What CCP actually wants to say:
"we dont want to spend more money into that game, we just want to farm the legion players as we did with the dust players! So we decided to use what we allready have."

I may be entirely wrong on this, but is Unreal 3 even capable of doing things like destroying structures and turning a battlefield into a giant crater when someone drops a nuke on it?


Cause the orbitals we have now are sorta useful and... cute, and all that. But really, it's just like avoiding rain. You get under a rooftop and all the firepower in the universe is stopped by 2 inch thick sheet metal. I would have assumed the original vision included leveling entire structures with orbitals. I can't help but feel like the HMG should be ripping through guard rails and hammering away at concrete pillars as well. Since you guys basically ARE starting over... isn't now the right time to think about that?

I would certainly hope so... but considering it hasn't ever been done and with all of the current problems it's been having... doesn't leave me too hopeful. Making such extreme changes to the engine, and with such a small staff... doesn't seem likely...

It works for me :)


But isn't it better from marketing perspective? To majority people U4>U3. They don't know that it's heavily modified.
It will be like:
"Legion is U3 game? Damn thats old, and I guess graphics looks like crap. I better get some U4 game, like Valkyrie"

On side note: if CCP modyfies U3 to no recognition, do we still have to see U3 logo on loading screen?

Titanfall doesn't have building destruction either :(

It works for me :)


But isn't it better from marketing perspective? To majority people U4>U3. They don't know that it's heavily modified.
It will be like:
"Legion is U3 game? Damn thats old, and I guess graphics looks like crap. I better get some U4 game, like Valkyrie"

On side note: if CCP modyfies U3 to no recognition, do we still have to see U3 logo on loading screen?

Darting between rubble?

this. exactly this.

Without knowing any details about the modification done on UE3 (and the engine itself to begin with), I am a bit hesitant about this news since I would like UE4 to be used for Legion

You have a opportunity to change now, while you only have an early prototype. If the project is green lit it should use the "next gen" engine to make it future proof.... Let say 10 years?

It is not a matter of what the engine can do now. It will be easier to add features later which would help you in development, but is not available in UE3.

Please reconsider.

I fail to see how changing engines forces them to throw out all models, textures and sounds.

Mainly it would force them to re-do things like movement and physics. Which... uhhhh.... yea, they kinda need to do that anyway.

Depending on who you ask within the company it was never on Carbon.

And there was a dev correcting that quote, saying it was false and has been on U3 since the 2009 stage demo.

So it comes down to what you believe more? The original quote from Hilmar, who is entirely detached from the work actually being done to the games, or the ones who actually work on it?

I have no answers for you with certainty though. As I said, it depend who you ask in the company.

Choice of Engine shouldn't be made ONLY based on the technical hurdles alone, no. But each and every hurdle costs time and employee salaries just to work around, and/or correct. So the technical difficulties is a major concern to game devs, but far from the only.

I'd say the choice to stay and mod UE3 has something to do with that 'slightly older' engine's licensing. If I recall, it provides discounts to games made with it for a F2P business model (I may be misinterpreting, or just completely off base. Never touched the UDK). Considering UE4 is Epic's new cash cow, this might be a very shrewd decision made by CCP.

Also consider that Eve got a massive graphical overhaul recently and the graphics teams would be able to utilize what they learned there (metallic surfaces, alpha maps, and limit of Detail options; not to mention that horrendous lens flare effect), in an FPS game the same way.

We are running on a heavily modified UE3 engine. Heavily modified means that we have taken almost all parts of it and extended or changed them. Take our lighting for example, we have completely moved to fully dynamic lighting that supports bounce lighting. Take a look at a presentation one of our programmers did a few years ago on our lighting. The presentation is a little old, but the key concepts are still the same.

http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2012/CCP/Malan-Dust_514_GI_reflections(Siggraph2012).pptx

This technology has been in active development since then and is getting very advanced (IGÇÖll see if I can get CCP Photon to do a devblog on the current state of it and where we intend to take since it)

We are also using a few very impressive middleware technologies. That means that we get code from companies that are experts in a certain technology and integrate it into our game. The NVIDIA PhysX middleware is a good example. It contains things like advanced particles, advanced physics and GǪ yes destruction. So the reason we are not doing destruction right now is not that our engine does not support it, but rather its not our focus right now.

What engine is chosen at the beginning of development should be thought of more as a starting point for a game rather than a box that the game is developed in.

I would go as far and say that we are not limited by anything there are off course constraints that we need to work with (time being one of the biggest ones) but its the same constraints that everyone has to deal with, regardless of which engine/tool they use.

As for the environments, the vision hasn't changed. we still have tens off thousands of planets in EVE that you will get to fight on, one way or another We don't have the technology yet to create a unique environment for each one of them (nobody has). but with every iteration we get closer.

Its a balance between art, design and tech. We could randomly generate maps and say that we have unique environments everywhere but they would probably look bad and not be very fun. (It would be fun for me to create them though) The other end of the spectrum is to hyper design every corner for optimal gameplay and polish every bit of rock and blade of grass, but then you'll endup with a game that only has 1 map. So its all about balance.

The socket system that you mentioned is a good example of this. This system, along with a few others we have is designed from the ground up be amazingly flexible and allow for huge amounts of variation in our environment. Its used in Dust 514 in a relatively simple form because that how it gives us the most out of the tech,art and design. It is something that we will continue to build on top of so that ultimately we'll end-up with unique environments on every planet

Isnt the EVE engine based loosely on the Unreal engine, or rather an extreme modification of it? I thought to hear them mention it, but cant tell exactly where.

You're comparing a legend in the business, Valve, to CCP? hahahahaaha...*wipes tears away*