3 ms·

I'd be very interested in reading more about FGS and what they've been up to around UE5. The idea of incrementally defenestrating UE5 in favor of in-house comp

I'd be very interested in reading more about FGS and what they've been up to around UE5. The idea of incrementally defenestrating UE5 in favor of in-house components is compelling to me. This path definitely works a LOT better in a team setting where you have actual artists looking for things to work on. I don't know how the licensing actually works out around this though... Assume you went full ship of Theseus on UE5 and replaced 100% of it with in-house. Will Epic Games be happy walking away from this, or is there some fundamental legal component that we know we'd never screw with?

dafelst 4y ago
You can modify Unreal Engine as much as you like to ship a game and the engine changes remain your property, you just have to pay their royalties. At least that is how it is in practice - the language in the license agreement is actually a little fuzzy, when our game was sold from one company to our current one, the lawyers had a bit of a frowning session over some of the language there, but ultimately decided it was okay. Maybe in the future it will be challenged, but for now, self-owned engine changes are the norm.
rollcat 4y ago
> I'd be very interested in reading more about FGS and what they've been up to around UE5. They have two subreddits: r/frostgiant, and r/stormgate (for their game). They regularly ask the community for feedback/discussion/brainstorming on some topics relevant to the gameplay (like pacing, asymmetry, monetisation, e-sports, etc), openly share their conclusions from the discussion, but unfortunately in-depth technical stuff doesn't really pop up often. They specifically bragged about their pathfinding (apparently at least on par with StarCraft II), and the rollback netcode (which is "directly inspired" by fighting games, and apparently not a common thing for RTSs), but again, everything is scarce on technical details. The unofficial Discord community (https://discord.gg/stormgate https://discord.gg/stormgate) has a "Yeti Tracker" channel that automatically cross-posts any comments made by FGS staff; there's also https://stormgatenexus.com https://stormgatenexus.com (fan website) where many of the interviews are transcribed and distilled into articles. I'm watching all of these closely, I can ping you if I see more engine-tech-heavy stuff popping up!

dafelst 4y ago

You can modify Unreal Engine as much as you like to ship a game and the engine changes remain your property, you just have to pay their royalties. At least that is how it is in practice - the language in the license agreement is actually a little fuzzy, when our game was sold from one company to our current one, the lawyers had a bit of a frowning session over some of the language there, but ultimately decided it was okay. Maybe in the future it will be challenged, but for now, self-owned engine changes are the norm.

rollcat 4y ago

> I'd be very interested in reading more about FGS and what they've been up to around UE5. They have two subreddits: r/frostgiant, and r/stormgate (for their game). They regularly ask the community for feedback/discussion/brainstorming on some topics relevant to the gameplay (like pacing, asymmetry, monetisation, e-sports, etc), openly share their conclusions from the discussion, but unfortunately in-depth technical stuff doesn't really pop up often. They specifically bragged about their pathfinding (apparently at least on par with StarCraft II), and the rollback netcode (which is "directly inspired" by fighting games, and apparently not a common thing for RTSs), but again, everything is scarce on technical details. The unofficial Discord community (https://discord.gg/stormgate https://discord.gg/stormgate) has a "Yeti Tracker" channel that automatically cross-posts any comments made by FGS staff; there's also https://stormgatenexus.com https://stormgatenexus.com (fan website) where many of the interviews are transcribed and distilled into articles. I'm watching all of these closely, I can ping you if I see more engine-tech-heavy stuff popping up!