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W3D vs UDK


wolf

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you make it sound like an attack. no it wasnt a attack. seems like he just dont enjoy the w3d games as me and many others, renegade is something unique. its also the only game i enjoy with 180ping on each famous server. if a windows update sometimes kills the game functionality i will simply use a second older OS then. renegade survived already so many years so i dont and wont believe it will be dead sometime. also renegade is a game where it doesnt matter when you join or leave, the game continues without breaking the current battle even if its a round based game.

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good, then leave in 2-3 years. i will stay. oh and for your interest, there isnt any UDK or UE game that i enjoyed more than a month.

The Batman Arkham series is actually quite good I feel; however, besides that game I would agree with you, I haven't found many good games for Unreal Engine 3. However, I wouldn't fault the engine on that, but the devs, I suspect that a lot of devs that take the unreal engine short cut take other shortcuts in development, which eventually leads to less love being put into the game.

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I don't think the engine has much to do with how the actual game turns out.

 

A move to a different engine would basically mean re-implementing all the stuff we love from the renegade engine (mostly just the C&C game mode because screw the network code) and giving us more scope for artwork.

We could do normal and specular maps as a base and do fancy shader effects for things where appropriate.

 

I'm not speaking for the rest of the team, just myself.

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This debate could go in circles forever. W3D is old, inferior to UDK and full of holes. We all know it, but as said before we like it. It's not an unhealthy attachment, we just like it. Sometimes things just have a certain charm to them, regardless of age or functionality.

 

It comes down to opinion, and that's something that can't be disputed.

 

RE backwards compatibility; Network Protocols haven't changed in years and i very much doubt they will. Even if they did, it wouldn't be hard to build an in-between client to make it work. Also, There will always be middleware solutions that enable backwards compatbility. (virtualXP for example). If we're all still interested in holding onto W3D in distant future, i'm almost certain it will be possible one way or another.

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With the UDK we could use the same artwork and rigs as we used in renegade. I haven't really dug too deeply into UE4 but, since Ben managed to rig the TSR GDI soldier to the UE4 default skeleton at games jam this year, I believe we could do the same.

 

The general art process is like this:

Model High Poly Version -> Sculpt in Z Brush -> Re-topologize -> Bake High Poly into a normal map for the low poly version.

 

PBR Pipeline (UE4)

Unwrap Low Poly Version -> Paint Diffuse -> Paint Roughness -> Paint Metallic

 

Blinn-Phong Based Pipeline (UDK, Renegade, All the things prior to the last few years)

Unwrap Low Poly Version -> Paint Diffuse -> Paint Specular Map

 

We can do the full set of work for the PBR pipeline and just take the mesh, rig and diffuse texture and drop them straight into renegade with very little extra effort.

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for me it feels like all the eyecandy makes games less enjoyable after a time i dont know why. compare resident evil on playstation one and the new remake, fir me the old one is still much scaryer.

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It's true that there's a certain charm to olde-tyme graphics, but this isn't all about graphics. I still think this should be about the developers, and providing the best environment and tools for them to work in - which you will only get in a newer, supported, and fully-functional engine.

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for me it feels like all the eyecandy makes games less enjoyable after a time i dont know why. compare resident evil on playstation one and the new remake, fir me the old one is still much scaryer.

 

Eyecandy is good for attracting people. Gameplay is more important when playing the game.

Right now W3D's terrible graphics engine chases away people before they even consider playing the game.

Edited by wolf
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Just a small update to this.

jonwil has invited me to work on W3D. So I'm going to be spending some time tweaking W3D and creating scripts in addition to looking at UE4.

W3D being the priority. :dance:

+1 :D

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Yeah, they're releasing the full source code. I can't wait to see it. I've always wanted to see what the innards of a professional 3D engine looked like...Once i've finished my W3D project, it would be a logical step to start looking at UE4.

 

I remember when i was back at school i started making my own engine in Visual Basic 6.0... i gave up pretty quickly and made a text based RPG :p

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Well even up to this point if you had subscribed for a single month at any time you could have had the full engine source code and the full editor source code.

 

Now that I don't have to keep paying for updates I want to get the UE4 experiments going even more.

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It comes down to opinion, and that's something that can't be disputed.

 

Technical superiority is pretty hard to debate against unless it has costs associated with it (and unless such costs happen to be higher than the costs of maintaining the old technology).

 

Fortunately for us, the cost of transition here has been laid out in the form of adaptation.The cost of holding on to W3D meanwhile is the dwindling player base and overall reduction in the form of a "return" on the time invested in this venture.

 

A transition to an engine as reputed, optimized and malleable as UDK would be of greater benefit to everyone involved in this community and would warrant in objective terms the temporal investment.

 

While an example such as RenX has its faults and deficiencies, but no one can argue about their progress and how much they've been able to achieve. Part of this comes from leadership and focus on their end, but the other part also comes from how easy playing with UDK is.

 

Modding for W3D is a struggle some of us are still willing to undertake out of pure sadomasochism.

 

I know it can be argued that potential maintenance issues in the long run will be alleviated the same way that technical problems with the old crop of WS RTS games have been addressed by the community repeatedly. However, as Aircraftkiller pointed out, we're extremely dependant on people that could decide to move on any day from now.

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Unreal Engine 4 is free now, eh?

 

Hmm...

 

so is Source 2

 

True, but it hasn't been released yet. Though I'm definitely interested to see if it has less of a learning curve than UE4.

 

Speaking of UE4, I'm glad they've abandoned UnrealScript in favor of C++, as it has been difficult for my team to find programmers with experience in UnrealScript.

Edited by Bfranx
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In regards to Source 2 - Look into The DOTA 2 Alpha Mod tools set available on steam in the tools section.

 

Hammer has been completely remade and I am guessing the same will be done with faceposer. Valve this time around are doing everything themselves which is really awesome. Not to mention that they will be using VULKAN aka OpenGL next and the best bits of AMD's Mantle.

 

As for Unreal 4 - It is flat out awesome. I am not any form of tech artist but Unreal 4 lets me stroke my ego and lets me think so.

 

Here is what I mean -

 

Everything is visual down to the Shader Editors, Blueprint Visual Scripting, Behavior Trees, Animation Editors, Cinematic Editors, etc. It really empowers artists to do their best stuff which is to just make awesome art without having to rely on a programmer.

 

That said - If you are an Programmer you will be right at home with UE4 due to its C++ base which is highly extendable. Best of all Epic Games is not content. I don't say this much and I have used allot of game engines from allot of companies - I LOVE Unreal Engine and I want to marry it if I could do that. Just due to the amount of time that it saves me.

 

They also have a lighting / shading system that you made have heard about called PBR (Physically Based Rendering). So what does this mean?

 

It means that you spend more time working on making awesome art opposed to worrying about how it looks.

 

Here is the long version of what I am trying to say.

 

Anyway I gave my 2 cents - I would love to see Apocalypse Rising, Reborn, and War of Assassins come to Unreal 4.

 

I would be willing to lead such a charge.

 

EDIT: It is also worth mentioning that Unreal Engine 4 can do some crazy large worlds.

 

So The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim is about 4 miles or 6 kilometers on its side rounded up to the nearest whole number. So if we multiply that by 10 we would get 40 miles or 64 Kilometers for the size of this massive level.

Which is massive for a game engine not to mention that with DirectX 12 and Vulkan we will be able to do more with large worlds like this. Things like more advanced Artificial intelligence, etc.

 

 

The demo that I am referencing.

 

 

Twitch.TV broadcast where they state how large the world is and What they did to make it. Skip to 45 minutes in that is when the talk begins.

Edited by HeadClot
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  • 2 weeks later...

Holy *&$@ the graphics are so much better , and come on they are literally saying " you may use our work " . I say finish the next patch and spend the next 6 months transferring units and art assets to UDK so we can play on that .

 

nudge nudge

 

And I would love to see it on unreal 4 especially .

Edited by Eternity 6
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