I remember awhile back in a Interview that Tom had… The Interviewer asked Him a question something along the lines of the current hand built engine that Stonehearth is using and if He had a choice of doing it again would he use a ready built engine? Tom replied (not a direct quote) He would probably choose a ready built engine next time…
‘If’ that is still true why not start the process of switching it over to Unity or something similar after A15?
Note: Not saying they should or that they need to by any means but it does seem that it could be a benefit to have all that built in Support and Libraries at their disposal and they would still have the means to build it the way they want it.
They could still do everything they do know and with all the personal knowledge they have in the Team and it could be a relatively painless transition (especially since they could hold streams of the transitioning process).
Because they’ve already worked on 15 alphas, over 3+ years, and they would have to rewrite literally everything. It wouldn’t take as long but it would take a long while that could be spent on optimization, content or features. Switching to a standard engine would also mean giving up the control to optimize everything for performance they badly need right now. Also, all the current mods would probably be dead, as most engines don’t support mods out of the box.
It would have been quicker to start with, sure. But Radiant’s gotten tied to their engine now for Stonehearth.
They wrote this in C++ for the most part right? A dash of lua, sprinkly some Json, all supported in Unity along with others.
How would they be giving up control with optimizations? Yes they would need to wait for a fix for certain areas… or would they? I know of some using their own band of code in A lot of areas along with a boxed engine and just using the best qualities the engine supports.
Lol I just watched a guy move minecraft to unity in a week: Minecraft to unity.
Is why I am wondering is all. Yeah this is not Minecraft and it probably would be too Big of a undertaking… Still would be neat to watch something like that happen as it happend
It is all glorious until you need something that the engine does not offer, which will make you insert your own set of code, thus messing with the rest of the engine and making everything a loss of time. Because if you end up needing to write (engine) code, there is no point to use it instead of doing one yourself, one that will be better suited and much more settled and optimized to your game.
A long time ago when I was coding in Delphi (a very old language), I was using an engine that basically gave access to directx plus a few game related routines.
Later on I simple removed it and started over cause the more advanced the game was, more I caught my self writing my own code instead of the generics from the engine.
Thanks for the insight! This is really useful stuff (for me at least) asking questions, reading answers. Pro’s/ Con’s and everything that goes with it.
