[Mark]

First of all, sorry for the terrible pun in the subject line.

I have been busy working on the mod system, specifically making it so that every part of a spaceship can be configured in mods.


Two days ago Crytek announced the release of CryEngine V. It is free, open source, and supports programming in C#. This was very exciting news. CryEngine has a brilliant rendering engine, and getting full access to it for free is great. Also UNION is coded in C#, so this opened up the possibility of moving UNION to the CryEngine.

I spent the last two days reviewing the engine, testing out different parts of UNION in it to see how it performs.

Sadly, I found the engine lacking. It's C# implementation is modern (great) but it's C# API is very poor compared to it's C++ API. There are many things you can do in C++ which cannot be done in C#. The source is available, which would allow me to extend the C# API, but that is too much overhead for me. Coupled with that issue is an extreme lack of documentation.

These things may be improved later on, so I will check again in a few months to see what has changed.


UNION is developed in such as way as to be independent from any one game engine. It has it's own entity, physics, UI, and networking systems. These can be then plugged into any engine/framework which has robust C# support. Right now that means Unity, MonoGame, and Xenko.

At the moment we are using Unity as our engine. It has a very good and easily accessible rendering engine, but it also has many issues and downsides (including an ancient implementation of C#/Mono). It is my intention to move UNION to the Xenko engine after it leaves Beta. Xenko is a very modern engine, with a much better API than Unity. It is also open source, which makes things easier for me as a developer (and that speeds up development).


Now I am back to working on spaceships in the mod system. We are holding off on the next DevLog until that is completed, with all this work on code there are no new visuals to show. In the next DevLog the basics of modding in UNION, creating a new mod and adding new spaceships to it.


Thanks for reading!

Mark

[Grey]

I bet a smarter man than me would get a lot of information out of this..
I on the other hand read: bla bla.. technobabble.. blabla.. programming languages... bla bla.. no devlog.

Thanks for rubbing in how little I know about programming and stuff. 

Can't wait to see the next devlog.. been waiting (un)patiently. Keep up the good work.

[Mark]

I bet a smarter man than me would get a lot of information out of this..
I on the other hand read: bla bla.. technobabble.. blabla.. programming languages... bla bla.. no devlog.

Thanks for rubbing in how little I know about programming and stuff. 

Can't wait to see the next devlog.. been waiting (un)patiently. Keep up the good work.

Ah now, you are being far too hard on yourself. Programming is not a measure of intelligence, it's a learned skill. There are far more intelligent people than there are programmers, and there are plenty of programmers who aren't terribly smart.

I'm really sorry about the DevLog delays, we just don't want to release one for the sake of doing it. It has to have content worth showing. We think it'll be really cool to show the process of adding a mod and creating a new spaceship.

We could do things faster, but it would mean cutting corners. We firmly believe in doing things right the first time.

[Blaze]

Sadly, I found the engine lacking.

That's too bad. I've heard good things about CryEngine, so when I saw the subject I was intrigued to see what's wrong. As it's open source, there's always a slight chance someone will implement what you need, so maybe you shouldn't discard the idea of using it until you have to.

and there are plenty of programmers who aren't terribly smart.

Unfortunately. That's why there are so many bad applications out there.

I'm really sorry about the DevLog delays, we just don't want to release one for the sake of doing it. It has to have content worth showing.

I agree. Your primary objective is to make the game, not the marketing for it. I'm okay with less updates, if that means you're all working hard on making the game awesome.

We could do things faster, but it would mean cutting corners. We firmly believe in doing things right the first time.

Exactly!

[Mark]

Thanks for the support man.

I have not written off CryEngine entirely, I am hoping that they (and the community) are committed to improving the C# API and documentation. As it stands C# is not very accessible in the engine (you have to read the docs to even find out how to access C# in the engine, and to do so involves looking through files in the CryEngine Program Files directory), and if people don't start using it then Crytek could just drop it in a later release.

If I had a bigger dev team I would definitely experiment with extending the C# API, but as it is I have to be very choosy about what new tasks I take on. Porting the game to a new engine is another kind of feature/scope creep, so I need to make sure it's really worth it.