This is Huge! Future Plans for B&S.

[Nory]

Hello,

 

So ... this happened : 

 

 

> Partially translated to : 

• Graphical Update and Conversion to Unreal Engine 4!
• New "Life style" Content : Fishing, Items Collection (treasure hunts ?), and more.
• Story development + new Chapters.

[dashrem]

[KlausFlouride]

Easily a year out. The biggest issue I see is if they can't figure out how to port current characters to the new engine they will lose a bunch of people.

[Deadly Intent]

Will nc break open the wallet to do this though?  It's exactly what is needed to keep the game alive but it might get to us a little too late.

[tomatotea]

Looks exciting 

 

[dashrem]

9 minutes ago, Deadly Intent said:

Will nc break open the wallet to do this though?  It's exactly what is needed to keep the game alive but it might get to us a little too late.

Something like this could bring back old players. I'm not an expert, but I imagine they would just create programs to make it as one-click to the new engine as possible, then work out any bugs. We'd be the bug testers of course. 

[Nory]

The video was freshly released today, and there is a supposedly Part-2 coming soon, which would provide more info. This was simply,

개발 로드맵 영상 1편입니다 : Development Road Map.

[tomatotea]

I dont know much about these things, but wouldn't a new game engine roll out across all servers at the same time? I mean would we have to wait longer as we are behind Korea in patches etc

[MassiveEgo]

2 hours ago, dashrem said:

Something like this could bring back old players. I'm not an expert, but I imagine they would just create programs to make it as one-click to the new engine as possible, then work out any bugs. We'd be the bug testers of course. 

 

That's not how this works. Here's the process of making an online game with a premade engine - first you train how to interact with the engine, then you create the assets, mechanics, networking modules (this is waaaay too complex to explain so I'll just dumb it down as "modules").

First you decide how the engine will generate the simulation. In the case of B&S as we know it now, it's through having designated areas, connected with portals. The moment you enter the vicinity of a portal, the game starts loading the remaining assets of that area (it loads the skeleton of the area the moment you enter a cell next to it for convenience purposes).

Next is making some assets. When you have the assets (textures, models, shaders, animations, sounds), you can start the world building. That means building all the static parts of the world - the terrain, the flora, the sea, the non movable objects, such as crashed ships, housing, dragon pulses, background fauna like birds and butterflies, the lighting and all the effects tied to it.

Next you need to make the world come alive... through mechanics. Everything which involves NPCs and PCs is governed by mechanics. A mechanic is a piece of code that tells the engine what to do under specific circumstances. The engine itself holds certain mechanics internally in order to provide the best performance for minor stuff, like looping ambient sounds and animations/effects, etc.

Now here's the part that makes jumping engines both hard and expensive. The easiest way to explain this is to make an analogy. Imagine UE3(2,5) is the core of a planet. It has certain parameters. Now you build the planet around that core. You get a planet that behaves and looks in a certain way. Now if you try to swap that core with a different core like UE4, everything else goes out of place. Fixing it in't all that easy. In terms of game development, you need to refit the mechanics to work with the new core and whatever triggers were changed, redesign effects and rewrite some of the shaders that no longer function.

Now if we add the fact that there are character animations and what not, things become exponentially more difficult, as remaking characters to functions 1:1 when it comes to face meshes is extremely hard. Every played skyrim and tried using someone else's face mod? Next time you update the mod, the face breaks and stops looking the same. I can guarantee that this is going to happen here. And they'll have to somehow work it out. Nobody wants to have their character look mangled xD

Furthermore, in order to be absolutely certain that you don't end up with a game that breaks and eats up abysmal amount of resources, they need to not only go over and fix all this, but also get on assembly level with the code they just wrote and optimize/fix that as well. That in on itself is a monumental effort and skipping it is kinda a no no for any software company that cares about it's name. 

All this will take considerable effort to rectify. It's not as easy as making a .bat script.

edit- also an online game means that the mechanics aren't executed locally, which adds even more headaches to deal with when changing engines xD

[Lorcanne]

That's good, It's gonna be a while tho :((((( I wish I had a time machine, and/or could speak Korean

[ArantirQc]

the question is... will the na/eu server still be alive when we get this update?

[Lorcanne]

1 minute ago, ArantirQc said:

the question is... will the na/eu server still be alive when we get this update?

I believe so, yes. If anything, it will revitalize things.  I always think about games like Aion, which are still chugging along after all these years, and they  are due for a HUGE overhaul, that just happened in Korea. Which I am excited about x) So, yeah I think it will still be alive especially for new and returning, because they make these changes to keep it  fresh. 

[swpz]

"Graphical Update and Conversion to Unreal Engine 4!"

 

Well. This is new.

 

[Ginkuro]

If the do update the engine I Hope that solves all the stuttering and freezes that we get on raids and dungeons, also if they plan to implement a new way of fishing gathering and so, let's see if it's really useful for our character progress and not another windrest

[SkFy]

Funny, talked about this a few days ago and people said they would never do that :)

[Pimboli]

It would be fun to have housing introduced into BnS 

[MassiveEgo]

44 minutes ago, SkFy said:

Funny, talked about this a few days ago and people said they would never do that :)

Well it's an expensive thing to do, not to mention time consuming. But it's the only way to get this game to run on consoles, so two birds with one stone I guess?

[Why Bother]

While changing to UE4, from UE3 could mean the game will run better, it could also mean it will end up running worse, for more people. Lack of proper optimization has always been the main issue, not the engine, and if under a new engine, which will also likely result in higher min system requirements, they still don't optimize the game well, then as I said, the game could end up running worse, for more people.

[MassiveEgo]

12 minutes ago, Why Bother said:

While changing to UE4, from UE3 could mean the game will run better, it could also mean it will end up running worse, for more people. Lack of proper optimization has always been the main issue, not the engine, and if under a new engine, which will also likely result in higher min system requirements, they still don't optimize the game well, then as I said, the game could end up running worse, for more people.

That's a fair point. Still UE4 is by default able to utilize four cores and up, so that might be enough to push the game's performance up. We'll see how this turns out if it even comes to pass.

[Statler]

Without porting to UE4 BnS would be dead in near future, so they had to do it when they want to keep the game alive. Anyway, leaving players after the last patch will increase the performance further more. 

[Why Bother]

1 hour ago, MassiveEgo said:

That's a fair point. Still UE4 is by default able to utilize four cores and up, so that might be enough to push the game's performance up. We'll see how this turns out if it even comes to pass.

True, but I've for instance played games by rookie devs that used the Unity engine, where the game was so basic, it looked like a Flash game I had played in a browser some 10-20 years ago, yet it ran worse for me than a very advanced, graphically impressive game under the same version of the Unity engine. Optimization, or lack there of can make a huge difference.

[MassiveEgo]

18 hours ago, Why Bother said:

True, but I've for instance played games by rookie devs that used the Unity engine, where the game was so basic, it looked like a Flash game I had played in a browser some 10-20 years ago, yet it ran worse for me than a very advanced, graphically impressive game under the same version of the Unity engine. Optimization, or lack there of can make a huge difference.

That boils down to whether the people who will be making the build on UE4 know how to multi thread the code. In the case of the current version of the game, the engine itself was a limiting factor to some extent. Now, if the engine gets updated, that fundamental limitation would go away and allow them to gradually improve their code until the game runs smoothly.

Also there's another thing to consider - an old engine will stutter more and more with each passing cpu generation. As instruction sets get excluded or updated in ways that don't favor a specific program which was written and compiled with them in mind, that program will run worse and worse under specific circumstances. And considering B&S never ran great, the deteriorating performance is a serious problem.

[Snake123]

On 5/9/2018 at 12:04 PM, Pimboli said:

It would be fun to have housing introduced into BnS 

Yeah, and if this game is getting as bad to be pay 2 win as people are saying it is, it could get people to keep playing. That type of thing would actually keep me playing too tbh.
I remember being obsessed with that browser-based game owned by Coca-Cola back in the late 90s/early 2000s. It was called Cokemusic. It was a really basic, primitive housing-type browser game and I sunk years into it, Lol.

[Why Bother]

On 5/12/2018 at 4:47 PM, MassiveEgo said:

That boils down to whether the people who will be making the build on UE4 know how to multi thread the code. In the case of the current version of the game, the engine itself was a limiting factor to some extent. Now, if the engine gets updated, that fundamental limitation would go away and allow them to gradually improve their code until the game runs smoothly.

Also there's another thing to consider - an old engine will stutter more and more with each passing cpu generation. As instruction sets get excluded or updated in ways that don't favor a specific program which was written and compiled with them in mind, that program will run worse and worse under specific circumstances. And considering B&S never ran great, the deteriorating performance is a serious problem.

While I get what you're saying, I don't think you quite get what I am. These days, online games people at least try to call MMOs, aren't really that fitting to that description, or don't fit it at all. B&S while used to involve more large scale group content, has been reigning that in, and these days it's all six, or twelve person content. About twenty years ago, in the earlier days of online games, and MMOs, they were typically much more fitting to the label of MMO, as there was content, and events where you'd be playing with dozens, to over a hundred people all together at once. Back then there weren't all these multi-core computers, and so forth, but devs could make that work, as they worked within the limits of the tools they had, and utilized them effectively to get the results they wanted, B&S hasn't been doing that.

 

The biggest performance crippling issue in B&S seems to be load times, even if you don't get two minute load screens, like many have, the procedural loaded content can still result in client lag, stuttering, and so forth for many more. Now look at TERA, TERA was also made using UE3, yet it doesn't share the same problems, my loading screens in TERA with my old computer were thirty seconds, or less, while with B&S, were about two minutes, procedural loaded content also had no issues. Then there's lots of graphics settings in TERA that can make it run at least fairly well, on a fairly wide range of systems. Meanwhile in B&S, there's all but useless options like how enabling the option to hide other players, doesn't stop the client from loading other players, their attack effects, and all the rest of it. The performance in TERA isn't perfect of course, but it's still far better than in B&S. In B&S, they just most certainly did not do all they could, with what they had, nor effectively worked within the limits of the tools they were using, they are far more to blame for the poor performance of B&S, than UE3 is.

[MassiveEgo]

@Why Bother Oh, I agree that this game barely even registers on the scale as far as MMOishness is concerned. Even Hellgate London has more MMO spirit to it than B&S does and that one wasn't even marketed as a MMO game :D

My personal idea of a MMO battle, is stuff like the siege of Aden in Nov of 2008 in Teon Lineage 2 server. There were over 2k unique players involved into that siege. One of the most memorable and grand massacres in my recent memory and probably in 3D MMO history. Compared to that, this game has nothing to offer. Nothing at all.

 

As far as TERA <> B&S comparisons go, you should also remember that TERA has a much more simplistic character customization. Comparing it to B&S is like comparing both of those to BDO. No contest. This customization however, is a performance hog of it's own volition. If you keep all those body/facial features constantly loaded, together with the class animations plus character emotion animations, you get a bunch of objects, in this case characters, which are drawn on the fly. It's not the same as loading a premade actor. Animations also change depending on the character's size and certain body proportions. That taxes the performance further, as you can't automate the loading of such models directly to the GPU. You end up keeping a lot of data on the CPU and ticking it constantly. That doesn't work so well in such an old UE3 build.