[Onkel Neal]

Weekly update #56, 5th of August 2021.

A very short update this week as well, as we're still looking into the possibilities and potential risks of making the change from the Unity to the Unreal engine. I can imagine you might be thinking: 'Why does this take such a long time?' and well, there are a couple of reasons for those which I hope to go into a little bit in this update.

First of all, this is the single biggest decision this project will face for years to come. At this stage of development, we still have the possibility to make the switch. Anything we add to the Unity version of the project will add to the cost of making the switch; for that reason, we've also postponed all development on that part, until we've reached a decision. Other parts of development, such as modeling, ideation, development of pseudo-code, etc. will continue as normal.

We have to make absolutely sure that this is the right choice and in order to do so, we simply have a whole lot of boxes to check. Checking those boxes isn't just simply looking up what possibilities both engines have to offer, but very much a process of getting our hands on it, in the Unreal engine, playing around with it, experimenting with it, until we've gotten enough of a feel for it to say either yes or no to it. In the end, we come up with a very, very extensive list of pros and cons between the two engines - specifically for this project - on which we hope to reach a decision.

Just to give you a couple of examples there, we're looking at stuff like how well the editor is integrated with the software we use for modeling and texturing, what kind of third party assets are available, the speed of the editor itself, the cost of relearning certain parts of the workflow and how that would influence the production speed, what this means for our networking infrastructure, and many, many, many, many, many other factors.

I hope you understand such is a rather time-consuming process since we simply cannot allow a mistake here. A day here can potentially save us a month later. Hitting a wall a couple of months later, a year later, maybe even two years later simply because we didn't do our due diligence during this part of the process is simply a risk we cannot afford.

That's all for this week, just a little update on how we're coming along. It's very likely that this process will take another couple of weeks, so in the meanwhile, I hope to bring you some more news on the other aspects of development. Thank you all for your support, and see you next time!