APB Anniversary Letter

[APB Anniversary Letter]

1 minute ago, Frosi said:

Somewhat, I am not 100% sure on this but I believe its a Beta version of Unreal 3.0 which is also heavily modified. There a ton of custom code here that barely holds the game together, this is also why in Matt's Engine upgrade posts he keeps mentioning needing to be familiar with APB itself, not with Unreal Engine.

 

 

Well first of all, the tools are 32 Bit which complicates things quite a bit, I'm not a programmer but I can imagine that if they were to code things on the current engine they would struggle to even get it to work and on top of all that it would likely mess up a lot of unrelated things in the game. With every patch we've seen something completely unrelated broke, first we saw this with being able to damage your own vehicle from the passenger seat, then by Vandalize storefront objectives being bugged and then stuff like the Radar Tower bug or the bug that makes HUD elements disappear when you switched characters, both which haven't been fixed yet, likely because the cause for this is something unrelated and it is like looking for a needle in a haystack. In short, the current engine is a mess, likely because its very dated, running on 32Bit tools and has a ton of custom code to it.

 

If they were to add some of these systems now they would also have to port them over to the new engine which will then bring its own set of issues because things will likely not work and you have to sit down and fix it yet again, basically doubling the work you have to put in. On one hand if they did these sort of things the current game could be in a better state, on the other hand it would have likely caused other issues to break.

 

One thing I haven't touched on is Engine limitations, these are things old G1 employee's kept mentioning so take this with a grain of salt but it could very well be that APB's engine is basically at the limits of what it can handle from both a literal and technical standpoint. 

 

The vehicle editors and vehicles themselves are and I quote "by far, the most complicated thing in APB", it'll likely take a ton of time and a dedicated person to sit down and learn how to use the thing but because of all the reasons above, I don't think that sort of thing is something they want to do right now, likely because the switch from 32Bit to 64Bit could make things easier as well as all the other things about risks of breaking things and limitations I mentioned above.

 

I hope this clears some things up, keep in mind that I have no experience with game engines, let alone APB's engine so take all of this with a grain of salt but these are some of the things both LO and G1 kept mentioning so I've tried to piece some things together in my post.

That actually made a whole lotta sense, thank you!!

[APB Anniversary Letter]

14 hours ago, Frosi said:

Its crazy that you name four things, three of which require the first thing you mentioned. 

 

APB needs the engine upgrade for any meaningful change to happen, this includes new content and system overhauls. No one in their right mind will advertise the current game but what they can do is fix background issues unrelated to current engine work, things that are minor and easy to merge over such as Weapon / Game balance and this is exactly what they are doing, if the engine upgrade launches and the game is an unbalanced pile of trash then you have yet another thing to do while you also work on fixing Matchmaking and adding new content.

Correct me if I'm wrong but APB is using Unreal 3.0, right? The only reason they "cannot work" with it is because it's not supported anymore.
Yet if they really wanted to, they could 100% implement new features using the old version of the engine. Why wouldn't they be able to include new vehicles in Unreal 3.0?
It's always advertised as the "one thing that has to happen" before anything else, but on a technical standpoint: I honestly don't understand why they shouldn't be able to change anything on 3.0.
Please explain ty

[APB Anniversary Letter]

9 hours ago, L0pht said:

Just END threat segregation already , the game is dying. Golds can’t even play on Jericho anymore. thx

Seemed to be the only option that made the console version playable. They should totally look into that

[APB Anniversary Letter]

1 hour ago, qb said:

"hurr durr let's make this game easier for us cause there's 'more' of us, let the game adopt to us instead of us evolving and learning how to play a game"

Just say you wanna play alone lmfao you guys are doing your absolute best to kill off APB for ages, it seemed to work.

[APB Anniversary Letter]

4 hours ago, qb said:

Nade spam? Med spray? There is absolutely nothing wrong with this? Stop listening to the silvers on these forums and listen to veteran players maybe? How about you make consumables a permanent unlock from Joker Store instead of scamming us by dumping our money? Marketplace tax and dumping money into consumables is just something I don't understand why it exists.

Considering "silvers" make up most of the already declining playerbase it'd be absolutely stupid for LO to listen to "veteran" players - y'all can't even fill an entire district.