Guild of Writers

Yesterday, at Mysterium 2011 in Boston, while Rand Miller was making a presentation on skype, I asked him if Cyan would be willing to use a more modern game engine for future cyan game projects. Rand replied yes in that it would be cheaper for Cyan to use an existing game engine than make up one of their own. So, I want to know what gow age writers think about this. Plasma is nice, but it has limitations. I would like to see more vehicles in ages for example. Over the Summer, I played with Ogre's Neoaxis game engine, and was able to take a simple uru age from max 7 to max 9 and then export it with the neoaxis exporter to the map editor and run it. I could put a vehicle like a tank in the software easily no subworlds required. But the graphics looked nowhere as good or as detailed as in uru. And multiplayer was a real pain. I also did not see how to easily get the tools I rely on in uru such as journey books, linking books, clickables for puzzles easily into neoaxis. It like many other modern game engines are more designed for fps games than adventure games. What other game engines would you suggest we consider?

That is not original but: Unreal Engine, and CryEngine are both great candidates. They are not only great renderers, they are all around very solid engines, full of features, easy to work with, and very well documented. And more important, both of them are totally free right now for non-commercial uses. Which means you can absolutely create an Uru knock-off and distribute it for free. (As long as legal issues are cleared with Cyan, obviously).
And unlike what many people think, they can run very decently on older machines; as long as the assets you're feeding them aren't horribly demanding and you're still aiming for directX 9 compatibility.
They might be FPS engines at the core, and dealing with the 3rd person nature of Uru will probably require more work than with Plasma, but the same can be said of any engine than is not Plasma.. Playing the avatar animations properly; aligning it with books/levers etc is annoying. But Plasma's animation system is quite outdated regarding this; so with a bit of work porting this to a new engine would actually be an improvement; both Unreal and Crysis have great animation engines. Puzzle scripting will also take a bit of work; but again, Plasma was designed specifically for Uru; so moving to any other engine will be a pain. Might as well go with the better engines then. Honnestly at this moment I don't see any reason for a non-commercial project not to go with any of those two. They're the best engines around, they've got great documentation, and they're free.

I don't have much knowledge of Unity; but I hear good things about it. The guys over at Starry Expanse certainly seem happy enough with it. I've no idea how it would handle avatars though.

Ogre is a very good graphics engine. If you were to say, port existing good-looking fan ages to it and run them, they would look as good or better than they do in Uru. If your testbed age lacked detail, that is because you did not model the detail. With any 3-D engine or 3-D tool suite, the final mark of quality lies with the modeler not the engine.

Oh, I do not claim to be an expert modeller, texturer, or programmer. I am a novice, and am still learning how to do things in max and blender. The main problem I saw was with the texturing rather than the modelling.
In max 7 and the plug in, I was able to use the detail feature in the cyan plugin, and the graphics looked pretty good. But when I moved the max age file from max 7 to max 9, I lost all of the cyan plugin functionality of course including the detail feature. Any of you that have played around with Ogre and neoaxis and can help me, I would be happy to listen to you.

I am not suggesting we abandon the plasma game engine for uru. I am just interested in playing around with other game engines for better functionality in the game play.

I see what you mean; the material stuff in Ogre has a pretty steep learning curve what and uses a quite different system from Plasma. In Ogre the choices of texture layers and how they're blended is practically limitless if you use shaders, whereas with Plasma, the base material system relies on a set of finite data.

When I started using Ogre I was quite bewildered at first by the number of Ogre material options, but what I've seen people do in that engine has shown me the material system can do some pretty impressive things. In your case, I think the main difference you were seeing between Ogre and Plasma's graphics engine is that Plasma has a Max plugin with more GUI options. With an Ogre-based game engine, unlike with Plasma, it is nearly impossible to create a world using only the plugin interface because the Blender and Max plugins are hopelessly incomplete. Although not available in the plugin, a detail texture system would be possible to write for Ogre as a shader.

Unity?

-Whystler

Second Life!!!!

/me runs away before getting hit by a bunch of tomatoes...

Tomala wrote:Second Life!!!!

/me runs away before getting hit by a bunch of tomatoes...

You can't outrun my supersonic tomatoes.

Your supersonic tomatoes are no match for Cave Johnson's combustible lemons.