hopefully the guys at Epic pump some knowledge into Unreal Engine 4 from this

They won't, in fact, I'm almost certain that the people at Epic responsible for writing UE code are forbidden from looking at this source code. Keep in mind, it's still under license! Using it without a license is still illegal and could get anyone including Epic into trouble. The only thing Epic could potentially do is a Clean Room Design, but that's not really worth the effort.

I know for a fact that I won't be looking into the source code, but then again, I also never looked at the UE code for that same reason.

yeah, I meant no stealing, just getting some new ideas to implement their own solution, according to that clean room thingie I've never heard. or maybe it is the master plan of Crytek to get money via copyright

anyway, it is great to work with an engine where the source is available, especially when documentation is bad, I have had to use a lot with UE4, probably it is the same with Cryengine...

You can't get "inspired" though, that's the thing. You need two teams, one that looks at the source code and writes up a specification, and another team that was never in contact with the first team and never saw the source code that ideally implements the spec walled of in some basement. The obvious problem with that is that you can't really say "how" to implement it, so the benefit is neigh nothing.

hmmm it sounds really interesting, it could be a hard but exciting "game".

strangely, sometimes I do something similar, but unfortunately I can't separate my brain into 2 parts, when developing new pathfinder+movement solutions (ahh they are never perfect, even perfect has no meaning in this context), I usually just read the theory and watch presentations, but normally do not check codes if available, what makes the whole thing more time consuming, but the final result is really 100% own work. maybe the 2 only exceptions are A* algorithm, and the very fast hybrid array + linked-list approach in A* data handling, made by Marco Pinter...

And mostly pointless The spec would contain nothing that CryEngine's marketing page doesn't contain. Keep in mind, you can't write anything specific with regards to the actual implementation. You can just provide a description of the interface, you can get that one for much cheaper already.

A clean room approach is great for when the interface isn't known and you want to create something that is compatible, you can have someone reverse engineer the interface and write neatly down how the things fit together and what should happen if you provide input X. But you still need to figure out how to get from input X to the desired result yourself, and that most likely takes a lot of actual engineering effort.

hehh, it's like a neural network