Odyssey on Unreal Engine 5? (to fix lag / performance issues)

[baron_V_S]

this isn't something you do 10 years into a game's lifecycle.

engine is the pretty much the foundation of the game. you will have to dig up the house to rebuild the foundations - it's an absolutely monumental undertaking. literally every facet of the game interacts with the engine in some shape or form. you would have to edit and change every single facet of the game, it's essentially a re-write of Elite Dangerous.

in which case you might as well just make the sequel!

 

[Barking_Mad]

No one will do anything.
It's high time we realized this.
In seven years they haven't made a color change in the interface, even though it's a couple of lines of code.
the basic functionality doesn't work - they go on vacation. the deepest management crisis.

eat what you have been brought. and don't forget to buy new skins. it is advisable to write rave reviews and thank you here. You can also make a video thanking them for the space legs and then discuss it for 1,000 pages.

What a pile of nonsense.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Surely any engine change from Cobra would mean that it'd be a new stand-alone title rather than Elite Dangerous.

Yes. If an ED-like game is possible in UE5, it's quite likely that someone else will be able to make it quicker than Frontier could unpick ED to use it.

(Whether it is or not probably depends on what you mean by "ED-like")

UE5 max map size is apparently ~21km

And it does allow tiling of multiple maps together to make a much bigger play area, but how well that works when some players are walking around on foot on a tile and another player is boosting past in a racing Viper at 900m/s potentially crossing several tiles each minute depending on trajectory remains to be seen.

 

[RogerO18]

FDev should sell ED & EDO to a company that would care about their game & players.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

FDev should sell ED & EDO to a company that would care about their game & players.

Pretty sure they do care.

 

[Sethioz]

FDev should sell ED & EDO to a company that would care about their game & players.

Honestly I think they do care about the game, I haven't exactly done much research and I don't follow their news, but as far as I know, they haven't really made any announcements WHY Odyssey lags so bad.
My guess, is that they got rushed by their sponsors and/or bosses.

This lag is my only complaint about ED devs, otherwise they've done great job over the years. ok ok not just lag, entire Odyssey seems bit off. Like the galaxy map, why did they have to rework it? They made it so much worse .. I have to spam left click like 10 times before I get it to focus on a system and same in system map, I have to spam buttons like 10 times before it registers the click and this "hold to plot route" is horrible too. I wish they'd see how bad it is....

and we're not even talking about VR, impossible to use galaxy map in VR. only search works, try clicking on something ... not possible. mouse cursor is 2D, while VR is 3D, so you mis-click every time, cuz you see cursor in a different place. anyone who has tried Odyssey in VR, knows what I'm talking about.

all in all, I think it's good to make posts like this from time to time, just to show devs that we haven't forgotten about the lag issues.

 

[Wizz15]

Even if UE5 would fix issues that their current engine has, it would also mean the engine swap will introduce a whole new spectrum of issues we currently don't experience in the old engine. I don't think they can simply keep all the game code and simply put UE5 underneath as a drop-in-replacement.

In any case you would just be trading one set of problems (the current bugs in the game/engine) for a different set of problems, since no engine is perfect and will work with any game. There are always limits/constraints and even UE5 is not magic - although it might look like it. If UE5 really was the end-all of game engines, everybody would already be jumping on it and dropping support for their in-house engines.

Probably a swap from UE4 to UE5 would be more realistic than swapping a proprietary engine like Cobra with UE5.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

FDev should sell ED & EDO to a company that would care about their game & players.

If there was a company out there capable of doing a significantly better job of an ED-like game, they could just write their own, probably much cheaper [1] than buying/licensing ED would be. Sure, it'd have to involve flying the Camel Mk II over the planet Leva as part of the dispute between the Coalition and the Confederation; the copyrightable bits of the concept and IP are replaceable enough if the game works out, and not being tied to some of ED's early design decisions might be beneficial.

The forums have been complaining about how bad FDev are at writing ED for well over five years now - more than enough time for this saviour company to replace them. Since then the space-game projects started at about the same time as ED have either:
- collapsed without trace
- released (or at least vaguely playable early access), but been a completely different sort of space game (not a surprise: it's a niche enough market you don't want to get too close to a competitor)
...and there's virtually nothing even announced as started up since in the same sort of area (I can think of two, one of which has basically no excitement on these forums about it at all and is years behind schedule, and the other will probably be at least decent but even less like ED than X4/NMS/SC are)

[1] Even despite two major drops in price this year, Frontier is still valued at over £700 million for the entire company. If Elite Dangerous is only a tenth of that value and the real money is in park simulators, it'd shouldn't cost £70 million to write a replacement. And yet no-one apparently is...

 

[Angelpichu]

I feel like Unreal Engine games usually end up really taxing on systems. My PC fans are loudest when running games that use Unreal Engine, and that's before the load times, even on SSDs...

 

[thistle]

It would mean rewriting the game from scratch. Rewriting the game means selling the game from scratch to make back the cost.

Back to square one for fdev, in other words.

Never happen.

 

[tomimt]

It's very unreasonable to expect FD to "port" ED for Unreal5, or any other engine. It's not as simple as taking the assets and the needed code, chucking them in UE5 and pressing compile. It would be a long, long project with no guarantees of success. Like someone mentioned, Starcitizen is using a heavily modded propriety engine, that has grown way beyond what the original engine was because of all the things they needed to build for it.

Changing engines would basically mean redesigning ED from the ground up, so in the end, if FD would decide to jump on the UE5 wagon, they'd probably use it for developing a brand new game instead of trying to wire ED working on it. While UE5 is an impressive engine, it's not some kind of a silver bullet, that would automatically fix everything.

 

[Bionic Bytes]

The biggest problem with swapping over to a new game engine isn't the game itself - it's the assets and tool chain used to produce the game's content. As an example (made up numbers) If the game could be migrated in say 6 months, then the tool set would be 4 years. This is from my own experience writing my own 3D OpenGL engine and tool set.