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> This is exactly the case for CD Projekt Red. They built their own engine (RED Engine) for Witcher 1 and built on top of it for the two Witcher sequels and als

• bashmelek 4y ago
  I remember Neverwinter Nights 2. Decently fun game, but extremely buggy. It had some strange local lag where it wasn’t that unusual to command a character to move only to have them freeze in place then teleport back where they were 10 seconds before.
  • belthesar 4y ago
    NWN2 was such an odd duck from an engine reuse perspective. When development on NWN2 began, Obsidian was handed a much older version of the Aurora engine source than what was currently available. While they did do amazing work with what they had, many weird bugs that were addressed by updated versions of mainline Aurora were now things Obsidian had to address in addition to the challenges they had to update the engine for the new game.
• daemin 4y ago
  To add to that (since I'm somewhat of an expert on this), the engine for Cyberpunk 2077 was completely rewritten from scratch, and only small bits were either ported from W3 or inspired by what was done in W3.
  • profile53 4y ago
    Huh that’s super interesting — full rewrites aren’t super common. Do you know why they elected to rewrite the engine completely?
    • daemin 4y ago
      I have to be careful here, but the simple reason is that the previous engine was not designed to handle the density nor the verticality of the CP77 world. Not that Unreal Engine 5 can handle a world like CP77 either, despite what people may think with the Matrix demo.
      • robswc 4y ago
        Game dev isn't my field, I always find it fascinating though. Why can't Unreal handle something like CP2077? Could be an "explain like I'm five" - details would be cool but I'm not sure I would even fully understand them, haha.
        • P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
          "can't handle" here means "can't handle performantly". Think of it like using the wrong data structure for the problem.
          • daemin 4y ago
            And not just for the game itself but for creating the world in the first place. Often you need radically different data structures for the creation and editing of the data as compared to what you need for running the game on player's machines.
        • danielbarla 4y ago
          I'm not an expert on the topic either, but from similar discussions I've followed, the answer tends to be that out of the box and with the base settings, an engine like UE5 will be optimised for certain use cases. Different genres will have different specific needs, and may require your developers to do a lot of heavy lifting to make the engine performant under their specific conditions. A good example might be sim racing titles, which generally have the player moving a lot faster than the default scenario for an engine (which is mostly a slow-moving FPS, for example). At these relatively high speeds, the default antialiasing methods may result in serious graphical artifacts, and at the rate at which physics needs to be calculated (90-300 hertz) the default physics of the engine may be less useful, and you're forced to implement your own from scratch. That's not to say it's impossible, but you're opting out from a lot of the engine features, or in some cases, it's actively making your life hard.
• somat 4y ago
  And if i remember correctly the aurora engine started life as MDK2.