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News: MindArk Signs Deal for Unreal Engine 5 - PRNewswire

Evey said:
I think exactly that is the problem, the old engine. There's just too much to fix and artists/animators/programmers with experience on that engine may be a lot harder to find.
I am 100% sure each of us will have at least one major thing that we won't like in comparison with the old engine, but I am also sure it will be worth it, after things become stable.

I do hope to see the collision of mobs fixed once and for all and .. quire a few other annoying bugs...
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Just to be clear, the problems of, "a very old and unevenly edited world" (which is what I said exactly) doesn't equate to the problems "of an old engine". It's important to differentiate between the two.

Let's take a specific example. I love Zychion but it's the same assets/textures/models that have been in game since 2004 or earlier. Some bits don't work or have broken lighting etc. The area could do with a remake using the original models as a template to produce a much more detailed and "modern quality" decaying city area from a long past robot war... which is what it is. Not only this, it could be made a lot more interactive and dynamic. It could have corridors and rooms "unlock" in response to mission completion, new story driven NPCs, animation, things swaying in the wind, creepy noises etc etc.

None of that will happen as a result of moving to UE5.

It will and can only happen with the employment of artists/animators and programmers to give the area (and other areas of the game) an overhaul.

Now, compare Zychion to the new RDI lab that was just added to the game (or even the Corinth area for that matter). That looks pretty nice from what I could see, certainly of a reasonable level of comparability to modern games. But was a new Engine required for this? No, it wasn't. It was the artists that MA actually got to go on video to talk about their work. We just need these guys to be cloned a few more times and the job will be a goodun.

In the end, all I'm getting at here is that a new engine isn't a "magic bullet" to fixing up all the areas of the game that look "old fashioned" or "poor quality". It comes down to employing enough people to do the work required.

Wistrel
 
Aha, this will force them to redesign my apartment that looks the same as it did in 2005. ?
 
Pi- said:
Yikes. The last engine "upgrade" was so bad it took 2 years for me to come back to the game after they broke many of the core functions of the targeting system. Up until this day I still dislike the new targeting system that I have to use to play and hunt. I also really disliked how the last engine "upgrade" made it so that you could no longer walk up steep terrain and basically ruined the feeling of jumping / climbing in game
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Yeh CryEngine2 was quite "a thing" in terms of hardware required but at the time, it was pretty revolutionary. I mean there's a reason for the meme "But does it run crysis?" :p Lots of people were "out" for a while until they naturally came to upgrading their machines or buying new hardware. I myself didn't return till vu11 as that was when I reached a good upgrade point to grab a new graphics card.

As for the steep terrain stuff. I can see why some disliked that as obviously it came with a reduction in freedom to explore everywhere. From my perspective though, I quite enjoyed the challenge as sometimes you could still climb those mountains, but you had to try hard and experiment a bit to find "the hidden" route up. So between that and fall damage, I welcomed the change. Generally though, natural (not invisible walls/no go zones) borders and environmental damage is something I feel the game could always have done with. Historically there was "the healing pond" and of course we have the insta-kill toxic zones if you've not had the shot... not to mention some pretty nasty/touchy mobs but there is a lot more that could be done to make the landscape more "part" of the game so as to make moving about a bit more interesting/more of a challenge/"game like".

Of course I know most people would hate me for that suggestion and I even heard one of the reasons people like Ark over Caly is that it's nice and flat and empty so people can see the mobs better. To my mind though, you don't level a forest or a valley because people want to hunt in a desert, you tell people who want to hunt in a desert to go hunt in a desert area,... and leave those, who don't mind a few trees, to hunt in the trees.
 
Wistrel said:
Now, compare Zychion to the new RDI lab that was just added to the game (or even the Corinth area for that matter). That looks pretty nice from what I could see, certainly of a reasonable level of comparability to modern games. But was a new Engine required for this? No, it wasn't. It was the artists that MA actually got to go on video to talk about their work. We just need these guys to be cloned a few more times and the job will be a goodun.
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This is purely speculative but the RDI lab development might have pushed them towards signing on a new game engine. The effort to build something in CE2 might not be as optimized as a more modern engine with better toolsets like Unreal 5. At the time CE2 was a step above what they had but there was a learning curve porting Project Entropia from Gamebryo. It's hard to know if there are cost savings in moving from Cryengine to Unreal but that could be a factor as well.

Overall there is probably a bigger talent pool of people out there who know how to develop for Unreal and Unity VS Cryengine. University programs tend to stick to the tools that are popular in industry so students can roll into jobs. When I was in school for Engineering Design we stuck to AutoCAD, Solidworks, and Pro Engineer because those were the most common tools. When I finished my degree a couple years ago the program focused on Maya, 3dsMax, Unity, Unreal, and the Adobe Suite of tools. Cryengine was great and had potential when it arrived on the scene but like Lightwave the tools just aren't being adopted by industry as they once were.

I am also curious if Unreal opens up possibilities for XR or even console development but that seems like it would be pipe dream since some games are better left on PC and not sure if that would attract new players.
 
Wistrel said:
What's wrong with the website? I always thought it looked quite nice...?
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Everything.
Looks very bad. Has extremely bad UX, has different areas that looks different, it's not responsive (doesn't work well on mobile devices).


I really don't know if UE or CE is better, what can and can't be done with each, but from the presentation clips I saw on UE5, oh wow, looks so out of this world.. and if they will manage to make EU look even remotely to look like that, I don't care which engine it is, just do it. But from the announcement, going into CE vs UE would not be very productive...
As said from the first day of the RDI Sectors, if they made other aspect of the game as good looking as the lab, it would be amazing, but apparently it's too hard, being legacy engine and coding in the back so if a new engine is what it takes, let's go warp speed and I'm pretty sure Zychion would look amazing under the next engine :)
 
Rocket192 said:
finally some proper investment back into the game experience. hopefully it's a speedy conversion.
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Out of interest... anyone know what the financial model of UE is? I ask because I had a feeling it was something like "free for development/learning/non profit" but costs money if you actually release something? I wonder how it would work with Entropia being a "free game"... I guess there are probably quite a lot of games that use it though that make cash from sale of in game items or gems or something though. Would MA have bought the rights to use it or would they be doing something like x% of decay goes to Epic Games?
 
Maybe finish the textures on Cryengine 2 first?
 
Some of us remember the clusterfuck of swapping from GameBryo engine, to Cryengine....

Forgive me if I dont do cartwheels...
 
Wistrel said:
Out of interest... anyone know what the financial model of UE is? I ask because I had a feeling it was something like "free for development/learning/non profit" but costs money if you actually release something? I wonder how it would work with Entropia being a "free game"... I guess there are probably quite a lot of games that use it though that make cash from sale of in game items or gems or something though. Would MA have bought the rights to use it or would they be doing something like x% of decay goes to Epic Games?
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UE is free for your for first $1m after that there is a 5% on sales.

Now, did MA talk this percentage down? Is the 5% cheaper than the per seat annual cost of CryEngine. We will never know. But I had to be worth it for MA to invest in it and UE to accept if a deal was signed since pretty much everyone gets the 5% fee
 
nevermind
 
I hope it is a smooth transition to the new engine. That last transition made many people leave the game (some forever). I wish they would have made the jump to UE back in VU10.

I will be interested to see how my armor looks in UE5 :)

vUrZ0NZ.png
cGu2oEF.png


:beerchug:
 
Evey said:
Everything.
Looks very bad. Has extremely bad UX, has different areas that looks different, it's not responsive (doesn't work well on mobile devices).


I really don't know if UE or CE is better, what can and can't be done with each, but from the presentation clips I saw on UE5, oh wow, looks so out of this world.. and if they will manage to make EU look even remotely to look like that, I don't care which engine it is, just do it. But from the announcement, going into CE vs UE would not be very productive...
As said from the first day of the RDI Sectors, if they made other aspect of the game as good looking as the lab, it would be amazing, but apparently it's too hard, being legacy engine and coding in the back so if a new engine is what it takes, let's go warp speed and I'm pretty sure Zychion would look amazing under the next engine :)
Click to expand...

Yes UE5 does have some whizzy effects for sure. Case in point I saw a good one the other day where someone had made voxel landscapes in it that were not only destructible but were tunnelable through and even had the landscape dynamically adapt to the changes like having rocks falls and stuff. Looked really nice although I doubt MA would ever utilise something like this. There are some "free" gains however like possibly the nanite optimisations or the lumen reflected light effect which hopefully even MA has the resource to make use of.


You are right though, debating if the move is a good or bad thing, is indeed largely an academic exercise as, they've made the announcement now, clearly the decision has already been made and there's nothing anyone can do about it. If someone in the company thought it would be a good idea there's very little the player base can do to sway that outcome. Zero in fact if the first they hear of the notion is after the deal has already been done :geek:

This said, it's announcement day so "the right time" for recording one's feelings on the matter is the here and now. We can all raise our concerns or excitement individually, then in "however many years it takes to implement it" 's time, we can all look back and see who was right and who was wrong. I'd love for you to be right about Zychion, I just remember what happened last time....

As for "if they made other aspect of the game as good looking as the lab, it would be amazing, but apparently it's too hard, being legacy engine and coding in the back" I'd be interested to know if MA have actually said this... reason being that, while I appreciate there are few, if any, other games with similar effective modifications to the engine to allow large open world roaming (as opposed to "levels"), other people have managed to make games with it that look stunning even by modern standards. There's an old saying "a bad workman blames their tools"... I just wonder if that applies here in the case of laying blame on the capabilities of CE2*.

Wistrel

* which, and this is important so should be noted, could be upgraded to the most recent version of the engine, along with all the huge optimisation improvements the 2 to 3 version change contained.

PS fair points on the website, certainly stuff like responsiveness is kinda key these days as are rules around accessibility that I doubt have been met. They've certainly not been met in the in game UI despite me flagging to both support and the community manager that the avatar names in that are dark blue on a darker blue backgound and are therefore pretty difficult to read.
 
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SupaPres said:
UE is free for your for first $1m after that there is a 5% on sales.

Now, did MA talk this percentage down? Is the 5% cheaper than the per seat annual cost of CryEngine. We will never know. But I had to be worth it for MA to invest in it and UE to accept if a deal was signed since pretty much everyone gets the 5% fee
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Is CE2 annual? or did MA secure a 1 off payment? This million thing is interesting... is that profit or sales, guessing sales as anything else would be impossible to administrate I suppose...
 
nutter said:
Some of us remember the clusterfuck of swapping from GameBryo engine, to Cryengine....

Forgive me if I dont do cartwheels...
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Because CryEngine is just not that good from a support perspective. I'm sure way back in 2007 it seemed like a good choice, but in retrospect...

The whole point is they are moving to an engine with much better support from all angles. I'm sure this transition won't be 100% smooth, but I'd be surprised if it weren't any better than last time.
 
I look forward to having to defend a city that will inevitably be destroyed.
I look forward to a new storage container housing all my apt. items.
I look forward to new maps to learn.
I look forward to the new graphics and possibilities

Orion said:
Nobody is here for the "stunning" grafix.
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The excitement shown in this thread alone tells me that you don't understand the the definition of the word "nobody" very well.


Angela Draniie Cloud said:
The requirements will put a fair few people out of the game requiring them to shell out a 400+ dollar laptop/ desktop.
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Trying not to sound like an ass here but...

If a person can't afford a computer upgrade once every 5+ years, how much income are they really bringing to MA?
 
Awesome news, I guess some time in near future I need to upgrade the potato of a pc I am playing on.
 
jetsina said:
This really does whack my motivation quite a bit.
Firstly, I will definitely need better hardware, and if I have to consume 100s of W instead of 12W then I simply won't want to stand at a crafting machine or do any kind of low action action.
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I'm one that's all about less electricity being used and go for the energy efficient graphics cards at the cost of not really being able to play at extremely high resolutions in most games. That said, we already have a range of graphics settings you can set to draw down power usage. I don't notice much difference with medium settings (with a few at high) compared to a blanket very high setting. I imagine we'll have similar options in the new engine. If UR is more efficient than CE (no idea if that's the case or not), that could also help, but the key thing is that it's already possible to customize graphics to lower GPU usage.
 
Very intresting :) And i think we got the best management we ewer had of Entropia right now, it seem to me they are doing the right things and changing to UE 5 is another step in the right direction imo.
I only got one issue here i NEED a new computer lol
 
Wistrel said:
THIS POST... IS THE WORDS OF A TRULY SENSIBLE HUMAN:bump:
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Yep, I'm excited to hear about it, but let's look back.... zero reason to be optimistic or excited.
remember this : https://www.planetcalypsoforum.com/...asino-where-will-this-lead-to-discuss.237308/
or

MindArk Selected to Present Entropia Universe to NASA

Virtual World Developer Shows the Entropia Universe Platform as Foundation for an Online Learning Game...
www.globenewswire.com www.globenewswire.com

or the whole housing element, or voting, or space good transport, or on and on and on. (oh Compet...*shudder)) Them signing is good news, but that could be as far as we get.
 
LAZZ said:
Very intresting :) And i think we got the best management we ewer had of Entropia right now,
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Personally I'd vote for the early days of management circa 2004/5 where the game was actively developed roughly every 6 weeks and Marco (the community rep) was regularly present on the forum's with his special ,-). Sure, it caused almost as much strife as it fixed, but no one could ever say that MA weren't making progress. Possibly they were not always making the right progress, or careful enough progress,... but they were making progress.
DavinFelth said:
Yep, I'm excited to hear about it, but let's look back.... zero reason to be optimistic or excited.
remember this : https://www.planetcalypsoforum.com/...asino-where-will-this-lead-to-discuss.237308/
or

MindArk Selected to Present Entropia Universe to NASA

Virtual World Developer Shows the Entropia Universe Platform as Foundation for an Online Learning Game...
www.globenewswire.com www.globenewswire.com

or the whole housing element, or voting, or space good transport, or on and on and on. (oh Compet...*shudder)) Them signing is good news, but that could be as far as we get.
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To be fair... while they indeed have done/not done a lot of stuff in the past that was never finished,... or,... abandoned,... or quietly forgotten. Every game engine update announcement to date has, for better or worse, (usually better - in the end) been delivered. I'm fairly certain if MA say they are going to move to UE5... there is pretty much a certainty that they will and, while it pains me to see them abandon another perfectly good engine that they never fully utilised, 10 years is 10 years, and will be likely significantly more than 10 years by the time "UnTropia" is released. It's not entirely unreasonable for them to want to get some new tools to play with.
 
I'm pretty sure VirtuVerse plays a significant role in this decision. It uses UE 4.2 and will have a new Alpha-release soon (not a Mindark-soon). And I'm pretty sure that we will see a bunch of more changes in EU that are more or less related to VirtuVerse. That's how good competition is!

The costs of a switch to a different graphics engine is also related to how well structured the code, models, ... are and what both products expect to get (different file formats, textures, ...) and how easily one can convert between the two. One would expect that UE has some conversion support from others like CE. I just hope that Mindark had a bunch of lessons-learned moments when moving to CE and things will be smoother this time.

You can put it any way you want and I understand both groups of players that play EU (not) because of the graphics, there is always that point when you look over the shoulder of other players (or watch twitch-streams) with graphics better than what we look at in EU.

As far as hardware is concerned: It'll be another year minimum until we get to play the new EU. Until then it's up to you to save some money and buy a PC/laptop meeting the requirements. Maybe deposit just half and put the other half away for that new equipment. That's not a statement against EU, it's that the money has to come from somewhere and if EU is your primary game and you're usually short on cash then it should be understandable and in terms of Mindark's improvements.

It won't be super awesome in the first release, but it's going to be great for sure.
 
www.gamesradar.com

The Unreal Engine 5 demo has a hidden special command for the big robot

To access it, players need to know the Konami code
www.gamesradar.com www.gamesradar.com

unreal.fandom.com

Console commands

The following page lists all of the console commands for the different Unreal games. These codes are also called Development codes, as they're used to debug and test third-party content such as maps and mutators. The following items are valid for the summon code: The following items are valid...
unreal.fandom.com unreal.fandom.com

https://www.polygon.com/22544652/ep...-cheat-developer-tools-unreal-engine-fortnite We'll see...

hmm...
forums.unrealengine.com

Unreal Engine 4 Player Count -> MMO

Connected players aren’t hard-coded anymore, that is outdated docs; However every “MMO” out there made with Unreal 3 or 4 suffers performance issues (Tera, Blade & Soul, etc etc) because devs try to pullout WoW numbers without optimizations specific to the engine’s graphics code. Lost Ark...
forums.unrealengine.com forums.unrealengine.com
 
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endermigne said:
I'm pretty sure VirtuVerse plays a significant role in this decision. It uses UE 4.2 and will have a new Alpha-release soon (not a Mindark-soon). And I'm pretty sure that we will see a bunch of more changes in EU that are more or less related to VirtuVerse. That's how good competition is!

The costs of a switch to a different graphics engine is also related to how well structured the code, models, ... are and what both products expect to get (different file formats, textures, ...) and how easily one can convert between the two. One would expect that UE has some conversion support from others like CE. I just hope that Mindark had a bunch of lessons-learned moments when moving to CE and things will be smoother this time.

You can put it any way you want and I understand both groups of players that play EU (not) because of the graphics, there is always that point when you look over the shoulder of other players (or watch twitch-streams) with graphics better than what we look at in EU.

As far as hardware is concerned: It'll be another year minimum until we get to play the new EU. Until then it's up to you to save some money and buy a PC/laptop meeting the requirements. Maybe deposit just half and put the other half away for that new equipment. That's not a statement against EU, it's that the money has to come from somewhere and if EU is your primary game and you're usually short on cash then it should be understandable and in terms of Mindark's improvements.

It won't be super awesome in the first release, but it's going to be great for sure.
Click to expand...
Competition is good. I just hope they don't make the Entropia like VV. Curiosity got the best of me and I have played VV extensively over the last two months. The interface and gameplay leave much to be desired. The UI proposed by MA earlier this year appears to be a cut-and-paste from VV. The gameplay in VV is completely different as well - it would be hard to grind 6k Rextelum/Shubs/etc... with the VV UI/UX.
 
NevadaJake said:
Competition is good. I just hope they don't make the Entropia like VV. Curiosity got the best of me and I have played VV extensively over the last two months. The interface and gameplay leave much to be desired. The UI proposed by MA earlier this year appears to be a cut-and-paste from VV. The gameplay in VV is completely different as well - it would be hard to grind 6k Rextelum/Shubs/etc... with the VV UI/UX.
Click to expand...

That's interesting... I've not been paying attention to VV for a while. I wonder if their UI is more placeholder'y while they are in development. Might be worth checking their Trello board as I seem to remember that was pretty informative as to what they were working on/planning. I can very much imagine an alpha game wouldn't have a snazzy UI, rather more just "enough" of a UI that the game is playable enough to test other elements. There does tend to be a little too much talk around Alpha these days as if it means some sort of "early beta". Alpha very much is element/progress testing for specific mechanics or features and should never be expected to be a "buggier version" of a beta release which is often what it get misconstrued as.

Aside... I have a joke:

Q: Why doesn't Jon Jacobs need to memorise the Konami code?
A: Because he NEVERDIEs!
 
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