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Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 9 months agoIt’s certainly a very large financial undertaking to change the engine like that, and at that point they’re honestly better off just making a new game entirely.
They might be doing exactly that FWIW. There’s some evidence Jagex is working on a “RuneScape universe” oriented game in Unreal Engine.
Still, that’s not the silver bullet that people often think it is. Rewrites are often far more expensive than originally anticipated and extremely risky as even if you intend to make the exact same game, there are often differences that come down to the underlying engine in how the game plays that can be controversial.
For context, I’ve been on a team that did a full rewrite of a large complicated C# web application in Ruby and I’ve also worked on several C/C++ “desktop” applications that have roots in the late 80s and early 90s. The former is more “fun” in a sense, you can make up for a lot of sins. However, I fundamentally believe that unless the language you’re moving from has serious fundamental issues (e.g. you’re insane and wrote a million line application in Bash), you’re probably better taking a hard look at your application and retrofitting new systems inside of the old application where you most badly need those changes.
Even in the “worst case” it’s in practice true that most of the code doesn’t need touched, it’s just some really intertwined portions that need revamped. You can often get away with making a new system that replaces the guts of the old, thus powering both the existing code, and allowing you to achieve whatever goal you had in rewriting in the first place (working faster, safer, more readably, etc).
assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Yeah that’s fair. It’s you can nearly cordon off the engine and then upgrade it to keep the same functionality it could work well. I guess it really depends on estimated hours to figure out if it would be more economic to make a new game or new engine.
Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 9 months ago
I also just wanted to add; if you want to look at what this looks like when the game development company is functioning properly look at Crytek and Hunt Showdown.
Crytek has publicly stated Hunt has a lot of issues internally in its code base. They then responded by committing to fix those issues (i.e. fix their spaghetti), and then they followed up by actually fixing issues (off the top of my head, an advantage when peeking from the left down to how the game handled the player camera was fixed, bugs in the ammo system resulting in a number of issues with reloading were fixed).
They didn’t stop there though. They said in their last roadmap update, they’re working with their internal CryEngine development team to make major changes to CryEngine to do everything they want to do, remove hacks coded into Hunt’s fork of CryEngine, and pay all the tech debt down to get Hunt running on the most recent CryEngine (and hopefully keep it there, with all the tech advances that brings).
Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 9 months ago
I just am cynical about Jagex’s willingness to spend money in this space. Ever since they’ve been owned by venture capital, everything is penny pinched; it needs to have an obvious return on investment.
We as players normally only see the content developers in interviews, and they’re often folks that don’t even have proper computer science degrees or training. Jagex internally for years has hired largely unskilled workers into their QA department and then promoted them into “developer” positions that work with RuneScript.
I’m fairly confident the engine team was a skeleton crew (and one split among developing iOS, Android, and Desktop clients) until the last few years when it became apparent at least some investment into the engine on the server side/more broadly was necessary.
I looked into joining their engine team at one point, and then promptly walked away when I saw the payscale.
Basically, I see no reason to give them slack; it’s actually a bit counter productive in my view. The community should be stern that Jagex should address their issues rather than running from them and constantly blaming “yesterday’s Jagex” for why “today’s Jagex” is making bad decisions, can’t do XYZ, etc