automationgame.com

Watch this and you'll see what I mean

I am, but I believe it might actually be UE4 if that's any better.
Thankfully I still have tons of patience because I'm lucky enough to have so many things to do with my time. (This is why i'm never active enough here)
We'll find out soon enough.

I'm assuming the switch to one of the new engines will give much greater performance on most machines. Is this correct?

YES

That's the reason I'm so excited for the engine switch - better graphics, AND better performance!

Just out of curiosity, what is the technical plan for the engine plan? I assume it's gonna be easier than most games concerning you wouldn't have to port over or intergrate with Unity's physics engine, and are only using it for the graphics. I can't imagine how you port over the body morphing though, considering most of Unity's tech assumes a more constant mesh, with any changes done through skeletal animation. It also seems like you are planning this engine change way too late in development when a majority of the features have already been implemented to work with the old engine, and I'm afraid this will either end in a year-long hiatus of rewriting everything or a sloppy job.

I assume you have already been planning for this and been designing the new features to easily integrate with the new engine once the change is made, but I'm also kinda nervous considering I got screwed on a couple other early-access projects I had been looking forward to. That being said I have dumped more hours into Automation than any of those other games, so my expectations are good.

Turns out in unity the mesh morphing just straight out WORKS with no real effort. It's only a skinned mesh, which is the same sort of thing you'd be doing with skeletal animation. In UE4 (the other potential engine, and in fact most likely engine) it almost works straight off, with just some minor work to tell it that the crazy bone structure we use is OK.

Porting wise it's basically grabbing the entire "game" which is made of LUA scripts, then getting the new engine to sit under all that pretending to be the old engine. I would quite honestly expect that to take 8 months at the very least, but that's OK as it'll be during a phase where we'll also be adding content and doing the massive testing and balancing task of the tycoon game, which will take ages and will be artist and designer heavy, but not very programmer heavy.

If you're worried this will cause the project not to be finished, don't be.

If you're worried it'll cause it to take longer, well that's entirely possible, but for the long term future of the game I think it's worth it. And we've never been about getting things out in a rush compared to getting them right.


*Disclaimer: this is my dumb artist understanding. Programmer could tell you more, but our plan has been checked for sanity, don't you worry

Also damn do I ever wish good, affordable* game engines were available back when we started this whole thing!

*Killrob Edit

Wait a minute, what's the difference between Unity and UE4?

They are two totally different game engines. UE4 = Unreal Engine 4.

This is sad news. Why the change from Unity to UE4? It's sad for some of us because like them I've switched to a Linux system and Unity seems to work natively. Idk how UE4 will work :/

No, the switch will be to either Unity OR UE4, not from one to the other.

I beleive UE4 also supports Linux reasonably well. So that could still be workable.

But please do be aware that you've bought a windows game that has never specifically been aimed at linux release. It may work on linux, but it is not an officially supported OS, we make no promises.

Why would you even use Linux over Windows?

Lots of reasons mate. One of them would be pretty much no viruses.

Well, for one, it's free.