If Camelot Unchained is about the engine... riddle me this (seriously, need opinions)

TwistedSister77

So, been reading a lot about people's theories that Marc Jacob is really more about building an engine to sell than an actual game.  A few thoughts (no order), then my disclaimers afterwards.

- How many future mmorpgs even care to have thousands of players in the same battleground?  Hundreds were in Dark Age of Camelot, Warhammer Online, and some others... but that didn't make them break out blockbusters just because hundreds could battle hundreds (they were successful, DAoK much more, just not the golden goose).  Eve online sports the largest battles, but graphics and type of gameplay puts that out of discussion - it's just different.

My point being... the corporate folks are going to assess... do we want to buy an expensive new engine, that nobody knows how to program, if it's not going to really move the needle too much?  


- Given the market seems to be shrinking for new Mmorpgs, or at least investments, what would they pay for his engine vs current offerings... how much would a new mmorpg buy/liscence CU engine it for?  $1 million, $5 million?   How many sales would CU need to make for the engine to break-even? 10? 20?

Point being, budgets are shrinking for MMORPGs and CU engine might only appeal to a few.  Also, games take years to fund and develop... so, it might take a long time to get contracts.  Meanwhile, the engine will age and need reinvestment. 

For how much CU has spent on the engine, not to mention updates, support, documentation, training (see further point below)... their is slim return on investment opportunity that I can see.  It's a massive gamble.

- From the developer's standpoint:  so there are engines out there that many game developers know (e.g. Unreal 4) and are highly supported and documented.  Or... would you be the game director and say... we can gamble with this new engine, which we'll need to be trained on (time and expense and might not work the way we expect).  Worry about employees that get trained, we cannot lose... because nobody in the industry knows the engine.

Point being, huge learning curve for developers... again, only if they aspire to have massive amounts of players on a screen (which actually is not necessary to gamers outside of RvR type of gameplay).

- The engine is the engine... I know what CU is focusing  on is players count and number of objects, so techies correct me if I'm off base... but darn, those graphics are not showcase (being kind)... 2008 Darkfall called.  

- Finally, remember Age of Conan... Funcom created the Dream engine or something... yeah it was supposed to be the next great thing for Mmorpgs...

*Disclaimers - love PVP, RvR, and want CU to succeed.  Still play warhammer online return of reckoning server (largest battle I've been in was 600 vs 550 siege w/ no lag... this is 2008 game without multi threaded processors ... pretty darn impressive - thanks to those admins)   So appreciate Marc Jacobs legacy, not a hater or a fanboy.

Gdemami

...so you say  what local armchair developers proclaim makes no sense?

Who would have thought so...

Wizardry

Devs can license the Unreal engine for CHEAP now a days and even get support from Epic depending on your package of course as it would cost extra for the support.
The engine can already minimize poly counts by a LOT and still leave the mesh/character looking great.

I do NOT for one minute believe Marc Jacobs is building an engine worth the price of leftover bread crumbs.
Then when a new business idea starts out ,like a game engine,especially one with no clout,they have to pretty much give it away so VERY little profit if any.then being an untested engine,tons of complaints follow up that would have been part of the licensing agreement so marc would never sleep having to fix all the problems.

To me it is pretty much a laughable idea,no different than Trion claiming they were building an app for others to use to load games..lol,yeah Trion did well with that idea.

What this guy is doing is exactly like the rest of them,he got some free money and it allowed him to earn a living with VERY little risk.Geesh the average employee in any job has a lot more risk,they have to perform or lose their job,Marc doesn't have to do a dam thing.

Scot

Wizardry said:

Devs can license the Unreal engine for CHEAP now a days and even get support from Epic depending on your package of course as it would cost extra for the support.
The engine can already minimize poly counts by a LOT and still leave the mesh/character looking great.

I do NOT for one minute believe Marc Jacobs is building an engine worth the price of leftover bread crumbs.
Then when a new business idea starts out ,like a game engine,especially one with no clout,they have to pretty much give it away so VERY little profit if any.then being an untested engine,tons of complaints follow up that would have been part of the licensing agreement so marc would never sleep having to fix all the problems.

To me it is pretty much a laughable idea,no different than Trion claiming they were building an app for others to use to load games..lol,yeah Trion did well with that idea.

What this guy is doing is exactly like the rest of them,he got some free money and it allowed him to earn a living with VERY little risk.Geesh the average employee in any job has a lot more risk,they have to perform or lose their job,Marc doesn't have to do a dam thing.

We do hear that its easier to make a game using a simpler engine though, which makes sense. But the extra time it must take to start from scratch seems to counter that argument.

TwistedSister77

Gdemami said:

...so you say  what local armchair developers proclaim makes no sense?

Who would have thought so...

I don't know how to interpret your post.  You toy with me... please expand.  

Oh, or you toy with "it's all about the $100 million engine" folks. ( why 100 million? Time value of money + future overhead to sell it + updates + reasonable return...)

Roughly, maybe $80, maybe $110...  I didnt break out my excel.  But like I said, there's likely no market to reach that in revenues (and then there's expense).  We're talking 1999 internet stock projections to reach that.. 20 publishers at $5mil each.

PS - I been scouring recruiters for the Funcom Dreamworld Engine programing skills... yeah, I'm sure the best people want to take a 2-5 year career detour into an unproven engine while the rest of the industry moves ahead.  

AAAMEOW

does ragnarok colossus use camelot unchain engine?

I dont' see a point in building new engine to sale.  There are so many already.

Scot

AAAMEOW said:

does ragnarok colossus use camelot unchain engine?

I dont' see a point in building new engine to sale.  There are so many already.

So why are they not being used, too expensive to license?

Gdemami

TwistedSister77 said:

I don't know how to interpret your post.  You toy with me... please expand.  

Local armchair developer: They are only interested in making an engine so they can sell it aftwerwards, all for OUR, backers, money! Dirty thieves!

You: There is unlikely a demand for MMORPG engine capable of large scale warfare with dated graphics so why would they do that?

Me: Yep.

Vrika

TwistedSister77 said:

Gdemami said:

...so you say  what local armchair developers proclaim makes no sense?

Who would have thought so...

I don't know how to interpret your post.  You toy with me... please expand.  

Just interpret is as "Gdemami does not like your post".

He's in a habit of declaring posts that he dislikes as wrong/false/ridiculous. Normally he can't point out anything wrong in the post, he's just trolling those posts that he does not like.

Gdemami

Vrika said:

Just interpret is as "Gdemami does not like your post".

He's in a habit of declaring posts that he dislikes as wrong/false/ridiculous. Normally he can't point out anything wrong in the post, he's just trolling those posts that he does not like.

...and yet, it was you who got lol and not OP.

Such an irony...

Sovrath

AAAMEOW said:

does ragnarok colossus use camelot unchain engine?

I dont' see a point in building new engine to sale.  There are so many already.

The whole idea of them building the engine was to allow for extremely massive battles. 

as someone who used to play Lineage 2, and who was in some "extremely massive battles" I can tell you that playing a slide show for the initial onslaught only to crash and then try to get back was not fun.

The people who backed Camelot Unchained are people who are interested in massive battles.

so that's why they built it. A byproduct of all of it is that they can sell it/license it to any developer who wants to make the same thing.

But I don't think any of the current game engines tout the ability to support massive battles.

Which of course some people want. 

Scot

Vrika said:

TwistedSister77 said:

Gdemami said:

...so you say  what local armchair developers proclaim makes no sense?

Who would have thought so...

I don't know how to interpret your post.  You toy with me... please expand.  

Just interpret is as "Gdemami does not like your post".

He's in a habit of declaring posts that he dislikes as wrong/false/ridiculous. Normally he can't point out anything wrong in the post, he's just trolling those posts that he does not like.

I meant to reply to this but forgot, Gdemmami is our official troll mascot, he thrives on nonsense but his Lol's will get you from green to blue in no time.

lahnmir

Gdemami said:

Vrika said:

Just interpret is as "Gdemami does not like your post".

He's in a habit of declaring posts that he dislikes as wrong/false/ridiculous. Normally he can't point out anything wrong in the post, he's just trolling those posts that he does not like.

...and yet, it was you who got lol and not OP.

Such an irony...

If you had any authority or were qualified to judge these posts that would indeed be irony. The real irony is that you think you posses these qualities. See you next round 

/Cheers,
Lahnmir

Iselin

It's never been about the engine other than as their own internal tool to allow good performance with many more players on screen than what is feasible with other engines. It's about the game.

But delays in over-scrutinized crowdfunded MMO projects make people antsy and they start to doubt everything and speculate about malfeasance.

This whole thing about "they're making an engine to sell, not a game" really took off when they announced that they had a second game in the works - a game that also took advantage of their many characters (many NPCs in the case of the 2nd game) on screen tech.

That announcement, IMO, was very ill-advised. The last thing that backers of a long delayed crowdfunded MMO project want to hear is that you're dividing your attention developing a second side project that backers of the original MMO don't give a shit about or want.

I'm guessing that the only reason they made that 2nd game reveal was because they were happy with how their engine performed and wanted to show it off.

But that backfired big time. The typical CU backer's reaction was "Fuck that. Where's my game, dude." Instead of being suitably impressed by the engine's performance they instead started posting about how it was all about the engine and selling that engine.

The fact that ever since that 2nd game reveal they have said almost nothing else about it and have instead focused all their communication on CU makes me think that they now get what a horrible mistake revealing that 2nd thing was.

Mendel

I think that in answer to the question about what other company is likely to buy the CU engine will depend a lot on what the exact, final capabilities of the engine will have.  It's going to take a massive bit of education for developers to come to speed with this technology, and that means money, up-front money.  I don't see a lot of companies being willing to make that investment.

The other factor will be what will this engine provide that older engines won't.  Right now, that appears to be delivering a mass battle experience.  That pretty much limits the applications to games featuring large battles.  There's no indication that these large battles will be a group of players versus a group of NPCs, so this will limit itself to games where they will be numbers of concurrent players.  In the current environment, this means mobile games.  The words 'mobile games' immediately loses my attention.

So maybe they hope the engine will be used to port the various Fortnight and its ilk to a larger, PC stage.  While that could be called an MMO, it's probably not what most of us on this forum would want.

Slapshot1188

Jacobs himself said that there was interest in his engine from other studios. Whether it’s the game that results in the engine or the engine that results in the game is kind of moot.

If one is successful so will the second be.  

MMOExposed

somebody explain to me what the engine does. I toyed around with the Utility Engine, and seem to handle graphics, physics and lighting. But how this work in MMOs? I see many AAA games made with Unreal Engine, yet its commonly stated that Unreal Engine is poor for making MMOs. Why is that?

cameltosis

As Sovrath said earlier, its all about massive battles.

No other game engine can handle 500+ players online, on screen, in the same battle, all firing off skills, without it becoming a slideshow (or whatever time-warping thing eve does to handle large numbers)

Unreal, Unity etc are great engines, but they aren't designing for massive online battles. There is too much bloat and not good enough networking code, so once you start hitting 50-100 players, things start to get difficult. I believe this is the issue Crowfall is currently going through.

As to why bother?

Massively multiplayer....its the defining feature of the genre, the unique selling point. Yet, virtually no developer has bothered exploring the potential. By creating an engine that can actually handle massive numbers of players playing together (i.e. massively multiplayer..), you open the door to that potential.

You are right in that simply having 500+ players in one virtual environment is no guarantee of success. You have to give those numbers meaning, otherwise once you've gotten over your initial wonder (if any) then the scale becomes pointless.

However, that's why I'm actually very excited about CU, it's feature list / aims are all about exploring the potential of being massively multiplayer! A short list of the things im excited about in the game:

1) Horizontal Progression!

I've been harping on about this style of progression for many years, CU is going to be the first mmorpg to actually do it! So excited, this one thing is enough for me to want to play the game.

2) Player designed buildings + destruction

Players can design their own buildings in CUBE, from small personal houses to giant fortresses and cathedrals. They can then build those buildings in the main game world (no instances in CU). Then the enemy can come along and knock them down! The largest buildings will require massive amounts of people to build, defend and then destroy. Its going to be great to see what crazy buildings, cities and stuff the community comes up with. As well as inevitable penis buildings...

3) Combat Depth

No more shallow action combat! No more bland, shallow tab-target! CU is aiming for actual depth, real meaning in your moment-to-moment choices.

4) Territory Control

5) Player Collision

6) Unlimited Group Size

This is a small thing on the surface, but just goes to show how much CSE are thinking about utilising large numbers of players. The more people there are, the more important organisation becomes. But, most MMOs restrict you to max 24 people in a group. CSE is aiming for unlimited group size: anyone can join. That means your entire realm in the area can form one giant raid under one leader. In addition, you can name your smaller groups (e.g. "cameltosis crew") and the small group can be invited in one go to the raid, and it retains it's name and structure. So, the raid leader can then just say "hey, cameltosis crew, flank to the right" or whatever. [nb i think they're aiming for built in voice chat too, to help with organising, but cant remember right now]. This is a feature i expect to become standard in all future mmorpgs that feature non-instanced pvp.

7) Full player economy with dedicated crafting class

Will this all lead to a fun game that makes use of 1000s of players? Who knows. I hope so, but will have to wait for the finished product.

YashaX

TwistedSister77 said:

So, been reading a lot about people's theories that Marc Jacob is really more about building an engine to sell than an actual game.  

I highly doubt CU was all a pretense for making a sellable mmo game engine, that really makes no sense. However, it has been in development for seven years (including two-plus years of "beta").

That is the same amount of time it took to develop ESO, a game that is massive in scope and includes an amazing RvR system among other things. In contrast, CU with its supposedly much smaller scope looks nowhere near release, and I am yet to see it perform reasonably with even a few players on screen, let alone 1000s.

Quizzical

Scot said:

AAAMEOW said:

does ragnarok colossus use camelot unchain engine?

I dont' see a point in building new engine to sale.  There are so many already.

So why are they not being used, too expensive to license?

Game engines are built to do particular things--and not to do particular other things.  If your game needs to do things that no engine available will handle well, then your options are to build your own engine, implement your game badly in some other engine, or change your game design to fit what some other engine can do.  That last option sometimes means "take out much of what could have made your game interesting", so it's a far more lethal choice than it might at first seem.

There are tremendous advantages to using an engine that is built to do what you want your game to do.  If you build your own engine, you get that.  If you don't, then you likely don't, at least if you want to go well off the beaten path.  That's why, for example, Paradox builds and maintains their own custom game engines even today that are well designed for the grand strategy games that they want to make, even if they would be wildly inappropriate for an MMORPG.

Sovrath

YashaX said:

TwistedSister77 said:

So, been reading a lot about people's theories that Marc Jacob is really more about building an engine to sell than an actual game.  

I highly doubt CU was all a pretense for making a sellable mmo game engine, that really makes no sense. However, it has been in development for seven years (including two-plus years of "beta").

That is the same amount of time it took to develop ESO, a game that is massive in scope and includes an amazing RvR system among other things. In contrast, CU with its supposedly much smaller scope looks nowhere near release, and I am yet to see it perform reasonably with even a few players on screen, let alone 1000s.

I don't really think that's true at all from what I've seen. If you've played it then that's another thing as you might have first hand experience with issues. But I've looked at all the recent footage and they've done a good job rendering quite a large group on screen with very little slow down.

Now, final game with updated graphics/models? We'll see.

YashaX

Sovrath said:

YashaX said:

TwistedSister77 said:

So, been reading a lot about people's theories that Marc Jacob is really more about building an engine to sell than an actual game.  

I highly doubt CU was all a pretense for making a sellable mmo game engine, that really makes no sense. However, it has been in development for seven years (including two-plus years of "beta").

That is the same amount of time it took to develop ESO, a game that is massive in scope and includes an amazing RvR system among other things. In contrast, CU with its supposedly much smaller scope looks nowhere near release, and I am yet to see it perform reasonably with even a few players on screen, let alone 1000s.

I don't really think that's true at all from what I've seen. If you've played it then that's another thing as you might have first hand experience with issues. But I've looked at all the recent footage and they've done a good job rendering quite a large group on screen with very little slow down.

Now, final game with updated graphics/models? We'll see.

I am not sure what footage you are referring to, but what I have seen does not look promising. You'll have to wait until the NDA lifts or pay them $60 to see for yourself. 

I guess I shouldn't be too pessimistic though, it might start shaping up into something decent over the next couple of years.

Kyleran

Going back to the thread title, not so sure anyone's opinion should be taken too seriously. (especially not Captain LOL) 

Disclaimers aside, I believe Mark first and foremost has been earnestly trying to deliver the game he promised us in the Kickstarter so long ago, and still is striving towards that goal.

I'm sure he's always entertained thoughts of selling the engine once the showcase product was completed and I've seen no attempt yet to market it independently.

I do believe it is being used in some fashion to deliver Ragnarok, but info is slim for the project so far. 

I seem to recall Mark in either an interview with MOP or in his response comments saying Ragnarok was using a more simplified version of the engine but not in the mood to look it up.

Mendel

Another possibility.  If their new engine will build worlds *and* support console / mobile versions, that might attract other companies with a presence in these other markets (where the players currently are).  I've not heard anything about this being a multi-platform tool, though.

If I were building a development engine, I'd target the solution for platforms with the largest selection of games (and paying customers).  Back-end running on a server, with PC, console and mobile clients.

Side note: If a game is going to need to support 1000 vs. 1000 battles, it first has to have 2000 players active simultaneously.

bcbully

Scot said:

Vrika said:

TwistedSister77 said:

Gdemami said:

...so you say  what local armchair developers proclaim makes no sense?

Who would have thought so...

I don't know how to interpret your post.  You toy with me... please expand.  

Just interpret is as "Gdemami does not like your post".

He's in a habit of declaring posts that he dislikes as wrong/false/ridiculous. Normally he can't point out anything wrong in the post, he's just trolling those posts that he does not like.

I meant to reply to this but forgot, Gdemmami is our official troll mascot, he thrives on nonsense but his Lol's will get you from green to blue in no time.

Wtf but yet y’all trolling him knowing that his post was misinterpreted by @vrika

@TwistedSister77, Gdemami Was taking a jab at some of our longtime regulars that can be a bit cynical at times. Not at you or your post

Sovrath

YashaX said:

Sovrath said:

YashaX said:

TwistedSister77 said:

So, been reading a lot about people's theories that Marc Jacob is really more about building an engine to sell than an actual game.  

I highly doubt CU was all a pretense for making a sellable mmo game engine, that really makes no sense. However, it has been in development for seven years (including two-plus years of "beta").

That is the same amount of time it took to develop ESO, a game that is massive in scope and includes an amazing RvR system among other things. In contrast, CU with its supposedly much smaller scope looks nowhere near release, and I am yet to see it perform reasonably with even a few players on screen, let alone 1000s.

I don't really think that's true at all from what I've seen. If you've played it then that's another thing as you might have first hand experience with issues. But I've looked at all the recent footage and they've done a good job rendering quite a large group on screen with very little slow down.

Now, final game with updated graphics/models? We'll see.

I am not sure what footage you are referring to, but what I have seen does not look promising. You'll have to wait until the NDA lifts or pay them $60 to see for yourself. 

I guess I shouldn't be too pessimistic though, it might start shaping up into something decent over the next couple of years.

I mean, I can already play it as they have opened up some of their sessions to lower level backers. I just don't because the last time I tried to install it I found it was a pain in the ass.

Also, to be clear, I'm referring to his latest video where he shows an incredible amount of stuff happening on screen. I am not referring to "a finished game."

Like I said, I played Lineage 2 and participated in some huge castle sieges and it wasn't near as much as he had going on in that latest video.

But again, I'm not referring to finished assets or finished game.