Upgrading the engine conference

[SickAlice]

Just an idea for everyone to kick around. We'd talked previously about making a new engine from scratch. I invested time in trying to learn Unity to that end though learned it's a confusing engine even for the people that develop games for Android, then my laptop crashed. A thought instead is to update the Netimmerse engine itself instead to beef up the options. I know some of you like Alex for example have a good handle on this stuff so maybe you'll have an angle. I figure there's games that use updated versions of the engine to enhance the graphics, Oblivion and Fallout 4 noted and I think Cuphead is the most recent version and wonder if it's possible to use the other games and cross-pollinate resources over to make this game a bit tougher and more high res for that matter. I've always wondered the same between the two sequels here. Like the first game for example does not use Stencil Masks and thus can't properly render cutouts made with alpha channels so the thought was to port components from the second game to the first. You get the gist, we have a solid group of minds here, lets see what comes out of this.

[abenavides]

I looked at this a lot a few years back.
I played around a bit with Unity and couldn't quite grasp they way it's put together (that was a a few versions ago so maybe it's easier now).
I did like Unreal engine bit more and planned to go spend more time on it but have never gotten back to it

I did a lot of coding with panda3D (which I blogged about). Gotten further with that than anything else, but it's not a popular engine and that hurts it becoming a finished project.

More recently, I had a similar thought to yours, isn't there some NetImmerse/gambryo engine or project we could latch on to?

I found this:
https://openmw.org/

It's an open source implementation of Morrowind. It uses the same game assets (NIFs) as Morrowind, but implemented on it own engine.
I took a brief look but it seems very specific to a Fantasy RPG. (inventories, etc). Theoretically could change it to be anything , but that may require C skills (I'd say I'm a beginner at C not having done it since my college days)

The GODOT engine also seems very interesting . This is an opensource alternative to Unity and Unreal. And its design philosophy is similar to Panda, so I could follow it a bit more.
Still has a learning curve though.

[SickAlice]

Bit more work than I was thinking but I'm lacking in this area so it wouldn't be on me, mostly just thinking of grabbing aspects from other later NI games and latching them into the FF ones. I figure I use that method sometimes for nifs so I couldn't see why it wouldn't work. The game Knight Rider 2 is very noted here, everyone should get a copy of that, pretty small file size, and extract the files and just crack them open in Nifskope and have a look. They pretty much took advantage of everything the engine has to offer and did it all in a clean manner. And yeah, Unity is still a nightmare. I'm registered with them and have it but damned if I ever bother with it.