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Inspector Gesicht posted:What are games that successfully use an engine that was intended for another genre? It's kind of the same genre, but the engine that The Witcher (the first one) is built on is an very heavily modified version of the Aurora Engine, the same engine that Neverwinter Nights uses.
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Jun 6, 2020 15:21
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| # ? Jun 7, 2024 18:07 |
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Engines can be pretty flexible, and adapted to a lot of things. The issues with Bioware getting pushed into Frostbite isn't -just- that it's 'only a FPS' engine, but rather that basically all the Frostbite developers + support staff were focused on supporting and developing for the various high-profile-yearly-release titles, like the shooters. Meaning that they were thrown onto a new engine which they had to learn, with minimal support, and a need to jury-rig in mechanics and features the hard way, instead of having them neatly developed as part of the engine. It's entirely possible it would have been a far better release had they had a squad of dedicated Frostbite devs to lean on to adapt the engine. Instead EA kept doing as EA did, and leaning on 'Bioware Magic' to make it all come together towards the end, as they did again with Anthem. In the deep dig article about 'Holy poo poo why was Anthem so troubled.' ages ago dug a bit into it. EA forcing a lot of studios into using Frostbite, while ignoring that they'd require significant development help is one of those typical 'executive decisions by someone who doesn't know anything about actual development.' decisions, with understandably lovely results.
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Jun 6, 2020 15:52
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flatluigi posted:which is also what starfox64 is based on and is why there's an arwing in oot's files There's actually several possible arguments about why the Arwing's there as an enemy. It's definitely there deliberately, but nobody's entirely sure if it's there to test Z-targeting, to test Volvagia's movement patterns (it has Volvagia's movement patterns, but it's a chicken-and-egg question for which one came first), an an easter egg that never came to fruition, or even just as a developer in-joke. The fact all those games are running the same engine does mean that you can semi-successfully load a save state from one in all the others, which is neat. The funniest part of that is that Starfox will actually run if you do that, because they load most of a stage's assets into the system's RAM.
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Jun 6, 2020 15:55
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Infiniminer by Zachtronics was an inspiration for Minecraft. It had first-person view with mining and building. Later they made Infinifactory that was based on that, but was actually an assembly line puzzle game like SpaceChem and still one of their best games.
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Jun 6, 2020 16:01
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Kennel posted:Infiniminer by Zachtronics was an inspiration for Minecraft. It had first-person view with mining and building. It must feel galling to be a close inspiration for a concept that made a billion-dollars for some chud. But it's also comforting since that same chud is now friendless and lives in isolation like a sweaty Citizen Kane.
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Jun 6, 2020 16:10
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SubNat posted:Engines can be pretty flexible, and adapted to a lot of things.
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Jun 6, 2020 16:45
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yeah it was FIFA specifically.
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Jun 6, 2020 17:27
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It took NFS four games to get passable vehicle physics after the switch to Frostbite. Rivals wasn't bad for arcade-style handling, but it felt the closest to driving a Battlefield APC, then they overcorrected ...which reminds me of a little thing in Underground 3 (aka the reboot): the lighting and sky is entirely location-based, like in Dark Souls 2. There's places that are pitch black and places that are at the break of dawn, it's not realistic as you move between them, but every location is hand-tuned to always look its best. It's a really pretty map, too bad about the undrivable cars.
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Jun 6, 2020 17:47
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Monolith has been using the same engine for years. Shadow of War and Mordor are technically running on the same engine that the FEAR games were.SubNat posted:Engines can be pretty flexible, and adapted to a lot of things. it was a miracle that inquisition turned out as good as it did honestly. Lord Lambeth has a new favorite as of 18:17 on Jun 6, 2020 |
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Jun 6, 2020 18:13
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Titanfall 2 (not sure about 1) was built on a modified Source engine. That fact that they made that game on Source still blows my mind
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Jun 6, 2020 18:26
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When people say that a game was used with another genre's engine, how often is it actually the case that they are taking a platformer and trying to force it to be an FPS? It could just mean that they already had the physics and scripting standards from the former and didn't want to reinvent the wheel. The same code that pulls the main character to the ground after a jump could be slightly amended to shorted the jump height or add a fall damage thing, and also making Grenades arc, and any spawning code, like Bullet Bill type objects, could be applied to rockets or enemy turrets.
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Jun 6, 2020 18:26
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BioEnchanted posted:When people say that a game was used with another genre's engine, how often is it actually the case that they are taking a platformer and trying to force it to be an FPS? It could just mean that they already had the physics and scripting standards from the former and didn't want to reinvent the wheel. The same code that pulls the main character to the ground after a jump could be slightly amended to shorted the jump height or add a fall damage thing, and also making Grenades arc, and any spawning code, like Bullet Bill type objects, could be applied to rockets or enemy turrets. That's not really the same thing though, the engine's still natively what already exists. It's pertinent in cases like Frostbite because an engine that's designed for linear corridor shooters just does not have native functions for things like storing inventory objects, dialogue menus, or tracking sidequests. That all has to be coded from scratch by the dev team, which takes a lot of time and effort cramming square pegs into round holes while another engine could do it all natively and probably be better-known by the development team. To bring it back to your example, I could change a bouncing ball into a grenade relatively easy, because I just modify the physics value of the ball, give it a lifespan, and have it execute detonate_grenade() at the end of that. Grenade gets thrown, goes boom. Fall damage and jump height are also absolutely going to be existing values that just get tweaked to suite the game at hand. Platformers have enemies, so you're just spawning new creatures with the existing spawner() function with their own behaviours. But how do I get the player character to talk to a friendly NPC when that platforming game has no dialogue in it or coding for NPC's with passive animation routines that aren't "run at the player and attack"? That's the tricky part.
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Jun 6, 2020 18:40
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TontoCorazon posted:Titanfall 2 (not sure about 1) was built on a modified Source engine. That fact that they made that game on Source still blows my mind Everything up to Apex Legends is actually on source. Neddy Seagoon posted:That's not really the same thing though, the engine's still natively what already exists. It's pertinent in cases like Frostbite because an engine that's designed for linear corridor shooters just does not have native functions for things like storing inventory objects, dialogue menus, or tracking sidequests. That all has to be coded from scratch by the dev team, which takes a lot of time and effort cramming square pegs into round holes while another engine could do it all natively and probably be better-known by the development team. Some engines are more flexible than others, I would think. Unity or Unreal can be really malleable and there's tons of documentation out there to make them do what you want. Frostbite I can imagine isn't nearly as good in that regard. Lord Lambeth has a new favorite as of 18:45 on Jun 6, 2020 |
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Jun 6, 2020 18:41
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Neddy Seagoon posted:That's not really the same thing though, the engine's still natively what already exists. It's pertinent in cases like Frostbite because an engine that's designed for linear corridor shooters just does not have native functions for things like storing inventory objects, dialogue menus, or tracking sidequests. That all has to be coded from scratch by the dev team, which takes a lot of time and effort cramming square pegs into round holes while another engine could do it all natively and probably be better-known by the development team. I was probably thinking of modules rather than whole engines, like multiple engines may use the same gravity math module but interact with it differently.
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Jun 6, 2020 18:45
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Something like Unreal started out as a rendering engine for first person shooters too, the difference to using Frostbite for Bioware RPGs was that Unreal has been used for a large variety of different games and genres for years, and provided suitable tools for stuff the original shooters didn't have yet, or studios which used it in the past had tools for the engine as well. With Frostbite it sounds more like EA went "we don't wanna pay Unreal etc. license fees anymore, use this neat looking engine from our Swedish team and make your own drat tools and extensions, BTW your game needs to come out next year". Maybe it wasn't a year, but it was clearly not enough time for the options Frostbite had for non-shooter games at the time.
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Jun 6, 2020 18:49
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I'd like to see a game where the plot thing is that it was built on an unsuitable engine and so as the game goes on things start to break down as the original forms of the engine start breaking through. Like a lovecraft kind of thing, seeing beyond the veil to code that should never have been or wasn't properly dummied out.
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Jun 6, 2020 18:54
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Tron by way of At the Mountains of Madness
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Jun 6, 2020 19:01
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BioEnchanted posted:I'd like to see a game where the plot thing is that it was built on an unsuitable engine and so as the game goes on things start to break down as the original forms of the engine start breaking through. Like a lovecraft kind of thing, seeing beyond the veil to code that should never have been or wasn't properly dummied out. There's at least one. The Magic Circle, maybe? It's a cool premise, and I too would like to see it explored more thoroughly.
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Jun 6, 2020 19:02
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BioEnchanted posted:I'd like to see a game where the plot thing is that it was built on an unsuitable engine and so as the game goes on things start to break down as the original forms of the engine start breaking through. Like a lovecraft kind of thing, seeing beyond the veil to code that should never have been or wasn't properly dummied out. This is remarkably close to both the Talos Principle (where the weird meta-stuff is kind of a background detail) or the Magic Circle, a game where you play through a game currently under development, with bickering devs and enemies that you can change the properties of on the fly.
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Jun 6, 2020 19:02
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The Magic Circle owns, and is about exactly this concept
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Jun 6, 2020 20:16
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You did it, you listed a obscure game with a novel concept that BioEnchanted didn't know about. He is free from the curse.
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Jun 6, 2020 21:03
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This is actually a fun exercise - what games mixed up genres in a novel way? Like, turning metroid prime and the witness taking side scrolling exploration and puzzlers into first person perspective.
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Jun 6, 2020 21:08
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The Magic Circle has voice acting by James Urbaniak which is my favourite thing whenever he does anything
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Jun 6, 2020 21:11
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Lechtansi posted:This is actually a fun exercise - what games mixed up genres in a novel way? Like, turning metroid prime and the witness taking side scrolling exploration and puzzlers into first person perspective. Duke Nukem and Wolfenstein are both probably noteworthy for starting as platformers and becoming shooters. The original Dynasty Warriors game was a fighting game. Kid Icarus went from sidescrolling platformer to 3D shooter/rail shooter
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Jun 6, 2020 21:16
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bony tony posted:The Magic Circle owns, and is about exactly this concept I'd heard the Magic Circle was something of a middle finger to auteur game directors, particularly Ken Levine and the ongoing disasters (at the time) of Star Citizen and Shroud of the Avatar. This has made me download the demo, so I'll go check it out.
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Jun 6, 2020 21:17
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Lechtansi posted:This is actually a fun exercise - what games mixed up genres in a novel way? Like, turning metroid prime and the witness taking side scrolling exploration and puzzlers into first person perspective. Are we not counting Myst?
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Jun 6, 2020 21:30
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Are we not counting Myst? Of course we can - I wasn't trying to say that the witness was the ONLY one that did it, its just the one that came to mind because of the comments in this thread.
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Jun 6, 2020 21:35
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Has any game ever had a mode which turns all the enemies into morons? As in they're not easy but they are comically dim? Some of the Mario Karts had a Blooper item that squirts ink on everyone's screen, and it causes the AI to swerve pretty wildly. They could have made it useless in single player, but it affects them enough that I was actually happy to get one.
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Jun 6, 2020 22:21
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exquisite tea posted:Horizon Zero Dawn uses a heavily modified version of the original Decima engine that Guerrilla developed for Killzone Shadowfall. Death Stranding so uses the Decima Engine.
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Jun 7, 2020 02:52
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Dash Rendar posted:Death Stranding so uses the Decima Engine. I was gonna mention this, I think those two games are high water marks for realistic open world design & implementation, pretty amazing where the groundwork for them came from.
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Jun 7, 2020 03:00
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Captain Hygiene posted:I was gonna mention this, I think those two games are high water marks for realistic open world design & implementation, pretty amazing where the groundwork for them came from. And not just open world games in general but two games where the natural environment played a leading role.
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Jun 7, 2020 03:25
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Lechtansi posted:This is actually a fun exercise - what games mixed up genres in a novel way? Like, turning metroid prime and the witness taking side scrolling exploration and puzzlers into first person perspective. Always remember that perhaps the most important advancement in JRPGs over the last maybe fifteen-ish years was Atlus deciding to combine one with a dating sim. It's probably my favorite 'shouldn't have worked, but it did' moment, because once you think about it you realize what a massive game-changer it was.
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Jun 7, 2020 04:04
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Are we not counting The 7th Guest?
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Jun 7, 2020 04:07
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Lechtansi posted:This is actually a fun exercise - what games mixed up genres in a novel way? Like, turning metroid prime and the witness taking side scrolling exploration and puzzlers into first person perspective. The old DOS Dune adventure game became a strategy once you talked to enough Fremen that you actually had an army. And of course, Battlezone was a RTS where you were a unit on the battlefield in FPP.
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Jun 7, 2020 06:42
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Brütal Legend was sold as a hack and slash action game, but it quickly turned into a strategy game with a third person perspective.
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Jun 7, 2020 07:47
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Cleretic posted:Always remember that perhaps the most important advancement in JRPGs over the last maybe fifteen-ish years was Atlus deciding to combine one with a dating sim. It's probably my favorite 'shouldn't have worked, but it did' moment, because once you think about it you realize what a massive game-changer it was. atlus did this over 20 years ago with their co-development of thousand arms
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Jun 7, 2020 08:05
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Gann Jerrod posted:Brütal Legend was sold as a hack and slash action game, but it quickly turned into a strategy game with a third person perspective. Also around that point it totally hosed up the characters in a way I found irredeemable - the main character's treatment of Ophelia was garbage by the endgame, he made her a promise then broke it like three hours later in the most rear end in a top hat way he could.
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Jun 7, 2020 08:38
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There was promise in the premise, but the devs whizzed it down their leg.
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Jun 7, 2020 08:40
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Gann Jerrod posted:Brütal Legend was sold as a hack and slash action game, but it quickly turned into a strategy game with a third person perspective. I think Giants: Citizen Kabuto did that first (or something similar anyway)
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Jun 7, 2020 08:50
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Probably the most out there example of engine use for me is the fact that Elite: Dangerous, the spaceship sim game, is built on the same cobra engine that powers Rollercoaster Tycoon 3.
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Jun 7, 2020 09:02
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