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The new graphics engine


Skybird03

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Not every free engine does what we need. Engines that may do what we need usually cost license fees. If the license fees exceed the cost of a programmer developing a new engine over the course of X months and the opportunity costs of him not doing something else instead, it's more cost efficient to do it by yourself. Besides, even if you take an off the shelf solution, you still have to make it work with your application. This integration work will also cost some time. Sometimes almost as much as creating what you need from ground up.

Either way, your "own" engine gives you full control over anything that you want to do with it. That's a definitive plus. Some open source engines come with license conditions to make the resulting product open source as well. This "license infection" is a very serious problem, so we're not going to touch it, not even with a ten foot pole.

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Full speed ahead and damn the older hardware please. We spent 125 USD on this (and a couple of 25's) so I'll buy a new card if I need to. The newer the better (DX11.1 on Win8 for example now) Normal maps, tesselation, soft shadows, displacement maps, PhysX, whatever. All of the above. Sims only get gfx engine love every few years you know, make it count!

Thanks :)

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Well its going to be OpenGL based, but I understand what you are trying to say.

*Shock & Horror*

You mean to say that we could run SB on *Gasps* Linux??!

*Bah Bah Bum!*

:biggrin:

Still I can see that moving to Open Gl would be better, as SB won't be as tied down to whatever Holy Decrees Microsoft makes in the future, well more or less.

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*Shock & Horror*

You mean to say that we could run SB on *Gasps* Linux??!

*Bah Bah Bum!*

No, at least not immediately so. We're just uncoupling the 3D render calls from DirectX. There are still a lot of other DirectX function calls in the code. This isn't done over night.

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I will not join the speculation about what parts of the existing artwork may or may not get updated. We're not developing a new game from scratch. We're giving a very old game from 1999 its second new engine and trying to apply new paint and filling some holes where things look worst. At the same time we also have to add new stuff in other areas.

Getting into this discussion is another excellent example why it usually is a bad idea to discuss ongoing development at all before it is ready for public presentation. You don't get to see scenes and photos from a movie set, say, The Hobbibt, until at least a raw cut is completed. Then a trailer is being made and released to the public. In the days before the final product is being release to the theaters - that is, when all the work is actually done you then also get a few TV pieces of "behind the scenes" to promote the product. But you just don't get to hear a discussion between director, script writer, and maybe a few actors while the whole movie production is still in full swing. It simply creates the wrong impressions about how the final product will look like when there are gaffers and carpenters walking left and right on the stage/in the studio and the actors are rehearsing their scenes with makeshift props instead of the real stuff.

I shouldn't even have mentioned that the new engine would be OpenGL based, because it won't as I learned a few hours ago. That was an idea proposed months ago, then dropped, and I just happened to miss the memo about it. And really, it shouldn't matter anyway as long as the end result is looking good and performing well. While I don't want to say that these technical matters are entirely irrelevant, I am not ashamed to say that I leave details like that to the lead programmer and the engine developer. I have full confidence in their ability to make the best choice there.

:)

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I am not ashamed to say that I leave details like that to the lead programmer and the engine developer. I have full confidence in their ability to make the best choice there.

:)

Spoken like a true director! :biggrin:

Still, can I ask, is anything being done with the bastard child of SB, the YPR series, it is, um, showing it's age.

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"It won't be OpenGL"

I considered that good news. Not that I hate OpenGL just that NVIDIA has a way to cheat OpenGL so performance is usually inferior or much inferior than the counterpart, at least that's what I learned from past experience. I honestly thought about not buying SB Pro PE with second engine if it was to be based on OpenGL.

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