Day: November 15, 2013

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.