[youtube]d1ZnM7CH-v4[/youtube]
Just in case someone somewhere was not already aware.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Sun, 05/30/2021 - 07:14
#1
UE5 Early Access video
So I wonder if MWM's "unique" licensing deal with Unreal will allow them to take advantage of UE5 in any way? Or is it the case that MWM is essentially locked into their current engine build simply because they've been working with it for so long it would waste too much additional time to "upgrade" to UE5 before launch.
I suppose this is one obvious disadvantage of the situation where a game's development is taking -longer- than the underlying engine development it's based on.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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We aren’t upgraded to UE5 for CoT. As wonderful as it is, it would require learning new systems. It is also specifically targeted toward “next gen” consoles and hardware. It doesn’t offer much in the way of backwards compatibility at this time.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
Yeah that's what I was assuming from this. IIRC, I remember you saying you weren't going to fully upgrade to UE5 like a year or two ago.
A shame that you might miss out on some of the improvements but like you say the trade off for having to "start over" with a new system would probably waste too much time at this point.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Besides, I'm a PC User, not a Console Jockey. Does UE5 even offer improvements for PC?
I'm sure there would be some performance improvements for all end users but I'm guessing most of the benefits would be for the developers, or at least for developers who might start brand new projects with UE5.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
UE5 offers a lot for developers. So many systems are streamlined to reduce workouts needed to develop. It is also a beast and really requires high end systems to work with it well right now.
Definitely not meant for MMO development “out of the box”.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
"Today's" high end systems are "next week's" mid-range systems and "next year's" low end systems.
Case in point ... Mac OS ... where there is a massive chasm hardware divide for orphaned legacy systems (I'm writing this on an almost 10 year old iMac running 10.13.6) due to a lack of hardware support for newer features. 3 years ago, I had the opportunity to play the Battle For Azeroth expansion for World of Warcraft, but the game client was not supported on my computer because Blizzard had updated their lighting and shading software for the game and it required Metal acceleration, which my computer didn't have ... so I couldn't play. Now with the new M1 Macs coming online, and later this year the M2 generation and yet more developments into the future, on the Mac side of the computing world we are rapidly approaching the point where there is for all intents and purposes a hard lower limit on backwards compatibility with older legacy hardware simply because Apple Silicon is SO ADVANCED relative to the hardware offerings of yesteryear (even when running windows client software under emulation using Rosetta).
My point being that on the Mac side of the market, there will soon not be any advantages in "any" backwards compatibility to pre-M1 hardware, because both the hardware and software is "evolving" beyond those constraints thanks to Apple Silicon.
The PC side of the market is a completely different story (like always), of course.
Still, there is going to come a point where you're going to have to decide the ... sunset horizon ... for backwards compatibility on the PC side of things at some point, if you haven't already.
As for consoles ... PS5 and up is really the only market you might want to cater to, honestly.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
One of the reasons we aren’t switching to UE5 is because it will raise the bar for lower end hardware.
But I was talking about even just developing games with the engine. When your working in the editor mode, it uses more resources than playing the packaged version. It isn’t optimized, especially in the beginning. Well UE5 set they bar higher too.
And if we used their meta-human software? It makes most systems chug with 6 characters on an empty map. Sure we could import our characters to the engine. But so much else has changed that it would cost us significantly more time to learn those nee systems and relearn how to do certain things that are handled differently.
The time saving features and the restrictive low end hardware doesn’t make sense for us to do so.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
Obviously they are creating UE5 to be relevant for some number of years into the future. What will be considered "lower-end hardware" 5 or 10 years from now is likely considered fairly bleeding edge right now. I would assume that even if you aren't going to work with UE5 now that you would eventually incorporate it into some far future game update some number of years after initial launch.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Moving to UE5 would be an entire overhaul of the game. Some stuff will be easy, other stuff….not so much.
We would also need to have every dev working in the editor with actual dev-systems - not your typical home even high end PC just to do the work without our PC choking.
We aren’t even entertaining UE5 for CoT. Sure the future has all kinds of possibilities butt hypothetical situations aren’t entirely useful to entertain for us as far as development of the current game.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
Speaking of lower end hardware. I seem to recall that you originally were targeting something like a nvidia 750 series GPU. How has that changed? Are you now targeting integrated gpus for your baseline? Given the GPU "shortage" that would make a lot of sense.
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A key problem for MWM's "development strategy" is that every year that goes by without a launched game means that the latest definition of what constitutes a "low end machine" continues to change. Tannim might have decided that so-called hypothetical futures don't matter for CoT but time is not really on his side as far as that goes.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
The minimum specs are based on both simulations and the requirements of the engine. We have them posted somewhere around here.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
Recommend a sticky post somewhere with that then.
Someplace that would be obvious to go find that info ...
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Over in one of the Mac forums, someone tried running the Avatar Builder on a new Mac with integrated graphics, which actually worked pretty well, especially considering it was an M1 Mac emulating the x86 instruction set to run the game. So it seems likely that some of the more recent Windows machines with the higher-end integrated graphics systems might do fairly well. Whether it will work as well in a crowded city, is another question, though.
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team [/color]