A while back we announced that Sirius Online is on hold while we work on porting it over to a new engine. But how far along are we exactly with the porting process? The answer unfortunately is not far.
We’ve hit some major roadblocks that we had to clear first and wrap our heads around a new box, so that we could both think inside and outside of that box.
World Size Difference
In our old Engine (Blitz3D), we used 32-bit Floating Points to store the Position in the world. That meant our original world had a total size of 7,355,443 units that we could safely represent without flickering / sudden jumps happening. We didn’t apply any tricks, such as local position offset or integer chunk mapping, to this limit. It was what we had to work with.
Unreal Engine 4 uses 64-bit Floating Points which increases that limit to 450,359,962,737,049. That’s our old limit times 612,281,221. This raised the question of how to actually fill the Universe at all and the answer was: Modding.
Modding in Sirius Online
This was planned for a long time, but due to the way our old code worked it needed a lot of work to be done. A lot more than if we just switched to something that already supported loading Mods out of the box, in this case it was Unreal Engine 4.
To make things easy, the game itself will be a mod to the base framework so that it can be unloaded and a complete conversion mod can be realized.
We’ll be using the Steam Workshop for this in the future once we’ve done the necessary work.
Finally
Have a screenshot from how the menu currently looks like!
Link: http://www.digitaldawnstudios.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/UE4Editor_2016-06-15_23-34-37.png
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