Ki-Ok Khan said:
Maybe this?
You may find a lot of similar videos about other engines. Such things are important part of communication between developers and rest of the world, they attract but do not answer questions.
MadVader said:
Good questions, perhaps you need a custom engine to optimize it for a large number of actors, their animations, AI and pathfinding, and it's not merely a vanity project…
Osvaldon said:
A custom engine, created for the needs of a specific game, can provide better performance…
Usually if you do approximately the same as others it’s impossible to win the race if you started significantly later. Time is very material.
Having less time you may try to be better in some of aspects but only sacrificing a lot of others. But comparing with competitors we usually have to aggregate and these few aspects may become negligible in the whole picture.
Working better with some parts of the scene and being poor with all others may leave no chance to achieve good quality and fps for overall scene.
DanAngleland said:
… why on earth nobody else is making games with anything remotely near M&B's NPC and real player numbers if that is the case- and player/NPC count is just one facet of M&B.
The question «why do not others do that» makes sense only under very specific conditions.
If they are not met the short and straightforward answer: they don’t want.
There are a variety of games that similar to different aspects of WB, some have horses, some have a lot NPC or players, some have melee fights, some are sandbox, and the fact that they are not copy of WB do not make them that unpopular.
DanAngleland said:
extensively modifying it before eventually running into brick walls.
Osvaldon said:
But the most important part of having a custom engine is that there are no limits to what you can do with it when developing your game.
Yes. That’s usually one of the main point of redevelopment — control over source code, no limit etc. Even opensource projects if they are huge do not give enough control and freedom. Understanding and changing the code that is not yours is a difficult problem. However developing from the scratch you also may eventually run into a wall, because limits exist anyway. And if for a stable engine this wall is from shiny brick and well-documented, your personal wall will be from vague strained glass appeared suddenly from «nothing».
Harmi said:
Why didn't they do it then? They wanted to keep the rich modding culture going on.
Some of games on mentioned UE have very rich modding culture too.
kalarhan said:
which is better? Again that would be a boring business discussion, not something for a reply on a blog discussion.
Yup, that’s why I don't ask to compare new BL engine, UE and Unity from the point of whole business process. Reformulating my question I'm interesting how opinion of developers changed for 5(I'm not sure here) of developing. My question is not about business but about personal feelings.
It was the start of the way. And you took a hard decision. Now after a long way making final steps, what are the thoughts about the first steps? Are their now completely the same?