[Ideas] PR Future Engine Ideas and Suggestions

[Draakon]

Originally Posted by Hotrod525

Cause when you got you're engine license, you can do whatever you want whit it, so that mean no more EVER "HARDCODED" excuse. The dev would be able to tweak the engine the way they want it to work. For sure it would take a long moment to build a game from scratch, but, after that, P.R. would be a GAME not a MOD anymore, R-Dev would be the exclusive owners no more EA Ghost in the background watching you like BigBro.

Exacly. The point with UT engines have been that they aren't hardcoded.

[Tirak]

Originally Posted by nick20404

I agree with this, After seeing arma 2 game play it already looks like pr, You guys would really have allot less work on your hands than the bf2 engine as the ARMA2 engine really strives for realism, Even ARMA1 would be a better engine for PR than bf2. Not so much operation flashpoint 2 though.

ArmA 1 is hardly suitable for PR mainly because of lack of a large number of players support. The game is simply unstable with higher numbers of players and bots cannot achieve the same level of play as another human, and by the looks of things ArmA 2 will also be focusing less on a large number of players and more on better bots, though with the current track record of ArmA 1 and it's expansion, I'm not too excited to see what the ArmA development team has come up with.

Perhaps, as Wicca pointed out, the new Massive Action Game if it ever comes to PC and is at all modable, it certainly would have sufficient numbers of players to support all the really large battles and I'm interested to see how the MAG developers will figure out how to make an FPS stable and relatively lag free (see playable) with 256 players.

[Psykogundam]

Originally Posted by [R-DEV]fuzzhead

Yeap agree with this statement. If anyone has experience with the source engine supporting 64+ players and LARGE (ie at least 2km) maps, please post about those experiences.

My only experiences with "larger" style Source Engine gameplay was with the empires mod, which supported 48 players and approx. 2km maps (but most of the map was not in play). The mod is very creative, but the gameplay was prety bad from when I played, I tried it for about 10 hours.

As a matter of fact, I cant think of ANY fps game with 64 player limit that runs STABLE in an open public environment OTHER than BF2. If anyone has experience with other games that run with 64 or more players on large maps, please post about them as were always looking for that next engine!

ArmA is an exception, but STABLE and ArmA arent exactly the right way to describe it Hopefully ArmA2 will be much better, but we are talking about released games here, not future stuff that has yet to be proven.

Edit :Post moved from another thread

the quake engine and unreal engine games wouldnt work, they are small and designed for meatgrinder stuff. i think that much is obvious. BF2's engine, ARMA, and starsiege tribes engine are very large maps with 64 players.

but the ARMA2 engine is most likely the winner.

[eggman]

One of the biggest problems with combiend arms & realism is the scale has to be very large. So you need large maps and long view distances. And the foliage and detail has to render at long distances so you don't have a guy hidden in the bush but from more than 100m away he's lying out in the open. Then when you look at the size of the map, you need a lot of players to keep it interesting.

So an engine that supports 100+ concurrent players, minimum 16sq km maps (preferably larger), can draw grass and foliage at 1km view distance, has vehicle physics, ballistics capabilities, etc, etc... I am not awae of one that exists.

The Torque Game Engine "Advanced" (TGEA) that is a prize in ModDB MOTY 2008 is a fairly huge evolution over the TGE predecessor. That is based on the Tribes 2 Engine and the TGEA update adds in a new rendering engine and a new "ATLAS" terrain engine. It has a lot of promise, but I'd be very surprised of a $300 engine can outdo $20,000,000 in AAA title engine development.

What I could see is a game built on TGEA that supports a lot of the required functionality but ends up looking like World War II Online (Battleground Europe or whatever they are calling it now). Basically I mean a game that ends up making so many sacrifices to meet some requirements but it might end up looking 4 or 5 years out of date when it releases.

There are several open source engines out there, but stringing the rendering engines together with the networking libraries would be a lot of work, particularly given the PR pedigree is in modding / art / gameplay design (we don't have a lot of C / C++ depth on the team).

ArmA 2 looks VERY promising as a game and possibly modding platform. However I keep hearing 50+ players. That sucks because I had hoped they woud stretch it to 100+. And, quite frankly, if it's as clunky as ArmA 1 and sees as limited marketplace success as ArmA 1 then it will have very few players and a fairly mature realism modding community (WGL / ACE).

ArmA 1 v1.15 is actually MUCH better (just started to check it out again). But the quality of the game play on random servers is a bit like joining a BF2 pub server. The game itself is not fundamentally designed to encourage teamwork, so the quality of the general gameplay has not evolved as much as has been the case with PR.

OFP 2 may also be promising as a mod platform, but I have a feeling it's going to be a console focussed title with 16p for consoles and 32p for PC.

MAG for PC could be interesting. But I don't think that will materialize. It's from the Playstation developers who did the SOCOM series. And it's said to be PS3 exclusive and may incorporate some sort of pay to play feature (as well as a ranking / rpg element to it).

Crysis Wars looks fantastic visually, but only supports 32p.

Developing an engine from scratch - where your goal is to build a game on top of it - is well beyond the scope of the PR team or any sane person / group of individuals.

Good discussion... hopeing something we've overlooked comes out of it.

egg

[DannyIMK]

I don't understand for what is this thread?
PR is for BF2 and i don't think that you can change BF2 Engine
unless devs planning to make PR for other game?

[General_J0k3r]

I personally don't like the Cryengine very much. I think it's badly coded and utterly inefficient. I like the Farcry 2 engine way more (forgot the name right now). It has nice graphics while not requiring a friggin cray to run it properly.

[Zerapup]

Lets just wait for the Frostbite engine on PC

[xatu miller]

Originally Posted by Zerapup

Lets just wait for the Frostbite engine on PC

Frostbite for PR might be good because of the huge map sizes that work with it. Plus the destructible world high detail at close up and far away and big view distance. If it was released for PC it would probably not be stable, but hey who knows

[gazzthompson]

Originally Posted by DannyIMK

I don't understand for what is this thread?
PR is for BF2 and i don't think that you can change BF2 Engine
unless devs planning to make PR for other game?

its just for discussion on a new engine possibility, what engines look good and what we need in said engine for it to be worth moving.

[D-JHappyMeal]

Originally Posted by gazzthompson

its just for discussion on a new engine possibility, what engines look good and what we need in said engine for it to be worth moving.

so we could use Bad company, or wait for BF3 to come out?
everyone likes a good physics engine