Terrain Physics, day night cycle,dynamic sky with volumetric 3d clouds, voxel ground surface, 25 square km map,wind, water, meteors, fully interactive global illumination, stable 60fps 1080p on a 1080Ti. How much of a headache would be for developers to change Empyrion's engine?
That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. I bet there are many, many miles of spaghetti code that could be cleaned out.
That depends. I'm sure there are many people here who would be happy sell out some extra cash if asked. You might even be able to convenience me to throw some money at them on the condition that it was going to an experienced programmer and there was a clear vision for what the games systems should look like under the hood.
Yeah but all our cash combined is insignificant. You're looking at about a million dollars minimum to create an empyrion 2 using a different engine. They would need outside funding for that, and many people still consider empyrion not feature complete (though I've certainly gotten my money's worth). But honestly knowing what is possible in empyrion versus what they have so far, it's far better that they work on completing the game they have. Empyrion 2 can come way later.
Oh, I wasn't suggesting scrapping the current game in favor of a reboot in a new engine. It would be crazy to just throw away all that work not to mention the ill will it would cause for exactly the reasons you mentioned. I just meant that it would probably benefit them greatly to work on their code base and depending on exactly what needs to be changed it may be better to just rewrite it in increments. It would be difficult and requires planning but not its impossible. As for funding...Steam Charts state that the game had 2,255.2 players in the last 30 day. So, yeah, even making some rather generous assumption about how much the player base is willing to invest, its just not enough. The other option would be going with a publisher and that has its own set of problems. That said, if they could convenience people that they were finally ready to put on their big boy pants and get serious they might be able to drum up some support.
This is just a demo with no AI, critters, no trees, no water, in a 5 x 5 km terrain, etc. Not sure it would run easily with all of Empyrion's actiual content, with 32 x 64 km terrains (that's 2048 sq. km compared to the 25 sq. km of this demo), Empyrion doesn't need another engine, it just needs more work in some key areas, and no amount of game engine goodies will do that work for the developers, not even in UE5.
At a certain level you have to acknowledge that the "wow" here it isn't really about any specific game but the capabilities of the latest game that exploits what's currently doable using the latest (or last) generation of tools. Abstractly the things that set Empyrion apart from other survival games is that it's future tech with travel between worlds in procedurally generated universe galaxy, solar system, and world level maps. It allows the player to build structures, vehicles, and assembly POIs using a block-based mechanism that's fairly easy to pick up and then share in the Steam workshop metaphor. That last one is/was critical to adoption since it allowed Eleon to crowd source the screen shots and YouTube vids that make you realize what's doable. Once you apply that taxonomy there are less than a handful (i.e. "count your fingers and allow for playing with firecrackers and power tools in a misspent youth") of games that fall into the Venn diagram intersection. Personally I don't care about backward compatibility and who's working the crank- if somebody decides to do the same thing again using the latest and greatest tools then more power to them … it's called progress. Based on a quick review of what the author has published, this toolset seems to lend itself to purpose built maps (think "Ark", "Quake", etc.) with an author laboring away behind the scenes as opposed to raw procedural gen. Using these tools in the context of procedural generation would require some sort of abstraction. I may be missing something (easy bet!) but this toolbox seems to be one where worlds get crafted by somebody as opposed to gen'd. That would fit better in milieu where warping was technology that takes place outside an x/y/z view of space (i.e. a jump is more like using the model of Flying Buffalo's Starweb (think TV show "Star Gate") where travel between systems is more abstract and the places you go have already been curated to be worth visiting as determined by the ancients (i.e. "the devs") as opposed to a unique each time sort of experience.
