Comments - EPG_BlownKapz

Pardon Insan, he likes trying to be funny. :p

while I agree, keep in mind this is all very much WIP - lots of things will change (for the better, hopefully :P) over the course of development, especially between this demo/prelude and the first actual release. Right now we're focusing on building tools, experimenting with workflows, working with new UE4 features and the like. You can safely expect things to be more detailed later. :)

some of the areas/cultures are indeed greek inspired. So while that's not an adaptation of the Iliad or similar works, there will probably be similar elements (?) or at least one or two references. Since Greek History/Mythology is something I'm very fond of I will personally make sure of that :p
Bad news is that these areas are waaaaaaaaay down our release plan, so it'll be a while until you see something from it :p

Hella long update but trust me, the story is real good.

uups, wasn't logged in.

"not a lot of hope for getting far, for the lack of updates...
We promise we're working though - just not a lot of stuff to show right now, lots of code and we're currently just building up the 3D Art team."

preeeeeeeetty sure theyre gonna find a way around that or will attempt to, would make for an awfully dull ending to the war in the next books. "Well they can't come over thise, time to pack your bags boys we dont need to fight after all, just let the wall do its magic thingy."

We merely misunderstood each other :P
Since you said that there is another way which is more of a hassle directly through Epic I was under the impression you thought that both Epic and Github give out those student licenses, when in fact the only way to get one is through the github program. I didnt know you were referring to the academic partner program. :)

that actually IS the thing Epic does, it's the official way to get the educational license. ;)

Mhhhm not directly, no - there never was a single 'Empire' ruling all of Althas, there were always 7 Anointed Kingdoms. However the Feralands, a very large region of the continent, is in chaos and mostly lawless, and there are many groups fighting for power after the Anointed Kingdoms that once ruled there were destroyed by the War of Calamities.
So there's definetly some clan fighting going on somewhere. :P

We are NOT in any way continuing development on the MERP mod, for a fact 90% of our team aren't even related to it and joined afterwards (includes me). This project is in no way connected to MERP other than that it's here because MERP was C&D'd and the (now) Team Leads wanted to make a game still.

If you do have a mighty need to walk around middle earth though, keep an eye on the Outerra engine and this particular project for it Me-dem.me.uk

We do work at higher than reasonable resolutions, because downgrading them is easy... Upgrading requires a complete redoing of the entire texturing :p

The Helmet by Justin was done by hand I believe, I did use the quixel suite for the Smith's Hammer. But I'll be replacing the quixel suite with Substance Painter and B2M, much better workflow IMO. A little more work, but the results look less 'samey', since you actually can create the base textures yourself instead of always using the quixem preset ones.

Yup it's a ball pein hammer, primarily used by smiths ;)

Just to clear things up, the total size right now is 32x32km, however the playable area is 26x26km, the last 6x6km are a buffer Zone and not actually visitable ( I mean its just ocean anyway, nothing interesting there...)

The performance hit would be litetally unplayable! :D
I mean assuming each ring has 3 radial verteces and 5 ring compartments -which would be the absolute minimum for rings to even look ringlike that'd still be 30 tri's per ring... Now Im not gonna count the rings in the Textures, but lets just Say we won't see 3D Maille in games for quite some time still :p

oh dont worry, it is up there during updates, with our highest being at number 3. We've just been doing a lot of stuff under the hood, so we've sunk somewhat low.
Hopefully soon we will have more stuff to show, it's been a long time :)

Unreal Engine can handle a theoretically unlimited map size, thanks to level origin relocation and world streaming.
The team I work with uses that to accomplish a 32x32km map.
I'm also pretty sure wind can change dynamically via Blueprints.
But it seems like you've takien kindly to Unity, and are making some very cool progress, cant wait to see more! :)

Oh no! So sad to hear that you guys eventually did have to jump ship on Cryengine. The pun is kind of intended, even in light of the bad news.
I hope you guys get some amazing results out of Unity, and I will definetly donate as soon as its available.
Having worked myself with Cryengine and having switched when CaaS came out, even though to UE4, I (or we as a team) are definetly encountering similar stuff like deeper understanding of the engine itself. In CE3 some things just worked right out of the bat like say the landscape system or a basic FPS controller, but when you acutally tried to change things... oh god. I'm glad we abandoned CE3 before ever encountering these issues, and wish you all the best with this project and Unity. Very excited to see what you'll do with this.

In addition to just raw manhours needed to get MP running there are also technical issues, since UE4 doesn't support multiplayer in combination with large worlds as ours out of the box. Only solution would be a custom netcode solution, which isn't something were able to do right now... :/

This isn't about pushing current Hardware to the max - we are not crytek. Engines like CE3 or UE4 can simply run more vertexes without performance impact. So combined with the fact that until we actually release hardware will be a lot more powerful than even now (or at least the average hardware in systems will be higher). So we probably can easily get away with higher vertex counts and a ton of stuff in the surroundings. And it is so easy to downgrade the graphics (keep in mind texture resolution is way more taxing than vertexes), so don't worry about it. :p

The music there is available for use when buying it. So it probably wasnt made for Morrowind Rebirth specifically, but licensed.

as to models/textures etc.:

MERP models wont be used because the import process would be painful, and since we are now using UE4 we dont have to go with Skyrims engine limits (much higher vertex counts possible in UE4) and we want to make use of that. Also a lot of the models are quite specific to Tolkiens world, and we want to set ourselves apart from that.

As to the music we have composers on the team, very talented ones indeed, so music will not be an issue in any way. Here's a link to our music overseer's personal soundcloud: Soundcloud.com , give his stuff a listen. And also here we want to separate ourselves from MERP, keeping the number of composers low to ensure consistency as MEB said.

As sad as it is, MERP is a thing of the past and this project is completely unrelated to that. :L

ah okay. :)

UE4 has indeed adressed a lot of the UE3 issues. I personally am involved in a team developing a UE4 (ex-CE3) game, and since we switched to UE4 a few weeks back we have made more progress up until now than we ever had in half a year of CE3 development, simply because of how versatile and easy to use it is. But yeah I can understand that, if the progress is there it wouldnt be a smart move to change anymore. Looking forward to future updates!

arent there maybe a few loops in there that are quite unecessary? Looks rather high poly.

If you were to switch to UE4, a lot of things would be way easier. Its an amazing engine, in every way superior to CE3. But hey, great work anyway! Those landscapes look amazing :)

well, stuff like that would mostly be wasted ressources. LoA will be, as you may know, 1st person only, and even though you will be able to see your body (looking down/reflections) it would be such a rare situation that the time it would take to develop and the processing power (however small) can be used elsewhere.

Importing into UE4 is literally just drag&drop. Importing into CE3 on the other hand... oh my. And UE4 is superior in every aspect imaginable, too. I think switching to UE4 was the best thing they could have done, and in fact, the best thing any CE3 dev group could do right now, if they arent too far into development.

"UDK (pretty sure that's the same thing as UE4 "
Not at all! ;D
UDK is the Free Unreal Engine 3 SDK, while UE4 is the Unreal Engine 4. UE4 has made a BIG jump from UE3/UDK, in almost every way. It's pretty mindblowing how accessible everything is, and it also looks great due to PBR. :D

The quixel suite outputs the standard maps used in games (diffuse, normal, specular) as well as a bunch of other ones for specific purposes, so you can use them anywhere. Also this open beta (lasting till September) can be used privately as well as commercially, so you dont have to buy it, but if you want to use it past September you would have to. Its worth the money though IMO. Its a bit hard to get into and I'm a nobn as well in it, but go to quixels YT channel, they have some tutorials there. And here, have a look at what I did messing around with it for 2 hours: Abload.de

Its pretty goddamn sweet.