Unreal 5 development engine. Imagine something like this...

dundun92 said:

Yes, I saw that a while back, even made a little game on it thanks to my coding skills. N3V has worked so hard on developing their custom game engine, it wouldn't be worth it to abandon all that progress. I had raised this question before about how N3V's competitors (e.g. Dovetail) can create games with assets with much higher poly counts and LOD's, while still getting much better performance because they are working with highly developed and refined Unreal Engine. If N3V did make a switch however, that would allow for much higher poly counts, LOD's and draw distances, without the performance hit.

I've complained how Trainz is so unoptimized compared to its competitors. You have trainz with shadows on Ultra, and yet jagged shadow edges can still be seen (they aren't smooth shadows), and ugly lighting noise in the cabs (https://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?161875-Ugly-lighting) - all while running at 5fps. Compare that to TSW, where I can get much better graphics, smooth shadows, more realism, extremely high levels of detail, while hardly ever getting fps below 60 with all setting maxed out! Trainz may have been something when it first came out, but it seriously needs a major game revamp in order to stay competitive now.

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amigacooke said:

Dovetail have used Unreal Engine for Train Sim World 2, but it seems to make getting an editor quite a problem.

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dundun92 said:

I've complained how Trainz is so unoptimized compared to its competitors.

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UE4 isn’t a silver bullet when it comes to graphics and performance. I’ve worked extensively in UE4 and considering the Trainz ecosystem, it would definitely cause more problems than it would fix. For one thing, Trainz relies heavily on user-generated content. Although this is an excellent business model (you don’t need as many artists if the community makes most of your content for you), I think N3V is now somewhat trapped in making their games backwards compatible. UE4, and most game engines, require all of the game’s assets to be built-in to the game and often compressed when it is packaged. Neither it nor Unity have great modding tools, and loading models and textures at runtime is an easily broken and hacky affair, even from standard formats like .fbx. This is probably the reason why the extent of custom content in TSW is, afaik, reskinning. If N3V were to start over with UE4, they would have two options:

A: scrap everything and hire a small army of additional artists (who specialize in modeling trains, and aren’t easy to find) to make new PBR content and UE4-compliant levels for the game. This would be a ridiculous investment, and would probably require another Kickstarter campaign. It wouldn’t be backwards compatible in any way, and this would definitely hurt sales.
B: Port over the asset database code, and write systems that will convert progressive meshes, indexed meshes, trainzmeshes, twinkles pfx, texture files, and more to either UE4’s native data structures (slow and inefficient), or pull the engine source code apart so that it will support outdated mesh formats from 20 years ago (this would clash with UE4’s underlying systems in several places). They might as well make their own engine in house….. cough E2 cough

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whitepass said:

The first Unreal engine soled for $500,000US and that was like 30 years ago.

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