Neverwinter Game Engine

stpensive · September 2016

It's well known that the game engine for Neverwinter (all Cryptic games if I am not mistaken) was built in-house. It's a fine product but it's hard to argue that it not without it's shortcomings (steep frame-rate dips being he most noteworthy) and it is starting to show some age when compared to the products produced with other engines.

If it is at all answerable by the powers that be, are there any plans that focus on updating \ replacing the core engine of Neverwinter? I would be satisfied with a simple 'Yes' or 'No' but any elaboration would be appreciated.

Thanks for talking my call, Ill hang up and listen.

kvet · September 2016

I believe this has been asked before and the answer given was "no" - but @panderus maybe could weigh in?

I can tell you though, that with any game of this complexity, changing out the engine is no small task. It's not like changing shoes.... it would require a complete (or near-complete) rewrite of the entire game, many of the supporting tools, and would constitute a huge learning curve (if not outright turnover) for the dev team... It's just not that simple.

stpensive · September 2016

The work that is involved is not lost on me; the company I work for created an engine around DX12 from scratch (Ashes of the Singularity). It's incredible the time and effort the devs spent on it. You are also spot on regarding the tools; the engine could be the new wheel but without a supporting tool-set its just lines of code...

And I want to be clear on one thing; there is no veiled criticism of the current core here; it renders the game well enough and in some areas; beautify. That said, there are just certain aspects of it that expose real areas of concern - ones that have been discussed since launch (again, crushing frame rate issues being the most notable).

tripsofthrymr · September 2016

I'm no expert on game engines, but do wonder if the current game engine needs to be replaced in order to address some of the concerns. Perhaps some attention to improving the existing engine would be worthwhile. Since many games use the same engine, the cost would be amortized across all of them.

solbergx · September 2016

Man i have played many MMORPG out there, and i wonder why NW is not top rated?

And i see they all have high fps in gameplay,maybe we could fix this first, there are lots of players with 4GB video card and they still get 20fps on protector enclave, maybe we should optimize the game first.

nathanjm · September 2016

I'd think there are some PS4/XBoxOne optimizations that could usefully feed back to the PC version. Using Microsoft's Task Manager, the NW client is a 32-bit process that rarely takes up more than 2 cores (50% of CPU on a 4-core box, 25% of CPU on an 8-core box).

The PS4/XBoxOne consoles are 64-bit boxes with 6-8 weaker (laptop-grade) cores. 64-bit amd64 code tends to run faster with the doubled register pool causing less spilling. Additionally, to take proper advantage of the 6+ cores available, I would expect they made the game engine more multithreaded. Both of these would be an advantage on PCs.

I assume the launcher collects enough system stats (similar to Steam's hardware survey) that lets them know how many users are still stuck on 32-bit boxes, WindowsXP, or anything that would prevent some from updating. DX12 requires Win10 and a DX12 capable GPU, which really restricts the market.

Unknown · September 2016

This content has been removed.

Unknown · September 2016

This content has been removed.

diogene0 · September 2016

First it's not a "fine product" at all. If anything, it's the biggest pile of garbage i've ever seen in an online game in years. It's so broken in many ways that it's probably not worth fixing it at all. I'm not just talking about the graphics. They're unoptimized as hell but an engine is more than that: animations, damage model, and so on. There are maybe 15 years of legacy and no one at cryptic probably wants to deal with that HAMSTER. At this point they're (hopefully) going to just get a licence for UE4 or the cryengine for their next game and move on. But Neverwinter will keep this old and broken HAMSTER.

Want to know where all the game breaking bugs come from? This wonderful engine.

perklyss · October 2016

nathanjm said:
"DX12 requires Win10 and a DX12 capable GPU, which really restricts the market."

True but remember you can have DX9, DX10, DX11 and DX12 all on Windows 10 no problem.
The question is can they write the game to use at least two of them, many games due give the option and now
DOOM 2016 allows you to pick between opengl and Vulkan. We are only as limited as our imaginations ;-)

yokki1 · October 2016

perklyss said:
nathanjm said:

"DX12 requires Win10 and a DX12 capable GPU, which really restricts the market."

True but remember you can have DX9, DX10, DX11 and DX12 all on Windows 10 no problem.

The question is can they write the game to use at least two of them, many games due give the option and now

DOOM 2016 allows you to pick between opengl and Vulkan. We are only as limited as our imaginations ;-)

the level of programmers working on id software is much higher than cryptic. that is a fact. doom is terribly well optimized. they need to hire more ppl here with as much knowledge as possible.

darkstarrfoff · October 2016

You guys realize a large chunk of performance issues is probably due to the fact they are using CPU based PhysX. It can't be offloaded to GPU either. That's a big part of why the game uses a ton of CPU power rather than being GPU limited. They are also, for some odd reason, using debug dlls (on the live branch as well as preview), PhysX3CommonDEBUG_x86.dll, PhysX3CookingDEBUG_x86.dll, and PhysX3DEBUG_x86.dll. Usually debug versions tend to be slower, if that's true for PhysX I cant say but no other games I use/play ship debug versions of PhysX.

candinho2 · October 2016

nathanjm said:
I'd think there are some PS4/XBoxOne optimizations that could usefully feed back to the PC version. Using Microsoft's Task Manager, the NW client is a 32-bit process that rarely takes up more than 2 cores (50% of CPU on a 4-core box, 25% of CPU on an 8-core box).

The PS4/XBoxOne consoles are 64-bit boxes with 6-8 weaker (laptop-grade) cores. 64-bit amd64 code tends to run faster with the doubled register pool causing less spilling. Additionally, to take proper advantage of the 6+ cores available, I would expect they made the game engine more multithreaded. Both of these would be an advantage on PCs.

I assume the launcher collects enough system stats (similar to Steam's hardware survey) that lets them know how many users are still stuck on 32-bit boxes, WindowsXP, or anything that would prevent some from updating. DX12 requires Win10 and a DX12 capable GPU, which really restricts the market.

Actualy dx 12 doesn't require a dx 12 capable video card, that was the main ads about dx 12, it is suppossedly to boost even old cards performance.

stpensive · October 2016

darkstarrfoff said:
You guys realize a large chunk of performance issues is probably due to the fact they are using CPU based PhysX. It can't be offloaded to GPU either. That's a big part of why the game uses a ton of CPU power rather than being GPU limited.

This stuns me... Why?

Also, with CryEngine (free), Unreal (free-ish), Unity, and Lumberyard (Amazon and based on CryEngine), there is no shortage of options.

Again, its not lost on me the time and effort it would take to start using AAA engines like these but it just seems Cryptic needs to consider them as options to what they are using now.

tripsofthrymr · October 2016

stpensive said:

Again, its not lost on me the time and effort it would take to start using AAA engines like these but it just seems Cryptic needs to consider them as options to what they are using now.

They may very well be considering a newer engine... for future titles. As much as I would love to see it, it doesn't seem like an economical choice to invest significant dev cycles in reworking current titles with a new engine.

kvet · October 2016

They do have another game in the works, but it's super secret right now.

playersnoopy · October 2016

A game engine that can barely support 20 users per zone... ya... get rid of the first M in MMORPG first of all... and scrap the engine and move on. I'm sure none of the original developers of the engine itself are still around and if they were should be taken out to pasture.

sameriker · October 2016

stpensive said:
It's well known that the game engine for Neverwinter (all Cryptic games if I am not mistaken) was built in-house. It's a fine product but it's hard to argue that it not without it's shortcomings (steep frame-rate dips being he most noteworthy) and it is starting to show some age when compared to the products produced with other engines.

If it is at all answerable by the powers that be, are there any plans that focus on updating \ replacing the core engine of Neverwinter? I would be satisfied with a simple 'Yes' or 'No' but any elaboration would be appreciated.

Thanks for talking my call, Ill hang up and listen.

Fine product... roflol, fine mess, you should see the comments made by the programmers. This topic has not only been rehashed for this game but many other online games in a dozen different forums. The game engine is the property of Cryptic Studios, they don't pay out money for a license. Monthly rent on a AAA game engine license would cut deep into their profits. Even "free" software normally contains some legal caveats about commercial use.

Guild Wars (2006) by ArenaNet is still sold online today, after 11 years people still buy it, and the engine is still the same one from 2006. I still play once in a while. I seldom hear the players complaining about the engine, graphics, or frame rate. They complain because the developer moved on to make the sequel and stopped producing new content for the original. Meanwhile the sequel has better graphics, a great models, and fewer players than the original. Where did it go wrong? Content and game play. Players want the "new shiny" and a game with better content and more stuff to collect is where it pays off.

Yes, players do notice the dragons tend to levitate 8 feet off the ground in some battles. The network gets bottle-necked and you get major lags. But they keep playing and paying for more content. The psychology is the player with the most stuff wins. As for DirectX and Windows 10, many of the people you are playing with are from Europe, Asia, South America, and many don't have the newest machine on their desk. If you want to sell your product to the world, you have to make it available to all and not just the select few. Personally I don't care for Windows 10 and I made my new computer dual boot and put my old Windows XP SP3 on it. So far this game seems to like it. My old micro PC was reformatted as a Linux box and you can read what I did with it here.

stpensive · October 2016

sameriker said:
As for DirectX and Windows 10, many of the people you are playing with are from Europe, Asia, South America, and many don't have the newest machine on their desk. If you want to sell your product to the world, you have to make it available to all and not just the select few.

What you may be overlooking is their console population. I would venture to say that the combined console player base (active users) is on par, if not greater, than that of the PC. This generation of consoles can do more than what this engine is asking of them. With the PS4 pro and Scorpio on the way, IMHO, it would be very unfortunate if the whole of the game is held back by the people who still run PCs that are outperformed by most modern cell phones.

Neverwinter Game Engine

Comments