Well the fact they have hired a load of CryTek people which okay is fortunate in that they were right place right time but it has basically allowed them to build their own engine in principle because those engineers they hired worked direct on the engine.
******Official Star Citizen / Squadron 42 Thread******
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Well the fact they have hired a load of CryTek people which okay is fortunate in that they were right place right time but it has basically allowed them to build their own engine in principle because those engineers they hired worked direct on the engine.
The Arms engine is pretty shocking tbh.
There is a massive difference between modifying an engine and building it from scratch, particularly when you're building an edge case game like SC.
They would have saved vast amounts of time and money by building their own from scratch.
But as I said, hindsight and all, they've been fortunate enough to tap into a revenue stream that is able to keep funding them through these missteps.
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Caporegime
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No the engine for ARMA is awful. The developer has even admitted it is out dated and not optimised. I have also worked with it and it certainly isn't something I would recommend. UE4 of course is all good although SQUAD has just moved from UE3 from all accounts.
Aye and I am suggesting that them building from scratch would have been worse than having the base engine from CryTek originally no matter how you look at it. That is just my opinion from what I have seen and done with different engines etc.
Building from scratch would not have been any different as they would have taken the spec they needed for the 2012 game and still have written all the code for the 2014 stuff.
CIG had worked with CryTek for a year previous, all the tech demos was in it and that was what they were aiming for. Now if they knew that they were going to get $160 million funding and the scope closer at day 1 of course a custom engine would be best but that just isn't something feasible to discuss or do because it isn't how anything happened.
It makes the premise of suggesting they should have gone down the custom engine route null straight away from those facts.
Caporegime
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UE4 is perfect for this game yes and Arma 3 engine has been optimised a lot
No off the shelf engine is perfect for SC. The requirements for an MMO space sim with atmospheric planetary landings and seamless FPS functionality is ridiculously niche and getting any general purpose engine like UE/CryEngine (which are both fundamentally FPS engines at heart with general stuff bolted on) into a state to handle those requirements is going to involve a huge amount of re-writing and throwing away stuff.
Caporegime
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What about MMO engines like the ones in guild wars 2?
Seriously you think making a game based in space with localised physics grids, realistic gaseous mechanics etc can be made using off the shelf engines? This had to be created. They even hired one of Cryteks own AI programmers to work on AI as the game is way too complicated for existing have AI, you have npcs who have to get in and out of vehicles, manoeuvre them on 6DOF then get out and move around in differing levels of gravity on and off planet etc. Traditional engines are very basic building blocks
I think you need to go look, since you don't have a clue.
Sorry but the engine is awfully optimised. I really don't think you know what you are talking about in honesty.
This, no engine is perfect for the job out of the box, you think any AAA developer sticks with an out of the box engine? even if its their own? DICE, Crytek, Epic Games.... all these developers are constantly changing, upgrading and re-purposing their own engines because just like CIG and anyother AAA Developer they also need to make changes for their own game developments, Crytek themselves made a lot of changes to their engine because the one that Crysis 3 was built on didn't work for Ryse Son of Rome, just a couple of weeks ago Crytek released a huge patch for Cryengine 5 bringing in all the changes they made to the engine for:
The idea that any self respecting developer works their game around a chosen engine is laughable, they all work the engine around the game, no developing an entirely new engine is not cheap or quick, the likes of DICE, Epic Games, CryTek..... have developed their engines over more than a decade to get the to where they are today and they continue to develop them for the future.
Soldato
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It has, but even in their own content is still failing badly to fully utilize the hardware and when you start to play with view distance and number of AIs, it falls flat - never mind how clunky and glitchy it is. That series needs badly a new engine (and AI). Just look at the campaign, you're playing on an empty map, with an almost basic setup for a human influenced environment, no civilians, nothing really spectacular in terms of physics and such, just you and a hand full of AIs and FPS is terrible.
There wasn't an engine capable of doing what they wanted to do simply because no one has ever done something like this - ergo, it would be foolish for someone to invest resources in parts of some engine that are quite unlikely to be used.
It took them a long time to get here; I hope they can create content quickly with their tools or this could drag for a long time still.
Like you said all major gaming studios have their own engines. Even smaller ones like Frontier, Projekt red, 4A games (the list goes on) built their own engines with their own distinctive amazing looks. Even indie devs do it so I have no idea where the "building an engine is too hard" narrative comes from. Unless you are making a run-of-the-mill fps/action game you are better off building your own engine. There is no denying it, cryengine was a huge mistake.
Fronter don't even have First Person module in yet let alone real ships, how many years have they been developing that engine for it, how many years have they been saying its coming?
When i can walk to my ship, get in it, look around inside it, beds, rooms, ecte.... get in the pilots seat go to a planet, land, get out and look around...... they i'll call it having cough up with where Star Citizen is at now.
Thats a long way from where they are at right now.
When i can walk to my ship, get in it, look around inside it, beds, rooms, ecte.... get in the pilots seat go to a planet, land, get out and look around...... they i'll call it having cough up with where Star Citizen is at now.
Thats a long way from where they are at right now.
You can't land on a planet yet in star citizen and many people cant get in their ships because they haven't modelled them yet... ED is a space game so they got the space things right first. Walking around is not an engine limitation, its all about priorities and manpower and Frontier now has 3 franchises (2 already enjoyed successful releases). Personally in my list of wishes for ED walking around is towards the bottom end.
odd that I murdered Humbug whilst strolling on a planet two days ago in Star Citizen. Yes we landed on it..
shoot him in the bottom with a laser pistol, he bled out lol
as you say priorities, let's not make this a ED v SC thread there's literally no need or benefit to it
shoot him in the bottom with a laser pistol, he bled out lol
as you say priorities, let's not make this a ED v SC thread there's literally no need or benefit to it
I can easily claim that Frontier behind closed doors has walking around and atmospheric planets. The fact is landing on star citizen is not possible atm and nobody knows when it will be. I own the game and I cant do it, neither can the vast majority of the playerbase.
I mentioned frontier among many other things in my post but you decided to focus there. I know its a sore spot because they managed to develop 3 successful franchises across multiple paltforms with minimal crowd funding in the same spacetime.