"Kironide;c-17912220" wrote:
A question for those knowledgeable people out there with technical insight to game engines - How difficult is it to upgrade a game engine, if a game proves successful and it runs for a longer than originally expected? I noticed there was job advert for an engineer recently to extend the Sims engine's function.
A perfect example is Skyrim. The original version runs on the Creation Engine, which is an upgraded version of the Gamebryo engine used for Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and New Vegas. However, Fallout 4 implemented a new
renderer with dynamic lighting and tesselation (among other things).
Then Bethesda decided to port Skyrim to their new engine (let's call it Creation Engine 2.0 for convenience). Considering Skyrim was running on the same core engine, it wasn't hard to port it to the new version of the same engine. It's the same as porting an Unreal Engine 3 game to Unreal Engine 4. Some games were ported mid-development when UE4 came out (Xing: The Lang Beyond) for example.
What can be truly hard is to port a game from two very different engines. You may need to redo a huge chunk of the game. Ultimately, engines are the middle man between you and your PC. It saves a lot of time and resources, but you don't really NEED an engine to start making a game. You can write your OWN engine as you write the game, especially if you're very good at writing in a low-level language such as C.
So whenver I see a claim that The Sims 4 can't do this or that because of its engine I wonder if people understand what an engine is. It's not a corset. It's suppose to make things EASIER for you. If the engine isn't capable of doing something, you just upgrade the engine and that's it.
