83 replies to this topic

[SQW]

Explain to me again why we need MW5 to make MWO better?

Edit: I now present to you your last, best and only hope for a good MW game..seriously, what's with the ancient UI and PS3 era graphic? What happen to mechcon 2016? Apart from sound, this looks like MWLL. There are two other gameplay footage somewhere but are equally mediocre.

Edited by SQW, 23 December 2017 - 05:42 PM.

[Mcgral18]

Because it takes the bulk of the effort in converting MWO assets into the new engine


Their version of Cryengine isn't compatible with any update, because of the heavy modifications.

[Verilligo]

Mcgral18, on 23 December 2017 - 06:43 AM, said:

Because it takes the bulk of the effort in converting MWO assets into the new engine


Their version of Cryengine isn't compatible with any update, because of the heavy modifications.

Additionally, given how financially troubled Crytek is, I don't think it would be a good idea to attempt to try and upgrade the current engine. There's also the issue where moving to a new engine might open up PGI to legal action from Crytek, similar to what Star Citizen is now having to deal with and depending on whatever agreement was made during the engine licensing. PGI is already engaged in one Good Fight, no need to get into another one.

[Revis Volek]

Also because isnt it best to familiarize yourself with something before you work on it?


I feel a lot better knowing they made a working, functional and fun game before they tried to port anything over. Just seems like a good idea but maybe im the idiot here...

[Quandoo]

Looks like replaced textures and sweetfx added into the game
But MWO is broken, even on a GTX1080Ti you will see frames drop below 40FPS.

Its so heavily bound to CPU, that 5y old PCs see equal frames.

Edited by Quandoo, 23 December 2017 - 10:20 AM.

[Nightbird]

Destructible environment?

[Khobai]

MWO can easily be made better without an engine upgrade.

because MWO's biggest problems are not graphics related

[Deathlike]

People forget that PGI stopped doing engine updates way back when. One of the things they suffered from is random weird artifacts, like the occasional flash-to-black screens when LRMs are in use (still in the game since beta - it happens on explosions and some such).

PGI literally doesn't have to the time, effort, nor skill to deal with all of that in a timely manner.

Edited by Deathlike, 23 December 2017 - 10:36 AM.

[kuma8877]

Deathlike, on 23 December 2017 - 10:35 AM, said:

People forget that PGI stopped doing engine updates way back when. One of the things they suffered from is random weird artifacts, like the occasional flash-to-black screens when LRMs are in use (still in the game since beta - it happens on explosions and some such).

PGI literally doesn't have to the time, effort, nor skill to deal with all of that in a timely manner.

This has been known to happen tho, where an engine is created or branch modified by past engineers/programmers who have since left and were poor at documenting the changes. Thus, leaving the current staff only able to do so much tinkering without blowing things up. A pretty notable example is Bohemia Interactive and the engine used for the Arma series (Real Virtuality) that was derived from their VBS engine for government tactical simulations.

There were 2 lead programmers for the original proprietary engine, they left BIS with bad documentation on how the engine simulation worked at a core level. Hence the reason for so few changes/core bugfix between Arma 2 and 3. It actually took the financial success of DayZ for BIS to be able to afford to go back in and create a new engine (Enfusion) which will be the backbone of BIS's games going forward. Expect Arma 4 to be running on that platform (regardless of what the current state of DayZ is), Enfusion was an investment in BIS's future.

[Deathlike]

kuma8877, on 23 December 2017 - 10:59 AM, said:

This has been known to happen tho, where an engine is created or branch modified by past engineers/programmers who have since left and were poor at documenting the changes. Thus, leaving the current staff only able to do so much tinkering without blowing things up. A pretty notable example is Bohemia Interactive and the engine used for the Arma series (Real Virtuality) that was derived from their VBS engine for government tactical simulations.

There were 2 lead programmers for the original proprietary engine, they left BIS with bad documentation on how the engine simulation worked at a core level. Hence the reason for so few changes/core bugfix between Arma 2 and 3. It actually took the financial success of DayZ for BIS to be able to afford to go back in and create a new engine (Enfusion) which will be the backbone of BIS's games going forward. Expect Arma 4 to be running on that platform (regardless of what the current state of DayZ is), Enfusion was an investment in BIS's future.

That's the thing though - PGI is not the one that developed the engine. Crytek was.

The only thing that may resemble your description that whoever was at the core of modding the game to what you saw since beta, probably isn't with the team anymore or are far and few in between.

Poor documentation is a significant enough level can be a valid excuse for not improving stuff, but on the other hand with the stuff that you actually had been working on and was working fine before - still suddenly becomes Lostech like not knowing how much ammo you have on a mech at a glance (we're not deep diving into the mechlab and counting where we put the ammo - we just need the loadout screen to show how much tonnage and/or total ammo that is equipped), that is a problem.

Cannot blame the spaghetti code entirely for something that would have made sense (in the process of coding certain features) for all in a quality of life scenario.

Edited by Deathlike, 23 December 2017 - 11:16 AM.

[Dogstar]

@OP You do know that WoT bought the company that made their game engine/platform, right? That's because they made so much money they didn't know what to spend it on.

Do you think that if PGI had made WoT sized money they would have stuck with Cryengine? Highly unlikely

[kuma8877]

Deathlike, on 23 December 2017 - 11:16 AM, said:

That's the thing though - PGI is not the one that developed the engine. Crytek was.

The only thing that may resemble your description that whoever was at the core of modding the game to what you saw since beta, probably isn't with the team anymore or are far and few in between.

Poor documentation is a significant enough level can be a valid excuse for not improving stuff, but on the other hand with the stuff that you actually had been working on and was working fine before - still suddenly becomes Lostech like not knowing how much ammo you have on a mech at a glance (we're not deep diving into the mechlab and counting where we put the ammo - we just need the loadout screen to show how much tonnage and/or total ammo that is equipped), that is a problem.

Cannot blame the spaghetti code entirely for something that would have made sense (in the process of coding certain features) for all in a quality of life scenario.

Not that I can disagree with your point, but Crytech's recent financial history and the resulting shift in skilled Cryengine engineers to Amazon and Cloud Imperium Games (Lumberyard and Star Citizen respectively) makes getting good talent to figure out what was done, that much more difficult to do in the current climate.

I have to agree with Russ when he essentially says that, at the time, going Cryengine was probably the best choice, as UE3 was fairly ancient by then (as far as industry time goes) and UE4 wasn't really on the horizon yet, not to mention Crytech was riding high then. With the actual way history has played out, it leaves PGI in a bit of a pickle for talent. I really hope MW5 does well, so PGI can afford to move MWO forward to a more powerful and accessible (talent pool wise) engine like UE4.

[Brain Cancer]

One could actually see MW5 as a way to reduce effective costs for an MWO engine upgrade by making it into a separate game that people will actually spend money on, allowing them to then adapt it to MWO 2.0.

Single-player fans are happy and put money into PGI that they'd get nothing for otherwise, and PGI is happy because they get to take their bread and butter and finally have a well-documented engine they're comfortable working with, the cost of which was reduced courtesy of people buying MW5.

[Khobai]

id like to see a seperate kickstarter for MWO 2.0

if people spend money on mechwarrior 5, the bulk of that money should go to develop mechwarrior 5. But if they can also reuse the assets for MWO 2.0 thats ideal.

otherwise you end up with the same thing that happened before with IGP... where they funneled off a lot of the founders money for other games that nobody wanted to play. Like mechwarrior tactics.

oh and lets not forget about TRANS|VERSE

Had more of that money gone to further development of MWO, MWO likely wouldve been a much better game.

Edited by Khobai, 25 December 2017 - 09:38 PM.

[Simbacca]

Khobai, on 23 December 2017 - 11:57 AM, said:

id like to see a seperate kickstarter for MWO 2.0

if people spend money on mechwarrior 5, the bulk of that money should go to develop mechwarrior 5. But f they can also reuse the assets for MWO 2.0 thats ideal.

otherwise you end up with the same thing that happened before with IGP... where they funneled off a lot of the founders money for other games that nobody wanted to play. Like mechwarrior tactics.

oh and lets not forget about TRANS|VERSE

Had more of that money gone to further development of MWO, MWO likely wouldve been a much better game.

Porting of certain MWO assets is doable - after all HBS is using MWO's mech models on the Unity Engine.

However considering the history of MWO, I honestly doubt that MWO 2.0 would raise any real amounts of money via Kickstarter.

[Mister Blastman]

While that WOT graphical update is neat, I still wouldn't play the game, nor would I play MWO more than I do, either, if PGI did the same thing.

I play games for gameplay.

And MWO's matchmaker is crappy and broken. Forget it. Life's so much more peaceful and enjoyable when I'm not yelling about PUGs or other players.

[Khobai]

Quote

However considering the history of MWO, I honestly doubt that MWO 2.0 would raise any real amounts of money via Kickstarter.

then whats the point of porting it to unreal?

if they cant get a kickstarter to pay for it, theres no point to doing it

[kuma8877]

Khobai, on 23 December 2017 - 11:57 AM, said:

id like to see a seperate kickstarter for MWO 2.0

if people spend money on mechwarrior 5, the bulk of that money should go to develop mechwarrior 5. But f they can also reuse the assets for MWO 2.0 thats ideal.

otherwise you end up with the same thing that happened before with IGP... where they funneled off a lot of the founders money for other games that nobody wanted to play. Like mechwarrior tactics.

oh and lets not forget about TRANS|VERSE

Had more of that money gone to further development of MWO, MWO likely wouldve been a much better game.

MW5 is already being developed without kickstarter... and is well under way (from my own impressions at Mechcon) with a year left to go. MW5's dev will mostly be paid for already by release and profit from it's sales go...where?

I think the way IGP handled Transverse was bad, but there is ABSOLUTELY no reason for a company to not try and diversify to help it grow. This whole idea that PGI can only do MW related titles is kinda bunk in my opinion. Did you ever think that had they been able to develop/produce/publish some other at least marginally successful titles/properties besides MWO that they may have been able to generate more funds in the long run by growing and being able to afford larger dev teams? PGI is 100% shackled to the success of MWO and MW5. They live and die by it at this point, as the playerbase has left them no other options.

[MauttyKoray]

SQW, on 23 December 2017 - 06:39 AM, said:

Explain to me again why we need MW5 to make MWO better?

This is an example of a highly lucrative game and profitable company being able to put a large chunk of resources behind an engine upgrade without affecting the game's continuous development cycle.

MWO is not large enough, nor profitable enough, to allow them to invest resources in both developing MW5 and pushing an engine upgrade through without interrupting the development cycle for MWO that gives us new mechs, cockpit items, game balance/changes, maps, and new features (like solaris and the bolt on geometry).

Now, once MW5 is completed and shipped, there are a number of options available. This actually start prior to the game's launch date but I'm not going to go into that because people who are going to ignore that anyway will still argue the same things so I'll ignore them as well.

The first being: They could begin working on either MW5:Mercs expansions, or they could actually begin work on a story campaign focused MW5 game such as MW2, 3, and 4 Vengeance were.

Second: They could use the MW5 team to instead work on an engine upgrade for MWO and thus not interrupt the main team's development cycle. However considering the two games run on a different engine, its probably not the best idea and would consume extra resources in the employees switching from work on one engine to another.

Third and lastly: They could use the team to instead begin rebuilding a version of MWO on MW5's engine, using the already completed game as a groundwork for its gameplay and developing the online components of MWO for it. That however would require a massive data transfer of accounts between game engines set up to correctly translate the data between them to make this community happy. "Yay a better MWO! What do you mean I don't keep my stuff??" Yeah, wouldn't go over well with how much this community whines. Also, PGI knows better than to do that anyway.

My hope is that they use the team post-MW5 to make expansion content and get some of the balancing team to help out with MWO. I can't say it is, but the MW5 gameplay in terms of weapon mechanics and mech systems (i.e. jump jets actually being jump jets) along with the fact the mech actually has MOVEMENT and not a vacuum suspended reticule would have the game so much more fun.

Edited by MauttyKoray, 23 December 2017 - 01:33 PM.

[Khobai]

Quote

MW5 is already being developed without kickstarter...

im sure there will be a MW5 kickstarter/founders program

it just hasnt happened yet