OMFG System Shock "remake"?!?

[datiswous]

Well I know what I'm doing in march..

[revelator]

SS3 remake kinda got shafted the SS1 remake should still be in the game SS1 also uses the unreal engine and not unity.

SS1 also accepted kickstarter fundings where as SS3 largely ditched it.

https://www.systemshock.com/

 

[AluminumHaste]

There is no SS3, how can they do a remake?

And thank god they got rid of unity, that engine is total trash garbage on anything over 60 fps.

 

Just spend 5 minutes on steam forums for Unity project games, and there's just thousands of people complaining about poor performance, stuttering etc.

[datiswous]

I often wonder what the use case is for Unity nowadays..

Edited February 26, 2023 by datiswous

[chakkman]

10 minutes ago, datiswous said:

I often think what the use case is for Unity nowadays..

Mostly mobile games, I think.

That said, Unity not necessarily means bad performance. Ghost of a Tale is made in Unity as well, and the graphics are great, and it's also performing well.

[chakkman]

52 minutes ago, AluminumHaste said:

There is no SS3, how can they do a remake?

I wonder if they still plan to further develop SS3, or if they ditched it completely. Would be a shame. Although it's pretty questionable if the people involved would have released something decent anyway... Underworld Ascendant (which is Unity as well, BTW) really was very bad.

Edited February 26, 2023 by chakkman

[SeriousToni]

Unity is indeed often named as a bad performer. Would you recommend unreal engine instead?

[revelator]

whoops sorry SS3 was the new one SS1 is the remake

[revelator]

6 hours ago, chakkman said:

I wonder if they still plan to further develop SS3, or if they ditched it completely.

dunno i kinda doubt it at this time... warren spector was a bit vague about it being dead but after tencent took over there has been exactly zero news so it would seem to be atleast on hiatus.

[Xolvix]

The choice of engine is interesting because it's not always clear cut. The Unreal engine is popular however it also requires considerable knowledge to use appropriately otherwise you end up with major issues like stuttering (which a number of recent high-profile games have been suffering with). Plus of course you need the people specialised to work with these engines and there's plenty of people who might only really know Unity well for example, so it's easier to get such folks to work on your game. There's also the Godot Engine which is supposedly increasing in popularity if you believe certain people on the Internet, although I've yet to encounter a commercial game actually using it.

As for System Shock and its remakes/sequels I'm kinda over it. They have to actually get RELEASED before I can start making judgements...

[revelator]

unreal 5 or newer atleast but many game devs out there seem to prefer unreal, hell even cd project ditched redengine for the upcomming witcher 4 game for unreal despite it being there own inhouse engine and so better known to them atleast. I think it has probably to do with the toolset avaliable for unreal more than anything else, otherwise there would have been a plethora of other game engines in use by developers. godot is quite nice and has a pretty good toolset also though it uses GLES it is capable of creating some pretty stunning environments with a small footprint so it might actually become a bigger player over the years.

[Xolvix]

CD Project ditching their in-house engine I kinda understand though. It definitely looks nice in Cyberpunk 2077 when bumped up to max settings, but it sounds like they had a ton of issues during development and the release was full of technical problems that took many patches to buff out (though it still has the occasional T-pose among other glitches.)

I think in CDPR's case, the choice to move to Unreal made practical sense. The talent pool for people familiar with Unreal is far higher than REDengine and that in itself would speed things up considerably as opposed to getting new people familiar with an in-house engine. I know Remedy still use their in-house engine (Northlight) so good for them, but who knows, maybe they'll switch eventually too.

[chakkman]

It's probably a massive task these days to develop an engine in-house which is up to par to, say, Unreal Engine. The advantages of an own engine are that you can modify it to your needs, and that you're 100% familiar with it.

One of my favorite racing simulation developers, Kunos Simulazioni, switched from their own engine to Unreal Engine for their game Assetto Corsa Comeptizione. They had some real issues in the beginning, and, you can also see that the engine is not 100% perfect for these kind of games, and that they had to apply tricks to make it work for them. It's also not the most performant game, which is probably a combination of the elaborate driving physics calculations, and the lack of familiarity with the engine in general. But, they seem to have run into a dead end with their own engine, as there were issues with the lighting and stuff.

As far as I've always read, more and more developers rely on third party engines, development frameworks etc. to make their work easier and better. It also happens in audio software: A lot of developers use frameworks to develop their audio plugins, like JUCE. They simply don't want to mess with the low level OS stuff, or develop their own framework to provide different plugin formats for different hosts and OS's. And, those frameworks also provide GUI resizability or preset management out of the box. In most cases, it will be a time and cost efficiency consideration. Also, of course, because such projects become more and more complex. I often scratch my head these days how huge and complex games have become. TBH, often for pretty useless things, like almost photo realistic graphics, or thousands of random items, or random tasks you can do in the game.

Edited February 27, 2023 by chakkman

[HMart]

21 hours ago, AluminumHaste said:

There is no SS3, how can they do a remake?

And thank god they got rid of unity, that engine is total trash garbage on anything over 60 fps.

 

Just spend 5 minutes on steam forums for Unity project games, and there's just thousands of people complaining about poor performance, stuttering etc.

Totally agree and not only that but if Doom 3 was made on Unity, TDM would never exist, because any game made on Unity is just almost impossible to be modded, unless you do heavy reverse engineering of the files (most don't know how) or the developers make their own mod tools, that I assume less than 1% of Unity game developers bother to do or even know how to develop their own tools.

Quote

 

...

I think in CDPR's case, the choice to move to Unreal made practical sense. The talent pool for people familiar with Unreal is far higher than REDengine and that in itself would speed things up considerably as opposed to getting new people familiar with an in-house engine

...

 

Xolvix that is my supposition as well, but is a petty variety in the game engine world, is slowly dying, not only because that is starving the engine making talent pool, but also because that has a real impact on the look and feel of games, unless the developers go out of their way to remove the engine default look, all games made on Unity or Unreal look and feel the same. 

Edited February 27, 2023 by HMart

[AluminumHaste]

I do find that UE5 has a distinctive look, like blurry low res rendering while moving that is very discernible. I can usually tell the engine just by how it feels/looks in general.

[revelator]

plenty of engines out there that can do visually stunning graphics the problem with most though are that the mapping toolsets usually leaves a lot to be desired. cryengine could deliver gfx that was pretty close to UE5 allready but mappers absolutely hate working with it i heard . And today noone but a few indie companies ever want to develop something better suited for those using it, most expect things to be served on a platter ready to use or they will say the engine sucks even though the engine most of the time has absolutely nothing to do with it groan... idtech was proably one of the last engines where some work was done to remedy that but efforts to create a better toolset died with idtech4 and has not recovered since which is a shame. 

[AluminumHaste]

That's very true, and I've mentioned this before, but Respawn used a heavily modified version of DarkRadiant for making maps for Titanfall 1.

 

[datiswous]

On 2/27/2023 at 1:42 AM, Xolvix said:

There's also the Godot Engine which is supposedly increasing in popularity if you believe certain people on the Internet, although I've yet to encounter a commercial game actually using it.

There's plenty of games that use it, mostly 2d.

On 2/26/2023 at 6:30 PM, datiswous said:

I often wonder what the use case is for Unity nowadays..

So what I see people say is Godot is way better at 2d than Unity (already in 3.5). I personally can't give an opinion about it, because I haven't used the engines to make games but @Moonbo's new 2d game is using Unity (I think) so I wondered why he made that choice, but I didn't ask yet..

In 3d there are also better options.

I think it's probably the assets store. And possibly the amount of tutorials.

[Moonbo]

Yep, using Unity - so far I've had a good experience with it. I came in knowing no coding so the fact that there were a ton of tutorials, and a lot of very well supported third-party assets, has been a big plus. The game (shameless plug: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1461150/Shade/ ) is 2D, but it uses a 3D camera for some effects so having that was also a nice benefit.

[revelator]

the HPL engines should also be interresting for 2D seing as it started out as a pure 2D engine to begin with , HPL1 sadly had a limited toolset to go with it but HPL2 which has also been opensourced has a substantial amount of tools, cant really speak of how easy it is to use seing as im no mapper but maybe something else to consider ?.

[AluminumHaste]

How does it run at 400fps?

Seems to run smoothly at 800-900 fps.

[Xolvix]

On 2/28/2023 at 2:58 AM, AluminumHaste said:

I do find that UE5 has a distinctive look, like blurry low res rendering while moving that is very discernible. I can usually tell the engine just by how it feels/looks in general.

That sounds a lot like the temporal anti-aliasing that became integrated into UE4. I'm not normally a fan of TAA for that reason, but it does depend on the implementation and the game environment. It seems to look worse in games that have foliage and grass, very fine detail that distinctly blurs during motion.

[revelator]

ah so thats where it comes from, yeah i noticed this in some games using TAA as well.

[revelator]

strange bug also cropped up regarding antialiasing in the witcher 3 next gen update, FSR2 breaks liquids when enabled together with dynamic scaling water looks like something you would see when on LSD , strangely these two options cannot be enabled together in cyberpunk 2033 so it seems to be a whoopsie in the next gen patch which will hopefully be corrected at some time. the dx12 renderer also crashes a lot

[chakkman]

It'll be released on 30th of May: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/482400/view/3675538825746573847?l=german

You really need a lot of patience these days... Starfield also has been delayed for the second time now, to September this year.

Edited March 14, 2023 by chakkman