Development Blog Update - Unknown Worlds Podcast #26 Options

[sloppy_joe]

I'm disappointed about the move to a new engine. I've been working on several NS2 maps in hammer for about a year and are now
going to scrap 'em or use parts for something else. The best part of using your own engine is that success or failure will be up to you.
good luck,
Joe

[spellman23]

Holy Awesome.

Release it to the linux market too!

(Edit: Please.)

Native Mac and Linux builds would be quite awesome. Gonna be hard if they use DirectX, though. OpenGL continues to improve, but it's core has some weird crap still in there.

[La Chupacabra]

Hum…..
I don’t know, I’m not quite as excited about this news as other people seem to be. Having written a good portion of a graphics engine myself I know that there is soooo much that goes into it, that has almost nothing to do with the gameplay you want. Just starting with (skipping what you said you already got) full hardware rendering using sharders to do water and other effects, skybox’s with proper parallax, inverse kine, full surround sound audio, HDR, multiple core rendering, foliage(leaves and trees), soft particles (ie flamethrower), each of these are very very tough to get exactly “right” and vastly help the game look/feel (especially on older hardware it has to be very optimized).

is NS2 there will be no water (at least at the beginning) and since it's mostly si-fi indoor than it won't gonna need too much trees and leaves (so they can be actually modeled and animated, as it was done in NS1)... the lack of AI worries me a bit since they wanted to add 'clever bots', but offline mode is not the priority I suppose

I don't like listenening to podcasts so maybe this has been answered but- can resources that you've already made be ported straight across to the new engine?

And my usual pessimist final comment- disappointing that it's summer 2008 and we're only now finding out what engine you're working on.

from what I understood they are developing the engine for 5 months now, but they are letting us know now when they know things are going well with it (?)

[locallyunscene]

In NS2 there will be no water (at least at the beginning) and since it's mostly sci-fi indoor than it won't gonna need too much trees and leaves (so they can be actually modeled and animated, as it was done in NS1)

Yeah, I think they'll be able to tune the engine much more easily. Better water effects and the like can come with updates/expansions.

Also, The Galapagos Engine.

[Prefix]

I second the Darwin Engine.

[Zothen]

Oh crap, I hoped to play NS2 in this century! An engine change is the worst thing that could happen. Especially when they say: Now everything will be faster! Of course! Guess Ive coded too much to believe that it can be faster when you have to build a 3d-Engine, the game (not to forget models, rigging and texturing) and the tools!
I cant believe that they have the ressources to build a decent 3D-engine thats better than Source... I cant...
Bye-bye, NS2 - see you in many, many years! Im a sad, sad panda, now!

This post has been edited by Zothen: Jul 11 2008, 05:13 PM

[ChromeAngel]

In short I'd like to hear more on the features the new engine and map editor will support, and how the hell Max thinks he's going to achieve all of this single-handed without burning himself out and into an early grave.

It sounds a lot like the engine will have whatever features UWE find they want (so long as Max can code it in a week)

We could be brainstorming up features that source doesn't have that would make NS2 even more awesome.

Is the new engine still coded in C++?

Another question occurs to me is the financial impact, UWEs investors cant be very impressed that you've blown a stack of cash on licensing an engine only not to use it.

This post has been edited by ChromeAngel: Jul 11 2008, 05:23 PM

[N_3]

woah, new engine. should definitely be called the BUS engine.

(edit: or BUE - big unannounced engine)

This post has been edited by N_3: Jul 11 2008, 05:32 PM

[locallyunscene]

Edit: List of names suggested:

• Beagle
• Blink
• Broken (lol)
• BUS/BUE - Big Unannounced/Unknown System/Engine
• Carnot
• Catalyst
• Colbert
• Constellation
• Darwin
• Eclipse
• Evolution/Evo
• Extraterrestrial
• Fade
• Finch
• Frontier
• Galapagos
• Gorge
• Hive
• Hovvar
• Leap
• MaxFlay
• Maximize
• Maxor
• NanoTec
• Natural
• Nexus
• Nostromo
• NS2
• Onos/Ownos
• Open
• Origin
• Scorpion
• Selective
• Ultimate Switch
• Unknown
• Unknown World Creator

Edit2: Now in alphabetical order!

This post has been edited by locallyunscene: Jul 11 2008, 07:54 PM

[Trace Bullet]

This is good news! It sounded like too much time was burned trying to bend the Source engine to their will. So, how soon until we see this new engine in action?

Also, I nominate "Natural Engine" as the engine's name.

[Max]

Thanks to everyone for the encouragement.

I know some people are wondering how we could possibly build an engine in only a few months. The truth is that we didn't; I've actually been working on the engine in some form since 2005. Originally the engine was just a way for me to try out different ideas (mostly related to 3D graphics) quickly and easily. And if you've been following the blog you've seen it a few times in different forms, including the dynamic infestation prototype video and the map viewer. So we didn't really decide to write a new engine, it's more like we decided we already had an engine, we just needed to add in a few more pieces. Adding in those pieces is what we really started doing 5 months ago.

So what are those pieces? The big one was networking which we talked about in the podcast a bit. We also added in collision support for character movement, character animation and physics / ragdolls and a sound system. All of the scripting glue code we wrote for Source just came right over. And since all of gameplay code is written in Lua script it was already very independent of the Source engine and we were able to directly use that with our new engine.

Right now we have every major piece in place in the engine, which is really great for development since it means everyone on the team can be productive without waiting on anything. Those pieces aren't all 100% yet, but I'm going to be continuing to work on that while the rest of the team progresses with the game.

We've been closed kimono about the engine for a while because things were still quite up in the air, but now that we're through that we hope to be talking about it quite a bit more on this blog.

[Zeno]

[I've got to stop lurking around ...]

Many things that were on my mind have already been said here so i have just a few comments/questions.


i wonder how uw/max will manage it to make an own engine with so little personell; there are so many things to do, like graphics, shaders, netcode, etc. uw may need some additional coders now.
still like most of the previous posters i support your choice.
-will the new engine benefit from multicore processors? i mean the scaling.... e.g. having an extra thread for physics........(sorry, i can't express my self right here, since my english isn't quite good..... but take crysis for example: it doesn't really matter how many cores you have, so it will possibly run better on a fast dualcore than on a average quadcore cpu). I know, i can't expect you to have an answer to this question at this early point but MAYBE you have one?
-What does Valve think about all this? You had insight into their engine and are now building an own that will have similarities to the source engine as said in the podcast. i hope valve's lawyers won't find a copyright-problem or something like this in it.
-will "Pretexa" support the source engine, too or is it just for your new engine?
-what about the investors? will they support your chioce


as for the engine name:
Evo engine would be nice but it's a stupid idea because there is already one (mitsubishi evo's engine )
Evolution is nice
my fav and own suggestions:
+The Scorpian engine
+Maxor engine
+Ownos engine
+Eclipse engine


ps: now that there are no engine based limits i'm looking forward to reading through the suggestions forum

oh and one more thing: If you make a linux version, feel free to raise the price to 50€ (although i would pay that for a windows only version, too)

edit: since don't post here often i hadn't the opportunity to say that yet: THANK YOU for all your previous work and thank you for NS1. It's one of the best games i've ever played

This post has been edited by Zeno: Jul 11 2008, 07:20 PM

[Karba]

[I've got to stop lurking around ...]

Many things that were on my mind have already been said here so i have just a few comments/questions.
i wonder how uw/max will manage it to make an own engine with so little personell; there are so many things to do, like graphics, shaders, netcode, etc. uw may need some additional coders now.
still like most of the previous posters i support your choice.
-will the new engine benefit from multicore processors? i mean the scaling.... e.g. having an extra thread for physics........(sorry, i can't express my self right here, since my english isn't quite good..... but take crysis for example: it doesn't really matter how many cores you have, so it will possibly run better on a fast dualcore than on a average quadcore cpu). I know, i can't expect you to have an answer to this question at this early point but MAYBE you have one?
-What does Valve think about all this? You had insight into their engine and are now building an own that will have similarities to the source engine as said in the podcast. i hope valve's lawyers won't find a copyright-problem or something like this in it.
-will "Pretexa" support the source engine, too or is it just for your new engine?
-what about the investors? will they support your chioce
as for the engine name:
Evo engine would be nice but it's a stupid idea because there is already one (mitsubishi evo's engine )
Evolution is nice
my fav and own suggestions:
+The Scorpian engine
+Maxor engine
+Ownos engine
+Eclipse engine
ps: now that there are no engine based limits i'm looking forward to reading through the suggestions forum

oh and one more thing: If you make a linux version, feel free to raise the price to 50€ (although i would pay that for a windows only version, too)

edit: since don't post here often i hadn't the opportunity to say that yet: THANK YOU for all your previous work and thank you for NS1. It's one of the best games i've ever played

I think Networking, collision and character animation have been imported directly from Source Engine, the license they bought allow to do this.

I would pay up to 100 € if the game is released this year althought we all known this is not gonna happen

This post has been edited by Karba: Jul 11 2008, 07:32 PM

[Max]

I think Networking, collision and character animation have been imported directly from Source Engine, the license they bought allow to do this.

Our engine doesn't include any code from the Source engine.

[Paul-Hewson]

What about the physic engine. You have spoken of nVidia's PhysX Middleware.
It is the part which require a PPU/ nVidia GeForce "CUDA" (GeForce 8/9/GTX) ? Or not ?

I think it's not but i prefer to be sure.

[Prefix]

Max, is there any chance of Linux or mac versions?

Or should I stop dreaming?

[Andos]

The "Hovvar" engine! Because it runs smoothly without flapping!


Anyways, good to see you guys are confident enough in your own engine to use it. I loved the look of the creep in the video and was hoping that you wouldn't have big troubles porting it to source. Now you already have a working implementation in your own engine so I guess that is ready

[Mr. Epic]

Well that must feel good to get off your chests! Max or Charlie, am I reading it correctly that there is no source engine code in there? If so, does that mean this is entirely UW's engine to do with what it pleases? If thats still to be sorted out, thats cool...

Concerning the engine itself, I am GLAD to hear that because you are eliminating legacy crap it will be a speed demon. Good, efficiency and knowing what is going on is a wonderful thing So, more specifically, what did you guys decide upon?

We know that you are presently using physX (good strategic decision) for ragdolls. Will there be any other uses of this (eg: for visual effect, I'm sure you guys aren't concerned with gameplay effecting destroyable walls or other bits of fancy), or has that yet to be determined?

About the graphics part, is this going to be usable with directX or opengl, or both? If one or the other has been decided, can you provide reason as to why? If not, just specify anyway... thanks.

Concerning network code, will there be adequate checking to ensure cheating is not probable? Also, can you say which direction was selected for updates and player control? Eg... are you syncing with the server thus causing motion stutter should lag arise, or will you keep with the same feel of half life and leave local player control real-time and unimpeded by update? I found the beauty of halflife games in multiplayer is that you always feel as though you are in control of yourself, not at the mercy of lag which causes you to go backwards or something. Please let us know!

Lastly, because you have freed yourself from source engine restrictions, will you be adding or changing the capabilities of what models or people or whatever can do? Or will you guys play it safe and essentially emulate through your own methods the model and map capabilities?

Thank you for letting us know, and hopefully you guys can be a bit more transparent and current with updates! Oh, and engine names.. lets see how they look and sound:

Unknown Worlds NATBUS Engine
Unknown Worlds Hovaring Skorpion Engine
Unknown Worlds ONOS Engine
Unknown Worlds OHNOEZ Engine
Unknown Worlds Lork On The Clorf Engine
Unknown Worlds LOTC Engine
Unknown Worlds Shirtgun Engine
Unknown Worlds SG Engine
Unknown Worlds Cornmandor Engine
Unknown Worlds BUS Engine
Unknown Worlds NOTDUKENUKEMFOREVER Engine
Unknown Worlds Charlie And The Turret Factory Engine

Or, how about Unknown Worlds No Name Engine... in homage to no name and an unnamed engine is original!

This post has been edited by CyberMantis: Jul 11 2008, 08:20 PM

[DooGie]

Yeah, now we can blame UWE when the bullets don't reg ;D;D;D;D;D;D;D;D;D

[MarshalTT]

This will be the next engine of DNF

resource engine