their rendering components and these components are not always abstracted tremendously to get closer to the metal performance. So please only focus on the idea as opposed to the concrete example
So when I say that Nintendo may not need to build a new engine, I'm not saying that they shouldn't have to upgrade some parts of it. I'm also not saying that they don't need to build a new engine, but having dealt a bit with such types of software frameworks, I'm more reserved in my statements because there is
a lot more to consider for which I don't have enough information.
What makes you say this? What supports this claim?
Also, I think we should probably move this to PMs at this point... if folks haven't already put me on their "hide list" (there is such a feature right?)
