As we are nearing deployment of Alpha 10, several issues within the game have been constantly present, despite Eleon’s attempts to patch these issues. One such problem at the very core of the game, is the game engine itself. It has been rife with problems throughout the game since its creation.
With every new patch, new bugs arise. In part of the current game engine, there are usage bugs that could be simply resolved more practically and more efficiently.The Unity engine, though it has served it’s purpose initially, now is unable to broaden the possibilities and the addition of extra features within the game. Therefore we propose that the development team at Eleon switch the current outdated Unity engine with another more flexible engine.
A good example would be the Unreal Engine with the Voxel Farm upgrade. Eleon would solve a host of problems with just one step, the method already exists. They could export code libraries from the Unity engine suites into the Unreal engine.
Here is an example on how much things would change within the game:
You can sign this petition and be part of the change, a change for the better:
Wow… in my opinion this is actually first real suggestion towards improving Empyrion Galactic Survival.
Watching and reading more about it. Eleon should make this priority and change engine. It would greatly encrise stabilty and would deffinetely attract more players/buyers.
It isn’t nearly that simple. It had been a while since I checked the ability to convert from Unity to Unreal so I just went and looked. There is still no easy way to convert a majority of files, though MonoUE would be very useful. Unity is closed source, a lot of stuff would be broken and require a lot of bug hunting. Converting APIs would have to be done manually and would require a lot of effort. They’d have to become fairly knowledgeable in UE’s architecture to do this.
A fair few of empyrion’s models were assets from the unity store the last time I checked (like 3 years ago). If they’re still using unity assets, they’d all have to be redone or replaced.
And one more, big thing:
Look at the unreal games vs unity games that are in the same genre. I scrolled through a list of UE4 games and found 1 game that could even be remotely compared to the style of empyrion (conan exiles). All other similar games are done in Unity (before anyone comments, Space Engineers made their own engine). Why? I can only speculate but I do know that Unity’s physics is far better than UE4. For games that are constantly changing structures/ships masses/forces/integrity you would probably want the engine that handles physics better. The videos you showed are graphics fluff. UE4 has better visuals by far but I’d venture to guess that most people playing empyrion would rather have better core gameplay than fluff.
I’m not saying that switching to unreal is a bad idea, you really wouldn’t know until it’s completely swapped. However, isn’t fair to go and say that Unity is “outdated” or “inferior” when each engine has its strengths and weaknesses. Is unity perfect? No. Is UE perfect? No. Would a switch from Unity to UE be worth the time invested and core gameplay changes? In my opinion, knowing some of the basic technical limitations of both engines, no.
As someone with a slight bit of know-how when it comes to programming, I can tell you it’s not unity’s fault. The engine is just a framework for the code you put on it. Unity is a very flexible and capable engine, and it’s been used in some massive titles in the past, they’ve all had no performance issues.
The problem isn’t the engine, the problem is Eleon’s thinking.
They haven’t done any optimization patches since season 7. They believe features are more important right now then optimization. The truth is, the more things you add to a game, the greater the “technical debt” becomes. That’s eleon’s number one issue. Technical debt, and they need a good couple of months or even a year to sort it all out.
You can read more about technical debt and it’s causes here
It’s very common in the indie game space, as it comes down to the fact that indie developers don’t actually know what their final product will look like. They have a general idea but really, it comes down whatever they want to work on in that particular week. That’s fine, but leaving problems to fix in future is a bit like last minute cram study, it’s not good!
I’m unconvinced switching to UE4 is worth the investment of lost developer time trying to learn a new engine and use it. Also Unity is “free”, UE4 isn’t, so a switch would not only cost more in terms of retooling and learning time, but also cost annually to keep it’s license intact. As others mentioned, the voxel stuff UE4 has isn’t quite best-of-breed when it comes to that. If anything, it might help fix the netcode problems, at the risk of bankrupting the game because it now has to pay an annual license in order to continue development.
While I’m certain Eleon is past the free copy of Unity, it’s price point allows them to continue development without paying a lot in terms of licensing costs to order to keep development going. Compare this to UE4, which wants a 15% cut of Eleon’s revenue, on top of Steam’s 30% cut. It’s not a great look (unless they were to switch to Epic’s store, but then lose a shitton of players in the process). If they were back in pre-alpha 2015, and fortnite existed back in 2013, then it would’ve been a good move, but now their too invested into Steam/unity to throw that away on such a gamble.
They have done some optimizations since Empy’s inception:
They included Zirax shits
Updated Zirax shits model
Updated Zirax shits model (HD)
Implemented Zirax squatting
Put those models together
Updated models, now using 12 shades of brown
Zirax lavatories included (to keep them from squatting at random)
DayZ went downhill in a hurry. I played when it was fun before they ruined it. It’s still unfinished and the “infected” have to do a dumbass animation of screaming at the sky before chasing. I don’t see any Ebola cases of screaming at their unwashed feet before urinating in a humidifier after attending the “licking of the corpse” ritual.
So, yea. Not a valid comparison. I can at least stand to play empy over DayZ.
Its hilarious to assume switching engines would fix any problems at all, even the last update to the newer unity version was delayed due to it causing more issues.
I could compare the engines but lets make an analogy instead, hey my 4cyl (unity) is running badly i’m going to switch to a v8 (unreal) I think it will run better. that’s literally whats being said here the v8 can have more horsepower but it simply doesn’t fit, unity being smaller allows for more add on’s. Also they both get to the same speed on the highway (analogy to optimization) but one will always use less gas (time/money) making it more efficient. In either case assuming you wont need massive amounts of work to fit one into another car (game) or that it wont cause more issues is idiotic. As someone else once mentioned the real problem is band aid fixes or “technical debt” piling up. That wont even be effected by the game engine at all.
I could go on but I think this gets the point across for now.
