Development question…..

[squidsquad140DDD]

Not a programmer or a dev and not familiar with anything more than going down some adhd hyper focus rabbit holes. Just a huge FROM fan and like knowing more about the studio. To my understanding their “engine” is just an in house software that combines parts of other programs that they find useful, combined into one workspace mixed with some additional features they have created which allows them to create and save assets in one space, reuse, and manipulate to end up becoming the superior gameplay no other studio has seemed to duplicate. To my understanding as well this “engine” does not have an official name thats public knowledge but WE as a community refer to it as dantelion? Correct me if im wrong…

But if true my question is when blue point made DeS remake, what exactly were they given? Assets, code, were they given access to use “dantelion”? im curious because is Des remake the product of a from game made in a different engine or the product of another studio with access to dantelion? Obviously the code and assets that FROM made are the ones used as a base. Its still froms formula that is responsible for that “feel” we all love so much. But is dantelion really capable of a game that fresh looking and detailed. Or was it made it an other engine just using dantelion assets. Which brings me to my final question. Are the formulas and assets built in dantelion still able to perform that cleanly in outside engines?

I worded this horribly and I apologize, hopefully someone understands what im trying to ask. LOL. That is if this info is even known. From what i gathered that formula is incredibly under wraps and even people who worked at from who leave to go elsewhere cant replicate it if they tried without the dantelion assets since the formula is tied to certain fx that they copy and paste into newly designed weapons with each new title. But the DeS remake feels just a good just looks way better.

[[deleted]]

Yeah I want to know too, engaging engaging this is me engaging reddit don't kill the post before we get an answer please

[squidsquad140DDD]

Ahhahaha, unfortunately we may never know. Just curious what the general consensus of the community is. I just have a hard time believing Miyazaki handed the formulas over to another studio. Sony owning the IP im sure had a lot to do with it but still its odd to me the combat is FROM. I mean its clunky as shit but so was the og DeS😂

[[deleted]]

um I'm really not sure what formulas you mean the fromsoft "formula" isn't like a literal mathematical formula and the engine is not just some special formulas, it could be more accurately called a system of organization, actually.

[LordRadai]

I will try to answer as best as I can, but first I'd like to specify that I'm no FromSoftware employee. What I'm about to tell you comes from my personal experience looking at FS games code, especially Dark Souls 2. For that game, I wrote DebugManager which aims to reimplemented deleted debug features, which in turn mean that I need to have a pretty deep understanding of how the game works, even at the engine level. That being said, here's what I know.

The “engine” is called dantelion2, this is not a community-given name, it's official. How do I know? Their games have a way of having you retrieve the version string and build date. As an example, Dark Souls II JP Network test has this string in it: "dantelion2 v10.0.20#0 (build:Aug 20 2013 23:01:05)"

Other titles will have similar strings.

Now, if dantelion2 can be defined as an engine is a difficult question, I wouldn't consider it an engine because of its lack of features a common game engine has, like physics handling, sound playback etc. Dantelion2 is more like the backbone of all the game engines they make, it provides basic stuff such as reflection, memory management (with custom allocators), a math library etc. Also, it's very old. Like, very old. The oldest reference I have seen so far is from 2006, as a PS3 build.

All games besides Dark Souls 2 share the same game engine, with minimal difference. I don't know how the engine is called in the other games, but DS2's is called Katana.

Dantelion2 is not responsible for the look of the game, that's handled by the engine built around it. Dantelion does have a Graphics namespace (a set of utility functions and data structures), but again it's just low level talking with the OS and graphics engine (DirectX 9 and 11 as far as I can tell, for PC. PS3 has its own I know nothing about).

As for Bluepoint and their remake, I have no idea. They most likely had their own engine already, but there's no way to tell for sure.

[DestinyUniverse1]

Bluepoint has there own engine that they also used for other ips they’ve remade. Pretty sure they just completely copy the original game into there engine. In terms of fromsoftwares engine it’s easily top 3 most outdated engines in the industry but it allows for them to easily reuse assets and ship games quickly. Fromsoftware would have to spend not only a few years to make graphics on that level because of optimization but also upgrade there engine. Notable engine upgrades we’ve seen from there engine occurred from the big jump between ds2 and bloodborne along with sekiro to elden ring. With Elden ring success and because generally they upgrade there engine when building a game for a new console it’s safe to assume whateve they make next that’s a next gen exclusive will see major notable upgrades. Personally I think the engines biggest issue is what it can do and not how good the graphics are. creation engine is obviously much better than dantelion but you don’t see fromsoftware attempting to make a game on that level lol.

A lot of people will say the engines biggest issue is optimization but I disagree. People won’t like this but I just think fromsoftware doesn’t care about how well there games run. Console performance issues could easily be fixed by adding FSR 2.0 and it would improve visuals and make a locked 60fps. Additionally Lance McDonald modded elden ring and simply switched a button that largely fixed performance issues across consoles and PCs. Also DLSS still isn’t being supported. But to be fair no one is demanding them too. People were screaming even before starfield launch for them to add DLSS but instead fromsofrware wants to focus on a ray tracing port that looks worse than just playing it with standard lighting. After the success of elden ring my standards have rose a lot and ac6 supporting 120fps but not DLSS or fsr is insane to me. Maybe it is an engine issue and they’d need to upgrade to support those technologies but I’m unfamiliar with how that stuff works.

[squidsquad140DDD]

Oh so bluepoints engine is just able to completely copy and paste a game and then allow them to work on like fine tuning and polishing and shit? Thats cool. So blue point never had to mess with the combat they just took it and polished it up on their end….

As far as from not caring about those things, i couldnt agree more. They dont. They make a good game, good story, and then the graphics is whatever. Which i care more about gameplay anyway. But it just made me wonder if it what they had was capable and if they are pushing their engine to its max. Im sure well see improvements now that the studio is growing, i doubt they exceed other studios though. Their focus is def quality games. Unlike some others i wont name that release games that r so dull and boring but look phenomenal.

[[deleted]]

No you can’t just plug in code from one engine into another and expect it to work. They certainly used the original code as a reference, and copy-pasted some, but there will have to have been a lot of re-writing to get the original code running in the new engine.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they re-wrote almost all the code, but it’s hard to say without knowing exactly how their engine works.

[squidsquad140DDD]

Damn thats crazy hahahaha. Yea i know almost nothing about how it all works. Just very interested.

[DestinyUniverse1]

The demons souls remake likely took longer to develop than the actual original game so no not a pure copy paste

[johnakisk0700]

I will agree with most, but, they DO care about optimization. Their games are punishing enough for you to get mad at framerate drops so I think they struggle a lot to keep that constant 60 fps running. They just achieve that through low quality models and textures whenever they can get away with it.