I have to say that what andrew meggs found as cool, making his own graphics engine, I think its solving a problem that doesn't exist and is an unnecessary risk.
There are entire companies that devote their whole existance to making videogame engines and fine tuning them. If you use their engines, you get to upgrade your videogame to the next big improvements they make with future hardware. Nvidia/Ati might invent some new great technologies and those engine developing companies will jump on the ball and take advantage of them.
Whereas when andrew meggs "finishes" his little engine experiment will he continue to fine tune it? To keep it updated with the times? Easy to work with so that content designers and artists can easily and joyfully work with it?
And in years down the road when the creme hardware is now considered old, will CSE be the ones to constantly be tuning and updating this custom engine?
And remind me again why one of the rocksolid engines aren't good enough? Because they don't handles thousands of players on the screen at the same time? This isn't eve online is it? The game will have servers with character limits will it not? People will expect a degraded experience when hundreds of characters are on the screen at the same time. This happens in PS2 at a much lower threshold than what we saw on megg's screen during his demo. Players are ok with it. It is expected.
Most of all for why I don't like this idea is, I see it as wasting valuable resources on a problem that doesn't exist, compromising on engine quality/support for a problem that doesn't exist, and where an established and fine-tuned liscensed engine is relatively future-proof and forward thinking, making your own engine is not.
With a proposed budget of $5mil, why the fuck is a tiny assed game studio making it's own graphics engine?
if you are about to make a propper game, you use your own engine. quite simple.
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
Not sure what the heck the original poster is talking about. I have yet to see an MMO game not completely drop FPS when there are like 50-100 players on the screen. Most games become a slide-show at that point. The reason is that almost every game engine is designed to render very good graphics with about 25-50 people. There simply isn't a game engine that is designed to handle large scale battles. So, if the vision of the game is large scale battles, why would you buy an engine (like say, the Hero Engine) that would make it impossible to do such a thing? That's extremely dumb. Ever try playin in Ilum on SWTOR with that Hero Engine? Just terribad, which is why all the PvP now is instanced.
Originally posted by Kuppa And to all the folks talking about the gw2 culling issue, it wasn't a graphical problem it was netcode.
GW2 is exactly what I don't want to see, regardless of the culling. All of your enemies are clones of one another. You're not actually seeing the other player's avatar. Totally ridiculous and a huge step backwards.
Where the heck did you get that idea?? It's not how it works.
With a proposed budget of $5mil, why the fuck is a tiny assed game studio making it's own graphics engine?
Mr Kokibukisa, do you know how much money it costs to buy a AAA commercial graphics engine? I give you a figure range, it has 7 digits.
That would be possible cost depending on the studio and liscense but this simply isn't true for a small studio. Every engine I've seen have very reasonable liscenses. Most get paid through royalties on earnings. While looking at costs you need ot keep in mind the cost of building your own, which believe it or not almost always costs more.
Please list these engines, and provide all the costing details for licensing them in the context of what CU is trying to do. Tell us how each can provide the level of pvp numbers they are hoping for.
The burden of proof / effort calling up each provider and finding out how much it would cost CSE, in order to say that it would be too expensive, goes on you, not me. Their websites (hero engine, unreal) say to call them for pricing. Having liscensed plenty of software and addons, my experience is they work with you to negotiate a reasonable price.
Of all the software that I have liscensed, making our own in-house solution for something you can get off the shelf is an order of magnitude (or several) more expensive.
CSE will have $5 million if funded.
$5 million is not a lot of money. A startup will burn through that i notime.
The only candidate that comes to mind is Lineage 2 engine you could/can have fight on order of 1k people in that game. I have no idea if it is licensable and what the cost would be.
Originally posted by tlear The only candidate that comes to mind is Lineage 2 engine you could/can have fight on order of 1k people in that game. I have no idea if it is licensable and what the cost would be.
The question isn't how many people can loosely be in the same battle. The question is how many people can be fighting that are close enough that you need to draw them on your screen and the server needs to tell you what they're doing. If game mechanics force players to spread out enough that even in a 1000 player battle, a given client never needs to be aware of more than 20 players, then for most purposes, the engine only needs to handle 20 players in a "battle".
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if you are about to make a propper game, you use your own engine. quite simple.
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
Not sure what the heck the original poster is talking about. I have yet to see an MMO game not completely drop FPS when there are like 50-100 players on the screen. Most games become a slide-show at that point. The reason is that almost every game engine is designed to render very good graphics with about 25-50 people. There simply isn't a game engine that is designed to handle large scale battles. So, if the vision of the game is large scale battles, why would you buy an engine (like say, the Hero Engine) that would make it impossible to do such a thing? That's extremely dumb. Ever try playin in Ilum on SWTOR with that Hero Engine? Just terribad, which is why all the PvP now is instanced.
Where the heck did you get that idea?? It's not how it works.
The burden of proof / effort calling up each provider and finding out how much it would cost CSE, in order to say that it would be too expensive, goes on you, not me. Their websites (hero engine, unreal) say to call them for pricing. Having liscensed plenty of software and addons, my experience is they work with you to negotiate a reasonable price.
Of all the software that I have liscensed, making our own in-house solution for something you can get off the shelf is an order of magnitude (or several) more expensive.
CSE will have $5 million if funded.
$5 million is not a lot of money. A startup will burn through that i notime.
The question isn't how many people can loosely be in the same battle. The question is how many people can be fighting that are close enough that you need to draw them on your screen and the server needs to tell you what they're doing. If game mechanics force players to spread out enough that even in a 1000 player battle, a given client never needs to be aware of more than 20 players, then for most purposes, the engine only needs to handle 20 players in a "battle".