Does POE require a new game engine? if yes how much does it gonna cost?

+1 for new engine

+1 for a new engine. Both devs and players would benefit from this.

How about an unreal engine supporter pack? YO GGG!

"

FCK42 wrote:

There's honestly no way to change the entire engine at this point.

Well that's just flat out bullshit. They 100% can change the engine at any point they please, it's only an issue of

A) is it worth the effort (and honestly, it is...when your engine can barely handle the shit going down on screen without tearing textures of crashing the game client it's time to look for cruft to fix)

B) worth the cost (OPs question) : and I don't see how it could bee THAT much of an issue with middleware engines with better resource management being available as a jumping-off point instead of starting from scratch again.

C) they care enough to bother. They've already updated parts of the lightning/rendering system, and I'm going to assume the Melee-rework is also possible another more expressed step of them working on the Client/Server, so they care enough to modernize the game at some level...now we ask if they care enough to do the rest.

Not like they code is obfuscated now that it's compiled into the client or they're under some stupid spell that prevents them from ever working on old code...

It does need a new game engine, but I doubt it will get one any time soon. Besides, it would just be too hard to do (and too expensive) for GGG to even bother with it.

As someone has already mentioned above for Bethesda - well most companies do that. They make a game engine, and then they re-use it for other games they make. It's simply more time and cost efficient that way, as game engines take a long time to make. Which also means that the chances of Path of Exile getting a new one in 4.0 are almost non-existent. Unless they started working on it years earlier, that is.

Most we can hope for is that this one will keep getting updated, and that's it.

Besides, it was already mentioned (not sure where I read that though) that Tencent will own 100% of GGG in 6 (perhaps 5 by now?) years. Don't quote me on this, but I think I've seen that Chris said they will make a new game then (or someone wrote that they hope so, I am unsure, you'll have to google a bit to find out) and that will, quite obviously, have a new engine. Of course, once they sell GGG> All we can do is wait, and hope for the best.

I dont think money is really the issue is it? not in an upfront fashion. isnt unreal free and u just give them some small chunk of profits from the game?

the cost is measured in time, and on that score its too expensive.

the day they finish a 3 month league it releases, and then the day they stop bug fixing it they start working on the next league, while working on expansions in the background. theyre literally running flat out all the time in order to keep this game afloat in the current engine.

I get the impression that skipping a league or 2 (or more) to port the entire game to a new engine and test it to release standards would literally devastate the games income in an irrecoverable fashion. I think GGG are running as fast as they can down a never ending road with a tidal wave coming 3 months behind them, if they ever stop to even catch a breath they will be swept away by the tide.

This Tencent talk is the dumbest shit.

If you think you can 'port' this game to Unreal in "one or two leagues", you have no idea what you're talking about.

"

Caiada wrote:

If you think you can 'port' this game to Unreal in "one or two leagues", you have no idea what you're talking about.

I dont think you really understand what you are reading

"

suspended_erection wrote:

+1 for a new engine. Both devs and players would benefit from this.

They wouldn't and we wouldn't. Jonathan mentioned in an interview once that no, unreal engine or any other of the widely available ones would not be an option. They simply cannot handle the sheer insanity this game would throw at them. He also said that to his knowledge, there is currently no engine better suited for running poe than it's current one.

Porting the entire game to another engine would also mean that things can break pretty bad if they're in any way, shape or form relying on core elements of the current one AND it would also mean that each and every dev would have to familiarise themselves with the new engine before they could start programming stuff again.

At the point we're at, a full engine switch would do much more harm than good.

Porting a game from its own scratch-built engine to an entirely new one is like permanently moving from your home to a foreign country. There's a very high chance that they won't speak the same language over there, and only very small parts of your current language will be understood. Cultures will be different, things that you might say or do back home can easily be offensive or downright illegal wherever you're moving to, and you'll have to adapt to a new set of rules. There may be a lot you have to give up entirely just so you can stay there. And unless you specifically make the effort to move to a nice place in the country, the scenery might not even be any different. A shithole city in one country may be more or less the same as a shithole city in another country, there might just be slightly more fog.

If you want to port your game from one engine to another, you need a flow chart to cover the possible compatibility issues and solutions. Is the language the same or similar? How much of your code needs to be rewritten? Does your team need to learn a new language? Are concepts used in your code easily translated? Can the new platform handle the thousands of calculations per millisecond that our game vomits out? Are we able to optimise our game or the engine to handle it, or do we have to manually engineer that capability ourselves? Does our license cover that? Is that even possible?

An engine doesn't just display a pretty picture to the end user. It's the entire backend of the program that makes even something as simple as picking an item up off the ground possible, and it's not as universally easy as bending down and reaching out with your arm to pick the item up with your hand. For all we know, theoretically PoE could be existing in what we'd consider a perfectly normal universe on the engine it's running now where we do just that, but ported to a new one suddenly it'd be a universe where nobody has hands and we have to learn how to flip kick the item off the ground into our mouths to pick it up. It'd be extremely cool to get it working, but hilariously impractical.

There's a heap of specifics I'm leaving out and I can't claim to be a genius on the subject, but this is just a "dummy's guide to why engine ports are hard with a sprinkling of bad jokes". Does anyone even know what language(s) PoE's engine uses? 'cause it's entirely possible that sometime in 2006 or whenever development started that they decided "hey all these existing languages suck, let's create our own derivative!", since that was a thing people were doing back in the early-to-mid-2000s. And yes, some of them were terrible.

"

Snorkle_uk wrote:

"

Caiada wrote:

If you think you can 'port' this game to Unreal in "one or two leagues", you have no idea what you're talking about.

I dont think you really understand what you are reading

Nope, it's you who doesn't understand. Everybody in this thread seems to think that a game engine is some easily swappable piece that can be just pulled out and and upgraded like a video card. It doesn't work that way at all, it's not like there is some industry standard game engine API that everyone designs their games around. Even more than that PoE has its own custom game engine written by GGG that the entire game was built up around.

People get the wrong idea because games can sometimes upgrade from one engine to a similar engine with a not too unreasonable amount of work, like upgrading from Unreal 3 to Unreal 4. This doesn't require a lot of structural changes to the game code because the engine API is basically the same. This is absolutely not reasonable for a game like PoE because it has a custom engine.

What you guys really want to be talking about is GGG spending more time upgrading the engine they have rather than putting out new content. That being said I doubt anyone would be truly happy about that as we are all spoiled by how much content GGG puts out, and it would cause even worse whining from the players than this....