Looking good guys !

Can't wait to see a working model of that Yamato 🙂

honestly it makes me really sad that this game has drifted away from cryengine2, but i understand that cryengine2 doesn't have good support, but its okay, i look forward to seeing episode 1 be released.

The CryEngine 2 is definitely better graphical engine but it is expensive for the small devs and the UDK is free to develop with and Unreal only asks for a percentage of game sales for its usage if it is sold. Plus the UDK engine isn't that bad of an engine as well and it is updated monthly with fixes usually. I cannot wait to see what the guys come up with because I have been trying my ass off to create a sweet nebula in UDK and cannot do it. maybe they could write a tutorial for me 🙂

yes i agree with everything you said dark one

but when it comes to 3d max, other udk, i really suck a something thats going to take me over 3 days to do...

i won't commit to it, i don't like long term commitments, thank god somebody does, im just not that patient.

I sort of get the feeling the project is falling apart, i wish their were more good freelancers willing to help out, i would honestly but like i said when it comes to graphical aspect, and patience, not for me. I could help market it though, that's one thing i am very good at. In fact im part of a startup online marketing service. i could create hype necessary for the game, if they ever needed it. I think people at freelancer.com and other outsourcing site might even be interested in this product if you explain to them that you eventually want to release it and if they are part of the development they can cash in. It would be nice to see this project move forward at a faster rate. i mean 2012 is just around the corner haha..

Yeah, it was a shame we had to shift away from CE2, as it's where the project was born.

That said, the reasoning behind the move was NOT purely financial. There were issues in terms of flexibility/capability and bugs when comparing what we had available to us with the CE2 Modsdk, and the UDK; Epic are also massively more behind thier engine, bug fixing it, and making it useable to a wider audience than Crytek have shown themselves to be. If CE2 was such a massively superior engine, there would be a larger number of studios using it, and as we have seen, even from the likes of developers who can easily afford the licensing fees, this is simply not the case.

In terms of how it will look, well potentially it will actually be better, not only are the models going to be identical, but in terms of scaling, the Unreal Engine is actually very good, and there a all sorts of bits and pieces that are easier to achieve with the UDK. Skyboxes would be one example, from my understanding, decent full surround skyboxes are apparently actually quite awkward to pull off with the ModSDK from Crytek, and given we're producing a space game, that sort of stuff is kinda important, as far as we're concerned, there is just more flexibility, and fewer bugs in what we have available to us from Epic, it's really as simple as that.

I'm not one of the modellers etc so I cant give much in the way of technical explanation, but from all I know, the UDK is the right move for us, and its not all about the cash as some people seem to think!

SirBaron is also pretty focused on ensuring the game will look just as good as stuff we produced built around CE2, so I dont think you have anything to worry about in regards to losing out there!

Me personally, I'm borrowing machines right now as my bad luck streak is amazing and my current one is back with the techs so hopefully my luck won't rub off onto the project in anyway. We have several fairly dedicated team members, and the project has gone from a small glimmer in the eyes of 2 guys about a year ago, to something with some dedicated work going on in terms of flight controls, modelling, scripting etc. For a small scale mod--> indie project, I'd certainly say we're not what you'd call falling apart, in fact that the project is still alive a year later is something of a milestone when it comes to this sort of production.

We've got real lives, there were several large real life setbacks for a few team members (family, work, machines dying etc) and we're not professionals [well ok, Gareth is!], you have to give us time, we have never, ever, promised the projects release was right round the corner, in fact we've usually said it's anything but when asked!

If you want to complain about release times/falling apart, I'd say go look at Black Mesa Source...the production time of that is almost an injoke! I'm sure it's been the best part of 6 years now!

I'm looking forward to see what you can do with the UDK personally. Because all of the examples on the UDK forums are for FPS games and not to many games are outside of that especially space games. So I would like to see if the engine can pull it off and hopefully there isn't to much programing involved to create the actual universe and you can make that with general engine tools?

Tyranuus is it safe to say that the models that were created for CE2 can be used in UDK without a problem? That will save some time there because I'm sure you had a few assets already built for the CE2 version of the game.

Yep, the models produced and imported into the Cryengine2 will be used in the UDK also, although obviously a lot of the content we had is still technically WIP rather than final anyway (all our models are produced in programmes like 3dmax etc). As far as I've heard the UDK is actually being a lot less fininicky with models we're importing as well, and seems a little more flexible in regards to this side of things.

As I said, there were more than just financial reasons for the swapover 🙂