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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Unreal Engine 5.4
Nerror
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
We got a sneak peek at UE 5.4:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8-k9bYsta0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8-k9bYsta0
- He mentioned nanite and lumen performance improvements of 2x compared to UE 5.0. Awesome for sieges and the big nodes.
- Some things look better now, like a heterogeneous volume improvement.
- And there's a lot of work on animations in the engine that I hope can translate to a faster development time for Ashes. Not my field of expertise though, so I don't really know.
- And a new cool audio tool
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Comments
After a certain point, it really seems like the launch-version of the engine to be using should be set in stone, and then later add-ons and expansions can feature the needed adjustments.
Though this won't be getting removed most likely some thing could change how it works +optimization or other others. For any experimental feature there is a general warning
If it was just to test it out to see how it works or understand the pipeline that is fine. But its different when you are talking about development.
I hope you realize it being experimental in 5.4 means you have a chance it wont be in 5.5. So to say for them to use that feature in 5.4 would mean you have to be suggesting for them to use experimental features in development.
you might be thinking of the UE4 to UE5 move
But... it's been 3 years between Alpha One and Alpha Two.
Steven has never released a game before, so... no... he knows nothing about delays and their impacts on scheduling.
I wouldn't call 3 years a short term delay.
A1 was ridiculously barebones in comparison. Very little system, basic combat with just skills, three classes? I suppose it also wasn't particularly asset/content rich.
A2 obviously has a very notable facelift already across the board, the game's scope is huge. I am no white knight and will quite happily point out flaws - what I would say is that if they'd stayed on UE4, I wouldn't be surprised if we were still either waiting for A2, or barely entered it.
--
On the actual topic - any improvements to the UE5 game engine should absolutely be taken advantage of where able. I think intrepid are on 5.2 currently the wiki seems to back this up. The bigger the game gets, I suppose there are more adjustments needed to get the new version working properly but in some cases if optimisations have been made between versions, that should just be a straight win. The game has big goals with the large scale pvp so it needs to have the best performance it can afford to get.
Kickstarter was 2017 and Steven said the game was already farther along than most previous MMORPGs due to using the tools in the Unreal Engine. Steven stated very emphatically that Ashes would release before 2020.
In 2021, after Alpha One, Steven announced they would be upgrading to the most recent version of Unreal Engine, but that would give the devs the tools they need to create faster than ever before, so that should not cause major delays to Alpha 2. I could never have imagined that 3 years in between was even possible.
Especially since I played some version of Ashes every year from 2017 - 2021.
If they had stayed on UE4, they would likely be closer to release.
Features would not be as robust.
Feature creep is real.
They can try to keep up with new UE updates forever... and never release.
At some point, you have to make the decision to stop the feature creep.
But, the crux of what I said is that an upgrade to the most recent version of UE is always likely to cause significant delays. And Stephen has proven many times that he is not capable of properly evaluating the impact of those upgrades on the schedule.
That is a side topic to whether or not the devs should make the upgrade.
10 years is a reasonable time frame for a good MMORPG. And we are on year 7.
Star citizen officially welcomes AoC into the fold.
Aoc devs to star citizen "What happen to your backers?"
Star citizen devs to AoC devs "Its about time, its our greatest weapon. We have ascended our mortal bodies, while our backers were lost to the force of time. The future is now" ~android eyes light up in the dark~
* Holds Mic to dear Songcaller *
" What will be able to expect in Two or Three Years when Ashes might release ? "
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Guild is " Balderag's Garde " for now. (German)
Personally, I hope they get to it at some point in order to implement the more detailed ground features. The ground do be looking pretty flat atm, and in most MMOs. Would be a pretty major graphical improvement to the genre. One of those thing's you don't always consciously appreciate when it's good, but absolutely changes how impressive the game looks overall.
I don't know much about all this, but I am curious how difficult is it to upgrade and move all the work done to another patch/version. I know they already done it in the past, but was it basically a click of a button? I'm sure its probably little more then that, but if it is like that every 5-10 patches I can imagine it be basically a new game even when ashes of creation is completely finished.
The "Biome-Generator" Part/Timestamp catched my Eyes the most.
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Guild is " Balderag's Garde " for now. (German)
It can be a huge amount of effort to upgrade to a new version of a game engine like that, even on small hobby projects. It is never as simple as clicking a button. They would have to at the very least do full regression testing to make sure the upgrade didn't break anything or change how anything works when compared to the previous version. It could potentially cost them weeks where no new development is happening because of issues, bugs, or changes in functionality caused by the upgrade. The larger and more complex a project is, the more effort and time this would take, and MMOs are about as large and complex as video games can get.
it depends. unreal uses semantic versioning. long story short, upgrading from unreal 4 to 5 will be difficult and break the game. lots of stuff will stop working and you need to replace the code. for example, you can have something like
and that might not work anymore, then you have to track it and replace it with:
you could also have a doSomething in 4 and 5 and they can do completely different things, so you need to make sure that these things are doing what you want internally.
upgrading from unreal 5.2 to 5.3 shouldn't break the game. you still want to check and make sure, but for the most part, things should be fine, and it's much faster than upgrading from 4 to 5.
then you can have something like 5.3.1 to 5.3.2. these are just bug fixes that shouldn't break the game.