The Wayward Realms - Transitioning Away From Unreal

[HiddenX]

The Wayward Realms will get its own engine:

Transitioning Away From Unreal

We want to extend a sincere thank you for the overwhelmingly positive reception to our last Devlog. Your feedback made one thing absolutely clear, this community is here because you care about deep systems, meaningful choices, and solid, uncompromised gameplay. That clarity has guided our next big step.

After reviewing the many thoughtful comments we received, we’ve made a major but exciting decision, we are fully transitioning away from Unreal Engine and building our own proprietary engine. This move gives us the control and flexibility needed to deliver the experience you’ve told us you want. Over the past few weeks, our entire focus has been on developing this new engine, and we’re thrilled to say that we’ll have something to show you soon, with a new Devlog showcase planned for early in the new year.

Shifting to our own engine is a major step, and while it positions us to deliver a far better game, it also means we won’t be able to meet the end-of-year goal we previously set. Our new target is to release to our Kickstarter backers in June of next year, with a public Early Access release following a few months later.

We also want to remind you that we’ll be hosting our Live AMA on Wednesday, December 3rd, and we invite all of you to join us and ask any questions you have about the new engine and the road ahead.

Thank you again for the trust, enthusiasm, and insight you continue to share with us. Stay tuned, big things are coming.

Features
The new engine allows us to:

• Achieve 30+ FPS on decade-old laptops without dedicated GPUs, giving us excellent performance even on very low-end hardware.
• Run the game at nearly 30 FPS on a first-generation Nintendo Switch, ensuring smooth performance on all major consoles, with full Linux support included.
• Load Eyjar, a static map four times the size of Manhattan, in under one second, providing an almost instant start.
• Load the entire engine in roughly 300 milliseconds, which allows extremely fast iteration and has already more than doubled our development speed.
• Offer full community modding support for everything outside the core systems, using a public scripting language inspired by C# as a tribute to the Daggerfall Unity community.

Thanks Couchpotato!

More information.

 

[Zloth]

Ooo... doing your own engine isn't easy. I hope it works out well.

 

[Stingray]

From what they said, they aren't building their own from scratch, they're starting with something open source called the Wicked Engine: https://github.com/turanszkij/WickedEngine

Sounds like a good recipe for this project to take an extra 5 years or so

 

[TheSHEEEP]

Some more details from their Discord:

Wicked Engine is made by Turánszki János, who has been working on it for over a decade and has done some truly incredible things with it,

The main things that it gives us are a really solid graphics rendering pipeline, a bunch of amazing API design, a ridiculously fast editor startup, and a very efficient Entity-Component System.,

In terms of proprietary stuff, there's of course our 10mil NPC system, town generators, dungeon generators, world events, magic system, VGM, LOGOS dynamic world database, infinite quests, and a few others.,

In terms of what we replaced at the engine level, the main scripting language is Lua, which is a huge part of the engine, and which we have fully replaced with AngelScript. We've partially replaced the terrain system, fully replaced the audio and music systems, partially replaced the physics and collision, fully replaced the built in character system, fully replaced the included animation and armature/rigging systems, and are currently in the process of fully replacing the UI system.,

We'll be implementing our own dynamic VFX engine for magic, which was already partially built in Unreal and just needs to be transferred over and finished.,

We evaluated and tested just under three dozen different engines and frameworks before deciding on Wicked. We also partially built one completely from scratch in Vulkan, which we actually have integrated into Wicked now and are going to use for compute shaders.,

The other coolest ones were RBDOOM-3-BFG (a Vulkan fork of the idtech4 engine from Doom 3) and Bevy. The former was actually amazing and nearly won out but would lock us into being a Steam-only PC game, and the latter just came with too many limitations at the moment.

Really, this engine change is less of a setback and more of a breakthrough.
UE5 just wasn't suitable for what they are trying to do.

It is unfortunate that it took them so long to realize that, but I get it - sometimes in software development, you just end up fighting the tools you work with more than them enabling you to do what you want, and it can take a while for the "bad stuff" to hit critical mass to make you consider switching tracks.
Apparently Julian, too, said quite a bit before his death that he was beginning to lose faith in UE5. So this development really is not new, and even in their dev logs they were quite open about how Unreal was bothering them.

 

[Couchpotato]

Good for them as most UE5 games have been hit or miss when it comes to optimization.

As said I don't know why it was chosen the first place, and yeah game is still years away from release. Though I'm not as hyped about the game as some members.

 

[SveNitoR]

From what they said, they aren't building their own from scratch, they're starting with something open source called the Wicked Engine: https://github.com/turanszkij/WickedEngine

Sounds like a good recipe for this project to take an extra 5 years or so

Yeah, I'm less optimistic now. It was already a very ambitious project, and this makes it even more so. But maybe like @TheSHEEEP said, it will be a better fit overall and make it better in the end?

Time will tell, but I'm happy I decided not to back it before at least something testable comes out.

 

[Redglyph]

Yes, it's an existing engine under development that they forked, and they seem to have prepared the switch for a while, so it's apparently not so dire (according to them).

There was some info and comments about that here, before this new thread started: https://rpgwatch.com/forum/threads/the-wayward-realms-wayward-radio-episode-10.65048/

The game looks good, but it also looks like the project's been in perpetual turmoil.

 

[mercy]

This only means their programmer is probably young, alive and kicking. Yeah, just saw video on Redglyph's link. Team is still young, safely away from age related heart attacks, but not from nervous breakdowns.

 

[Carnifex]

A bold and ambitious plan, I can only hope it works out for the best.

 

[JDR13]

I've never heard of Wicked, but it's apparently been around for at least a couple of years now.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_NDD_gCrKo

 

[crpgnut]

I've talked with the main writer from this game (casually, not on the record) and it sounds both amazing and not very far along when it comes to piecing it back together. I'd say that it's at least 2-3 years away and that assumes continued solvence. The original backing wasn't for a 10 year dev cycle. The dude is extremely passionate about the project and that's really good news. He's the biggest fan of Daggerfall/Morrowind so I expect something deeper than Bethesda when it comes to the writing.