DS, you've mentioned they would have to build their own engine from scratch to pull off what they intended. What would happen if they scrapped it all now and started building a bran new unique engine? Would any of the work be usable in the new engine (art, etc...), or would it be as if they started from day 1? Obviously they don't have the money or time for this, but I am wondering at what point they could of done the right thing and still managed to save the project.
All the art assets can be retained. They just need to be re-exported from MAX or MAYA, depending on which they use, for the target engine.
But at this point, the only way forward for them, is to stick with their custom CryEngine/Lumberyard FrankenEngine. Sure, they will have to make some sacrifices along the way in terms of world size (no way in hell they retain it, while trying to build the rest of the world), but with Amazon's advancements in Lumberyard, they could very well pull it off - in about another 3-5 years. Except that it would take time, and cost more money.
I don't care what hardcore backers say or think, if 3.0 doesn't knock their socks off - and it won't, since it doesn't bring that much in the general scheme of what's left to do - they're going to have a tough time getting funding for another 3-5 years. And if Roberts comes back with an MVP, and marks the game as "released" in 2017 or 2018, well the fallout will be amazing to behold.
We're
facing the same engine issue with LoD in our moving to UE4 for the console versions as that is quicker and also because all our middleware tools are supported in UE4. As we won't be using UE4's Blueprint feature, and just sticking with C/C++, our engine framework remains largely the same. Most of the work will be exporting our assets from MAX, as well as in porting huge swathes of engine (Havok Vision Engine) specific game play and visualFX code to UE4. All art and 3D assets would need to be not only exported, but also in some cases, heavily revised in order to take advantage of UE4 features we don't currently support such as HDR, PBR etc.
I was planning to port the whole thing to UE4, so we would have a multi-platform target again, but the time it would take, the costs etc, made is vastly prohibitive, and I didn't want to take the risk. Especially since the game isn't being sold atm. So we've decided to just release the PC version with the current engine, then use a UE4 port for the console version which will be released later down the road. Of course if had a ton of other people's money, then this won't be an issue, as we'd just head full bore into a 9-12 month port without worrying about money.
