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Should STO get its own engine?
daedalus304
Member Posts: 1,049 Arc User
Should STO finally get it's own specifically tailored engine?
new fetures, making updates more effective, including what would make STO really Star Trek worthy?
Genesis 2?
Ship combat and ground combat overhaul, weapon details, new customizations? (being able to show what weapons you have equiped on your ship)
would this be worth a Kickstarter?
new fetures, making updates more effective, including what would make STO really Star Trek worthy?
Genesis 2?
Ship combat and ground combat overhaul, weapon details, new customizations? (being able to show what weapons you have equiped on your ship)
would this be worth a Kickstarter?
Post edited by daedalus304 on
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I go along with that. yep agreed.
All that is possible in this engine, it's just a matter of time and resources.
It's pretty much this hard to keep just one timeline intact. ♪
The engine is the core of the MMO and changing it could create massive problems in the long run. So asking for a new engine is asking for Star Trek Online 2.
This, exactly.
And not to be.. uh... rude, but Cryptic has a habit of saying "Oh X isn't possible within our game." They did it constantly in CoH. Then the "New and Improved" dev team came along and did almost every 'X' the playerbase asked for.
Cryptic follows their passion. Not ours. Which isn't entirely a bad thing, but it does mean we aren't always going to get exactly what we want.
Also, a new engine isn't needed for MOST things. The only things I think that may (but, in fact, may not) require a different engine would be space travel, the ability to roll or go inverted in a ship.
Other than that, even if the engine has limits, you can "fake" most things, getting the desired result without the need to adapt to a new engine.
Hey , why not ?
Cryptic excel at taking an idea , adding an impossible time frame and running with it .
Mind you we'd end up with another buggy mess , while Cryptic runs along to the next "project" , but hey , it's possible ... .
What they need to do is expand on what the existing engine can do, not make a new one.
QFT
There would be no reason to create an entirely new engine from scratch. Those things could just be added to the existing engine. However, priorities, and resources are not boundless, and thus, some things fall by the way side. If you think that creating a new engine from scratch will somehow require fewer resources than updating our existing engine, I would like to know what color the sky is in your world.
As for "X isn't possible in our engine," you should always tag "as it stands now" onto the end of that. Anything is possible with enough time, money, programmers, and mountain dew thrown at it. However, there are things that cannot be done in the engine 'as it stands now.'
The engine revamp from COH to Champs was a nice idea, but really ended up being an immense pain. Trying to develop a new game at the same time as a new engine is not something I advise anyone to try. While today, our engine is better than it used to be, it took years to get there.
Personally, the most important tech issue to improve is the fact that the engine prevents Gravity Well from having a better -repel level.
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Joined October 2009. READ BEFORE POSTING
I don't care how long you've been playing. I only care about how you play.
And remember to follow the rules.
Additionally, a lot of your engine is modular.
If it's graphics people don't like, you can get a new graphics engine without a new game engine. Of course, then, that means redoing every asset in game. But if you have something like capes/loithcloth clipping as a pet peeve, that may change as the physics engine gets updated. And Cryptic changed how textures were handled in LoR.
The audio is handled by the FMOD engine. Cryptic doesn't fully take advantage of that engine as-is.
It really doesn't take a whole new engine.
I mean, you want more detailed faces, you know what would fix that faster than a new engine? A second complexion overlay.
The question I always have when people start/support these threads is what features do they think a new engine would bring? What features do you want the game to have?
You really don't need a new engine for that.
Heck, one seamless world (ground and space and all missions) without loadscreens wouldn't require a new engine. It would just require a lot of tricks (a LOT) and make it so that 95% of people who play the game couldn't play it anymore due to system requirements. The reason they don't do that isn't so much engine. It's because it isn't realistic for a multiplayer game and because there are design reasons to segregate people.
I'm not sure you should be throwing Mountain Dew at computers.
I would have to concur with this statement. Actually, I am not sure Mountain Dew is the answer to anything, but I could be bias against it. Not a fan of the Dew.
Im running an Intel i7 with 8GB DDR3 ram and 2 overclocked Geforce 670's in SLI and i get horrific performance.... In Most modern games at max settings i get between 100 - 300 FPS, in STO im lucky if i hit 60, and even when i do the crappy engine is trying to melt my GPU's and CPU's....
Ohh and their Anti aliasing engine needs fixed as well.... i ended up resorting to disabling the TRIBBLE ingame AA and using my SLI to give me x64 AA and theres still some jaggies
*Ok, there's the UI issue with failure to accept and relay inputs that cuts across all of Cryptic's games. That may be an issue with code that is considered part of the engine. But it's something that really should be a tractable problem without ditching everything else. They've just never successfully tracted it.
The developers have no reason to change from the current system since it is fulfilling it's desired purpose, which is generating profit and a change in that dynamic could have unpredictable consequences, with abandoning the franchise as likely an outcome as changing to a new engine.
The only thing that would drive a change to a new engine is if there were a near global shift to a new system architecture that is incompatible with X86 based software, forcing developers to embrace the new technology if they want to stay competitive, but such a scenario is unlikely to take place for the foreseeable future.
My biggest "complaint" about the game, or rather, biggest wish, would be to give Space a spacey feel. Get rid of the shoeboxed-in wall-feel of outerspace. And I've read dstahl's comments about what an undertaking that would be (basically that would be a whole Season, with nothing new/else added), so I get it. But a boy can dream...
:rolleyes:
You can find/contact me in game as @PatricianVetinari. Playing STO since Feb 2010.
Well, you know, SWG was very close to that. Each planet was a seamless enviroment, indoort and outdoor. And each planetary space again seamless as well, including ship interior with multiple players manning and operating different stations on the ship on a multiplayer ship.
And in the end it had atmospheric flight, but i'm not sure if the seamlessless was extended form your house into space with it or not.
Project infinitive however has exactly that that feature. seamless from anywhere to everywhere. But that project is taking its sweat time.
Engines like BigWorld also allow for seamless environments across the game.
Well, if you wanted that, I suppose they could do something like remastering each mission as an adventure zone.
I still think it would be considerably more possible with ship interior being used for sector travel since it could preload the assets of your destination and they could conceivably load bridges/interiors on every map as well to make the load time almost nonexistant.
But, of course, that would be work for art, content, and code folks. Just less work than a new engine. :-)
They would have to design the subsystems and implement them in their build but it can be done.
Further they could use the Unreal engine used for "Mass Effect" for ground and in ship game play to enhance the overall experience.
They could use a single server array that can serve PC and console clients that way all gamers can get in on the STO experience. Using these engines they could make NPC bots more intelligent create system traffic, and add distinct character to the game environment.
I had been trying to do something like this for years but it's beyond me and maybe these guys can solve some of the problems I had with server swapping, and client capacity. Check out the screenshots and gameplay of Independence War 2 at http://i-wars.com/
Yes it would be a big job but the resulting game world would be phenomenal.
Especially if they could duplicate the existing themes and missions with the new gamplay elements.
I seriously doubt that STO would get its own engine though; it would probably be a generalized update to all Cryptic games. Rather it would be an engine built with STO's needs in mind and designed to accommodate those needs, rather than building the game around the deficiencies.
That said, if this ever happens, there will be two months of horrors that will make the LoR launch look like a cake walk, most likely.