Project News - New platform

In the last DevLog post, I mentioned that we have decided to move over to a new game engine. When evaluating our options, we had some requirements and constraints, as well as some “wishlist” things. Very important was the support behind the engine, not only the company itself but also the developer community. Flexibility, programming languages, usability, capability and compatibility were all prime considerations. We of course also had to weigh the consequences of moving platforms as well, and we had to be able to afford it.

In the end, we settled on one that could meet all of the most important criteria for us and at least some of our secondary goals. Of course a few things had to be sacrificed, but the overall package was very favorable.

The engine we settled on is called Unity3D. I could go on and on about what's good about it, but the link contains a far better exposition of all the goodies.

So of course this shift comes with some advantages and some challenges. In the advantages column, the Unity3D platform is very flexible, actively-developed, modern, used in an increasing number of titles and can be deployed on multiple platforms, including Windows, Macintosh and Linux. There's a web-based player available as well, and we can target mobile and console platforms, should we decide to go that route. As far as challenges, we have to adapt everything to a new networking structure, convert our code to a different language and architecture, convert some of our 3D resources to a different format, recreate terrains and so on.

This is definitely not a “starting over” situation, though we do have a fair amount to do in order to get back to where we were when things turned south for this project.

And since they were requested, I'm including a few screenshots taken using the new engine. These are, of course, “pre-alpha” with very little “eye candy” and which may or may not be indicative or representative of the eventual released form. In fact, the depictions are far from complete, but they do serve as a good example all the same.

Enjoy!

(Click for larger view)