Little Orbit should have just started from scratch.

[Revoluzzer 274]

On 5/22/2021 at 8:35 PM, Nagletz said:

- Complains about long development time of 3.5.

- Suggests to develop the game which takes even longer time than LO's current progress at new engine.

Flawless plan.

It remains to be seen if pushing through with the engine update will be quicker than rebuilding APB from scratch, even if they would start with the latter today.

And how much they can really do with that upgraded game, compared to a proper new setup.

 

On 5/24/2021 at 6:31 PM, PolarKC said:

Hindsight is usually 2020. In this case we can't really estimate how long it would take to build a minimal viable product of APB from scratch in a newer Unreal version. Building a game is a monumental task, especially on the scale of APB. Even using current APB as a reference to build out a detailed game design doc... estimate accuracy for a project of this scale is a lofty if not unobtainable goal. Ask any dev, they've poorly estimated how long a single task will take countless times (I have), scale that up to a full project even with 30-40% padding and you could be off months or years.

A major benefit I see for a complete rebuild is that all the conceptual groundwork has already been laid out. All the "how could this work?" and "how should that look like?" questions don't have to be asked any more - unless they want to improve certain aspects of the game. And they could probably trim a lot of the fat along the way.

 

As it stands, they are upgrading a minimal viable product of 2006 to a minimal viable product of 2014-ish. In 2021. With UE5 around the corner. And since they port everything, they have to put a lot of work into getting stuff to run that they might not even want to use in the future.

Is the way APB handles character customisation even feasible in this day and age? Fifteen years ago it was a spectacular novelty. Today it is a run-of-the-mill feature that has been drastically optimised. Heck, UE probably ships with some module for out-of-the-box support.

And that's just the obvious tip of the ice berg. APB has a day-night-cycle. Uncommon back then, absolutely nothing special today. A small-scale open world? Realtime Worlds had to hack together a solution in their version of UE to get this to work. As far as I'm aware their districts are, technically, composed of "rooms" stitched together at invisible walls, because that's how UE's logic worked at the time. Today the size of these maps is child's play for any modern engine.

[PotatoeGirl 220]

For the time they port it to the new engine it will become obsolete again.

And yes, the game was crammed to work with that particular engine.

I still think it woudl have been a much easier just figuring out a way to do things on the current engine.

 

Creating new game is hardly an option if they don't even know how stuff has been done to begin with.

[Jilleroo 349]

On 6/6/2021 at 2:16 PM, Revoluzzer said:

As it stands, they are upgrading a minimal viable product of 2006 to a minimal viable product of 2014-ish. In 2021. With UE5 around the corner. And since they port everything, they have to put a lot of work into getting stuff to run that they might not even want to use in the future.

So true.

 

I Kickstarted Ashes of Creation in 2017 and that game has come further along than APB has in over a decade. The new Halo is coming out and it looks gorgeous and innovative. Tarkov is getting a huge map expansion and more. I don't really understand how APB is still even accessible these days... Other than shutting it down, selling it for a bargain to LO makes a lot of sense.

Quote

It was launched in 2010 as All Points Bulletin and then relaunched as APB Reloaded, a free-to-play game, by K2 Network's subsidiary Reloaded Productions after purchasing the rights for £1.5 million.

I really hope LO didn't pay over 2 million USD for APB's rights, and if they did, I really hope they got a decent chunk of change from selling the future rights to that other company...

[Queen of Love 453]

i still believe that APB should be considered as an engine itself.
old but not obsolete at all.
plus game could be fun and (important most) different from red vs blue.
5000 just in EU servers when it was -different- from any other .
Now (with the conformity wave ,insensate) very few.

Restore p5n5. OutofBound , and most important Ninjaripper plug in (ok maybe this is not official possible, but unofficial is!)

[Gateron 267]

21 hours ago, Queen of Love said:

i still believe that APB should be considered as an engine itself.
old but not obsolete at all.
plus game could be fun and (important most) different from red vs blue.
5000 just in EU servers when it was -different- from any other .
Now (with the conformity wave ,insensate) very few.

Restore p5n5. OutofBound , and most important Ninjaripper plug in (ok maybe this is not official possible, but unofficial is!)

Not sure if you know but the engine APB is running on is 3.0 UE instead of the 3.5 UE.  UE 3 didn't have Unreal Development Kit so most of the things where custom written by Realtime worlds. From what I know there is no real documentation and it's all custom code. No one really knows how everything works besides the original developers, so using those custom codes to make content is hard and breaks a lot of things as you probably have noticed if you have been playing since 2011 and then compare that to now. G1 broke the traffic lights, tracers and the game runs very bad now if you compare to 2011 and probably more small things but yeah you get the idea.

 

So the only hope is to port is to 3.5 and rewrite a lot of things to make it work with 3.5. After that they can actually develop new content but, i have the idea that is going take a long long time. And don't forget they bought the game the community is a freebie.
 

Edited June 12, 2021 by Gateron

[Hexerin 1142]

13 hours ago, Gateron said:

Not sure if you know but the engine APB is running on is 3.0 UE

It's actually running on a beta version of UE3, which is why most of the game is the custom code and brute force hacks to get things functioning at even a basic level (and why everything breaks with the slightest changes).

[KillerHippie 3]

On 5/23/2021 at 3:34 PM, TheDogCatcher said:

 I maintain that the biggest problem that APB faces and always has faced is one of image, it has always been seen by the wider gaming public (rightly or wrongly) as a pay to win game that is riddled with cheats, I personally dispute the pay to win claims but I don't think anyone can seriously say that this game doesn't have a problem with people cheating, it's a free to play game and all free to play games have this problem to one degree or another and again rightly or wrongly APB has historically always been seen as one of the worst.

 

This is the biggest hurdle that anyone running this game has to overcome - cleaning up it's image, a new engine will do nothing to fix this issue, you can have all the new content you like but if this game is seen as a hackers paradise you are never going to get your players back.

 

When LO first aquired APB one of the first things they did was unban all previously banned players, in my opinion (and I doubt I'm alone here) this was monumentally bad optics, then we had the utter farce of them switching anti - cheat provders every few weeks, this only served to make them look even worse, I think by this point they have lost the trust of gamers to get this most important aspect right. We can argue all day about whether the bans dished out by G1 were deserved or not but I don't think anyone can dispute the fact that a good proportion of them must have been justified, anyway it's not even about that it's about public perception and this game is still percieved as a hackers paradise run by devs who really aren't in control of the situation.

 

Without trust you are building your house on a foundation of sand and with this in mind I strongly believe that APB is way beyond salvation at this point.

and there you have it.

 

as to upgrading to U4/5 , as some one said, APB 2 would not feel like APB.  Would it be better or worse, that is the real question .   Keep in mind that what makes APB the game it is, is the customization, the single hit table (no X-dmg to body parts). and the individual ready ques. It is these 3 items that sets APB apart.  There are a lot of games that come close and use 1 of the three, but none have figured out that is the combination that makes the APB enjoyable.   

 

Could APB 2 be made using a modern engine.  Technically (legal issues aside) APB 2 could be made in 3 years, from scratch.  2 years if the reuse the existing models as a base..

Could LO make APB 2?  No, they do not have the capability to create a game. There is a big difference between recoding an existing game and actually creating assets for a new one.  

 

[Hexerin 1142]

On 5/23/2021 at 2:34 PM, TheDogCatcher said:

I personally dispute the pay to win claims

Then you don't know what pay to win actually means, or were/are unaware of what was present in APB that caused it to apply.

[Revoluzzer 274]

On 6/18/2021 at 5:32 AM, KillerHippie said:

as to upgrading to U4/5 , as some one said, APB 2 would not feel like APB.  Would it be better or worse, that is the real question .   Keep in mind that what makes APB the game it is, is the customization, the single hit table (no X-dmg to body parts). and the individual ready ques. It is these 3 items that sets APB apart.  There are a lot of games that come close and use 1 of the three, but none have figured out that is the combination that makes the APB enjoyable.

None of those three "features" is dependent on an old engine, though.

[KillerHippie 3]

On 6/27/2021 at 10:09 AM, Revoluzzer said:

None of those three "features" is dependent on an old engine, though.

I did not mean to imply that it was limited to the old engine.  Again a new modern engine could as I stated here:  "There are a lot of games that come close and use 1 of the three, but none have figured out that is the combination that makes the APB enjoyable." 

[a Pair of Socks 126]

Ah yes, Im sure that reimbursing me 6000 dollars and deleting all of my customizations (that I spent probably a thousand or so combined hours making) just to make the game not look old and run without getting a stutter every 5 minutes will make me want to come back and play it!

Honestly; APB has been the same forever now and people have stopped playing for " x " reason so what will changing how it looks/runs do???   Im not saying I know how to fix apb but I do know scraping everything and starting from square zero again will make me never touch this game again. ( Same reason I refuse to move over to Citadel; I have nothing on that server so why should I then also deal with the shitty connection lmao )


I understand where youre coming from and the frustration youre feeling, but doing what youve proposed would just lead to a quicker death than were already dealing with ontop of *countless* hours of wasted hours and money for everyone invested and involved.

Edited August 5, 2021 by a Pair of Socks

[MasterTheHero 20]

On 8/4/2021 at 11:40 PM, a Pair of Socks said:

Ah yes, Im sure that reimbursing me 6000 dollars and deleting all of my customizations (that I spent probably a thousand or so combined hours making) just to make the game not look old and run without getting a stutter every 5 minutes will make me want to come back and play it!

Honestly; APB has been the same forever now and people have stopped playing for " x " reason so what will changing how it looks/runs do???   Im not saying I know how to fix apb but I do know scraping everything and starting from square zero again will make me never touch this game again. ( Same reason I refuse to move over to Citadel; I have nothing on that server so why should I then also deal with the shitty connection lmao )


I understand where youre coming from and the frustration youre feeling, but doing what youve proposed would just lead to a quicker death than were already dealing with ontop of *countless* hours of wasted hours and money for everyone invested and involved.

Unfortunately, the game is on life support.

 

Player population is abysmal and the engine update is still running into problems.

 

The latest update in the engine tracker from Matt is something I saw when exporting assets from motion builder into a game engine. If even one object is not tagged correctly or the name doesn't match, the converter will fail and create incompatible data that will not import into the game. Real Time Worlds did such a shitty job, then again, the features they were adding in did not exist. So I guess I can't really fault them for that. APB technology was several years ahead of its time. Just a shame really.

[Euxoa 17]

Honestly, I prefer a game that looks like shit and doesn't run as well, but with consistent updates, patches, balances, etc. over a game that looks good with all the same issues. Pretty graphics won't bring back your playerbase. Working on the current game will.

[Delete884943468320878423 172]

You give them the MONEY!!! To start from scrap!

Its already a miracle they invested in us... by trying to improve a dead code, the worst expensive dumpster around.

Edited August 8, 2021 by Vnight