We are pleased to announce that Ground Branch is being developed using Epic’s Unreal Engine 4! Don’t worry, the majority of our completed work has moved over with a little bit of effort and things are in a much better state to move forward. For now, here are some of the main reasons for moving on to UE4:
- It is modern technology!
- More efficient art/programming pipelines
- It allows us to compete better in the graphics area without needing tons of developers
- Allows us to support platforms other than PC without hiring dedicated and expensive specialized programmers
- Better Dedicated Server support
- Infinitely better control and performance with dynamic lighting
- New Material pipeline that makes use of physically-based shaders to give unprecedented control over the look and feel
- Much more advanced particle systems
- Advanced AI and the dynamic navigation system make it simple to simulate complex behaviors with navigation meshes that update in real time
- Advanced DirectX 11 high-end rendering features such as full-scene HDR reflections, thousands of dynamic lights per scene, artist-programmable tessellation and displacement, physically based materials and shading, temporal anti-aliasing, IES lighting profiles
Moving to Unreal Engine 4 provides us a more solid foundation to make sure Ground Branch has a long life. We want to support GB for a long time and UE3 has been around for a while now… its roughly 7 years old and has lots of legacy code/methodologies that we had to continually work around. Basically, UE4 is a more solid platform to carry BFS/GB for many years to come. Oh, and it’s just a bad ass engine to work with!
We will have much more to show as we gear up for the new Ground Branch Kickstarter.
