Lets make PlaneShift Unreal

[Talad]

Let me answer to some of the questions.

CrystalSpace: the engine is not dead, and we will continue to use it for the current version of PlaneShift. But we feel CS cannot provide us the next generation of features. One of the major points we struggle with is the tools pipeline (easily importing/manipulating art). I agree it's sad CrystalSpace cannot be better than Unreal, I felt it could with more people working on it, but it's not happening.

Open Source: Unreal provides all the sources, which is amazing for such an advanced engine. Even if it's open source itself, it allows other projects like us to still publish our code with an OSI approved license (example Apache or BSD), so to me the spirit of PlaneShift doesn't change. Our objective has been always to have an open development, allowing contributions and ensure we build the game with the community. This is even more true with Unreal.

Win/Mac/Linux: The support of different platforms is way greater in Unreal than CrystalSpace. It's true Linux is not their primary goal, but I feel this is an area were the community will contribute a lot, and I'm positive it will become solid enough.

Hardware requirements: Unreal capabilities to downscale graphics are good, in developing the art , we will be conscious of keeping it reasonable.

Where to start to help: The best way is to connect to the chat channel mentioned above and discuss with me or other devs, as we are building right now a more detailed plan. In any case downloading the engine and installing it on your machine is the first step. Then follow the tutorials based on your area, art or code. Download some examples (there are plenty) and see how those are built. Some are just made of "blueprints" which are a UI-driven way of programming, and so accessible also to the less techy people.

How long it will take: My current guess is about 2 years, but I think we can speed this up a lot with additional contributors. That's why we decided to uncover our plans and ask the community to join.

[Talad]

I added a new picture on main site and here for the article, which is actually a picture taken from unreal engine, where we loaded hydlaa and a kran waving. It's a screenshot inside the game editor, notice the real time shadows. Graphics will anyway look much better when launched in game and with proper lighting. At the moment is blurry, not sure why.

[redhound]

Great news!  Hope this transition won't take long and we will enjoy brand-new PlaneShift un-realistic look & feel pretty soon. A big loss for CrystalSpace, though...

[redhound]

Aside from graphics, which aspects of the game would be affected by Unreal engine transition?

[Duec2]

This sounds like a good system to use for PS, however can you help me with a few things I do not understand:

1) What is the minimum requirements for each system to play using this new program (for windows, mac, Linux)?
2) Will we have the options to hide details like grass or shadows if we would like?
3) Will this program allow for quicker updates in the future?
4) Will this program allow us to choose a "gore level" so it will not be too bloody for younger players or people that just do not want to see that sort of thing?

That is about it for now. 

[Volki]

4) Will this program allow us to choose a "gore level" so it will not be too bloody for younger players or people that just do not want to see that sort of thing?

If you have an issue with gore, then this is probably not the right game for you. As of now there are no gibs or decals from combat. I don't know if the developers are going to put those in the game. I hope they do at some point, but most games with that feature give you the option to control the number of decals so your computer isn't bogged down.

[Pierre]

This is exactly the game for you if you don't like gore!!  There are so many full professions that have nothing to do with combat, e.g. cooking, alchemy, mage (non-combat spells, tons of them), adventurer, crafter, miner, metal-worker, fisherperson, many more.  Any creature parts you need you can get from other players and you can avoid the aggressive mobs we have.

And your RP won't have any gore.  I suspect that this game, even on Unreal and fully fleshed out, is not going to be heavy on bloody things, it's just not the Yliakum vibe that I get.

Look at that happy waving double shadow kran    Not even a stubbed toe in that screeny, see?

EDIT:  Of course, there are plenty of ways to be a bloody limb ripping warrior, hunter, outlaw, etc. if that's your role.

[helios21]

While I am happy to see a decision to move to a more advanced engineā€¦

This is exactly the game for you if you don't like gore!!  There are so many full professions that have nothing to do with combat, e.g. cooking, alchemy, mage (non-combat spells, tons of them), adventurer, crafter, miner, metal-worker, fisherperson, many more.  Any creature parts you need you can get from other players and you can avoid the aggressive mobs we have.

And your RP won't have any gore.  I suspect that this game, even on Unreal and fully fleshed out, is not going to be heavy on bloody things, it's just not the Yliakum vibe that I get.

For me this is a critical feature of the game. If it would force me to see gore in order to play it, I know I am out. I am not into seeing blood or splatter for my recreational gaming activity and sooo many other games fail to address this need of mine. I also do not want to see the inside of a consumer or anything like this.

My chars donĀ“t kill anyway, but I also donĀ“t want to see it if some other chars kills a mob nearby.

So my plea is to have any gore as an opt-in for those who want to see it.

I am also concerned about moving to engine that is not free as in freedom software.

Has openscenegraphĀ¹, Torque3DĀ² and GodotEngineĀ³ been considered?

[1] https://openmw.org/2015/announcing-switch-openscenegraph/
http://www.openscenegraph.org/
https://github.com/openscenegraph/osg/blob/master/LICENSE.txt
(based on LGPL)

[2] https://www.garagegames.com/products/torque-3d/ (MIT Licensed)

[3] http://www.godotengine.org/ (MIT License)

Thanks,

[LigH]

(4) OGRE has been discussed earlier, too...

[CheatCat]

Open Scene Graph would require building a own game engine. As I understand this game is based a lot on Crystal Space that includes much more that graphics rendering.

This sounds like a good system to use for PS, however can you help me with a few things I do not understand:

1) What is the minimum requirements for each system to play using this new program (for windows, mac, Linux)?
2) Will we have the options to hide details like grass or shadows if we would like?
3) Will this program allow for quicker updates in the future?
4) Will this program allow us to choose a "gore level" so it will not be too bloody for younger players or people that just do not want to see that sort of thing?

That is about it for now.

1) https://www.unrealengine.com/faq If you computer barley can run Planeshift now, you might need a new or a upgrade.
3) This have little to do with upgrades. The devs might be able to work quicker perhaps. I found the UDK level editor simple and fast to work with, compared to blender for example.

This is however just as I think.

[Roled]

RR is a technoresister to some extent... 
yet

By the Gods I hope my basic Windows laptop will run this other kind of engine... for those of us without supercomputers and with little interest in building or modifying the client- will we still be able to download and run this new system by pressing the download button, waiting a bit, then logging in?

Twice in my 8 years ig I've had to buy different kinds of laptops without Intel just to try to run PS  - resulting in months of not being able to get in game at all.    

I am sure you smart techie types have consider us non techie types? 

Looking for reassurances, I am,
RR the techno avoiding elf

[Talad]

Hi, and thanks for all the feedbak, here are some answers to the questions above.

1) What is the minimum requirements for each system to play using this new program (for windows, mac, Linux)?
We expect to have all options needed to run also on lower systems. Unreal has options you can tweak to lower the resolution, shaders, etc... so I don't envision problems at the moment.

2) Will we have the options to hide details like grass or shadows if we would like?
Yes, we will take care of this aspect, also Unreal has good LOD (Level of Detail) management for all assets, and we can add some options for lower level graphics.

3) Will this program allow for quicker updates in the future?
Updates will still be based on the number of developers present in the team. What I'm expecting is to find more developers thanks to the updated tools we can use to add content to the game. Will surely help the speed of additions.

4) Will this program allow us to choose a "gore level" so it will not be too bloody for younger players or people that just do not want to see that sort of thing?
Not sure where this question comes from, there is no gore in PS and I expect to keep it similar in the new engine.

5) Has openscenegraphĀ¹, Torque3DĀ² and GodotEngineĀ³ been considered?
We did a detailed analysis of different engines and Unreal has come out as the best one for our needs, also including the compatibility with an open source license. Changing the engine is a MAJOR effort, and requires a very robust and widespread engine, on which we can have support from their community. At the moment we are doing a proof of concept to see how complex this porting will be.

[Salamanderrake]

This sounds great, but I'm curious about a few things:

1. Does this mean there will be a slowdown in the development of the current game? (division of man hours)
2. How different do you think the hardware requirements might be for the unreal branch?
3. Do you think the unreal branch is likely to run on Linux? ( either native or via wine )

1.) Not a PS dev so that one I don't know about.
2.) For windows again I don't have a clue, but for linux you will need a 64 bit OS. UE4 can do opengl 3.2 and 4.2 level of graphics so if your system meets those requirements then you already have a good start, if not its time to come out of the early 2000's On linux like any other game out there, you will have issues with amd cards, just let the people in #UE4Linux on freenode know and we can (try at best) help you through these issues, if not we can point you in the right direction to report the issue.
3.) You can compile and run the Editor in linux so you definitly run the games you make for linux on it, its more of choice and not technical issues that stop developers who are using UE4 to port their games to linux.

System requirements for the editor(not a game)
 Desktop PC or Mac (or Linux, unofficial atm)
 Windows 7 64-bit or Mac OS X 10.9.2 or later, (again Linux 64bit ubuntu based distor (centos7, opensuse 13.2, gentoo will also work fine but arch has some issues atm) , unofficial)
 Quad-core Intel or AMD processor, 2.5 GHz or faster
 NVIDIA GeForce 470 GTX or AMD Radeon 6870 HD series card or higher( an GTX 750 ti works fine, you will need to turn down some graphics stuff in the editor though)
 8 GB RAM (on linux for development you probably want no less then 16 GB of ram, mainly because of shader compiliation)

UE4 will run on desktops and laptops below these recommendations, but performance may be limited.

https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Linux_Support
https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Linux_Demos (note these demos were cross compiled from windows to linux.)

There are a ton of settings that you can turn on or off in regards to level of graphics the game will use, all the PS devs need to do is to add the options to the menus ( hint hint hint), Seriouly UE4 can run on iOS and Android tablets(though I think they are arm Android tablets) so no one should really have any serious issues.

You have any questions feel free to post them on the forums.unrealengine.com or come to #UE4Linux or #unrealengine irc channels.

[Salamanderrake]

Please do not do this. Planeshift is the best Open Source MMORPG out there. If you switch to the Unreal engine, the support for Linux would be more limited. Also, the Unreal engine guys do not like Open Source or GPL so much.

Of course it seems tempting to switch to a such robust and powerful engine, and it is very popular. You have my fullest understanding if you still want to change engine. I am sure there will be huge improvements. But Unreal is not open source so it kills a bit of the spirit in this game.

This make me a bit sad, but you do as you think is the best.

1.) Epic fully supports games on linux, the editor on the other hand is still not officially supported yet, but runs none the less.
2.) There are tons of 'opensource' projects on github that use UE4, you can not opensource the engines code its self, but you can do what ever you want with your code. If there are changes you want to push upstream for the engine thats different matter. As long as the PS devs follow the EULA there should be no issues, and if they have any questions they can ask them on answers.unrealengine.com (just tag it with the appropriate tag)
3.) Because it does not follow a totalitarian ideology of opensoure dose not mean it will kill the spirit of opensource its self. UE4 is VOSS, virtual open source software, any one can get the source for any reason and only have to pay if they make a certain amount of money per quarter. If you have any legal questions please feel free to read the EULA its self and/or ask them on answers.unrealengine.com

[helios21]

Hi, and thanks for all the feedbak, here are some answers to the questions above.
[ā€¦]
4) Will this program allow us to choose a "gore level" so it will not be too bloody for younger players or people that just do not want to see that sort of thing?
Not sure where this question comes from, there is no gore in PS and I expect to keep it similar in the new engine.

Talad, just as an explaination here: I thought about this as I read "you can slice consumers in two pieces and see the inside" from the announcement, and cause I think lots of games made with Unreal have lots of gore. So I was afraid that as the Unreal may allow for it more easily it will be added without an option to opt out.

I am glad to hear that you have no plans of doing so.

I am glad that there are plans / ideas to switch to a different engine. I am still a bit concerned about that it is not free as in freedom.

And I think switching to another engine is sufficient and maybe not even necessary to attract new players.

But I like PS using a more advanced engine, even if that means a new laptop in some years, as I think Unreal engine could be too slow for Intel Sandybridge i5 at Full HD resolution.