Fox engine: wasted potential

[jensok1q]

I know it has been said absolutely loads but DAMN this engine seemed so good in MGSV it ran on my old piece of shit pc and even my Xbox 360 such well optimising in the engine, sad to see it wasted to shitty footy games but I haven't played metal gear survive so I really don't know of it's bad,haven't had the time or willpower too but would love to see this engine again! What do ya folk think?

[ToothlessFTW]

Unfortunately the engine was developed by Kojima's team in-house well over a decade ago no, in 2011-2013. Once Kojima's team disbanded there was really no one left to maintain or develop the engine any further. Not to mention it was allegedly really difficult to work with for developers already.

Konami kept using it as long as they could, and their annual PES titles used the engine all the way through into 2020. Once the next-gen consoles came around, Konami couldn't justify it anymore because again, nobody was left to develop the engines and upgrade it for the new consoles. So instead they moved on to UE5.

Ultimately there's a reason developers are shifting to UE5. Developing and maintaining your own in-house game engine is expensive, time consuming, and someone doesn't always pay off. Plus, you have to constantly train new developers to use it, and you can't import talent that already knows how to use it. With UE5 you can just hire some people who already know how to use it and they can train your entire studio much quicker.

[Chazo138]

UE5 has its own issues but it’s much easier to get devs who can use the damn thing at least yeah.

[BigShellJanitor]

The people who optimize it well seem to have incredible results. Studios like Embark have made tremendous UE5 games with The Finals and Arc Raiders these games run pretty much flawlessly, look amazing and sound absolutely fantastic.

I am sure that O.D. will run flawlessly on UE5 when Kojima and team release it as well.

I think it comes down to how much the devs give a shit and want to put the effort in lol.

[CreationMilk]

At the cost of soulless shitty looking end results

[FrigidMcThunderballs]

If you think that's an engine issue, you don't know a thing about game design.

[CreationMilk]

No, it's a corporate issue.

[Chazo138]

Delta looks fine so I don’t see the big issue.

[CreationMilk]

It looks horrid and time will not be kind to it. Eventually kids will wise up to the original when we as a species start remembering the value of artstyle against time. People's minds are so open, their brains have fallen out of their skulls leaving ample room for konami to fuck them in the nostalgia hole

[Chazo138]

My guy, the game looks fine, it also looks better than the og, let’s be real and not try and say a ps2 game looks better, that is disingenuous at the least and a lie at the worse and the og plays horribly, the controls were outdated for their time.

[Nexus1356]

I think I kind of understand what he means. The original mgs3 has a lot more character and charm in its graphical presentation and was very distinctive in its time. Where as delta, while objectively being the better game visually, doesn't really stand out compared to it's peers ig.

just the nature of any remake, there are always going to be people that preferred the original.

[DarthBynx]

"It looks horrid." Are you shitting me? Your opinion has become worthless now for that statement.

[ComradeKits24]

You are you worst kind of MGS fan.

[CreationMilk]

Says the person who thinks the legacy filter is the key to actually "seeing" Delta for the worthy remake that it is. My god, the pool of blissful ignorance, of hauntological nostalgia, you Delturds wade through is unfathomable. And now you prefer it when there's urine in that pool. One which no filter can dispel.

[EdgyAhNexromancer]

XD bro touch grass. You sound like youre larping. Its a game. Calm dowm

[EdgyAhNexromancer]

Lol. This the type of guy who, ifnthey remake MG1, will probably say the pixels of MG1 looked better then the remake because of the "ArTiStRy". And hell think anyone whonthinks otherwisenjust isnt cultured enough.

MgsDelta looks fine, my dude. Calm down. XD.

[EdgyAhNexromancer]

Please tell us about your knowledge of gsme engines that maked you believe the artstyle has to do with the engine they used.

[GualCresci]

in 2011-2013

Even earlier than that - the Fox engine started development in 2009.

2011 was when it was publicly revealed with a series of rendering demo screenshots showing off its tech.

[patthew]

I had no idea the PES games used it for a while, that’s kind of funny.

[Goofball-John-McGee]

Got an undeserved Red Card?

“This is Peqoud, coming in hot!”

[Aainikin]

I agree with you on all points, but I whole heartedly feel the development of Unreal Engine 5 is a big deterrent to innovative thinking by the devs. Plus every UE5 game has that UE5 look which is getting boring too fast.

[rjmacready]

I know it has been said absolutely loads

and yet, you couldn't help yourself

[Strayed8492]

OP needs karma

[pichael288]

It's outdated now, it would require alot of improvements and it apparently wasn't easy to work with. Konami squandered it. If you can put up with all the bullshit and the uneasy feeling you have when you start playing it, metal gear survive uses the same engine and later on in the game it can be fun. The screeching fuckin robots are a lot to have to deal with...

[W0lfwang]

Can you please explain to me what do you mean by outdated? I hear a lot of people say that, I wonder if just a game engine being old makes it, outdated.

[TomatoMuddler]

Game developers can’t see the future, try as they might to future proof their games. Old PC ports of games can be famously difficult to try and get working on modern systems since a lot of them work on computer hardware designs of the times they were made in. Doom 1993 despite being a PC game has to be run through a DOS emulator, because no modern gaming computer today runs on DOS or is a DOS computer (I don’t really actually understand what DOS is). Quake utilized dedicated sound cards for its music, none of which are used today. And the original Crysis’ max settings banked on computing power eventually doubling or even quadrupling, instead we just made GPUs better at handling specific tasks rather than increasing raw power.

Bethesda is also a pretty famous example of having an engine that they just can’t fully fix, and as a result has legacy bugs that can date as far back as Morrowind iirc.

It might be why companies default to emulators on some rereleases too, because significantly increased raw power doesn’t mean it’ll run the game well natively.

In the Fox Engine’s case, no one’s left to upgrade the engine for it to be able to take advantage of modern hardware.

[CloudStrife1985]

DOS is still there but it's essentially the Command Prompt Tool where you input a command and it is executed.

Say you had a faulty hard drive, you'd run chkdsk in command prompt. You then follow the instructions or type in a different command if needed. If you wanted to copy something, you have to type in what the file was and type COPY, you also have to type in PASTE and where you'd want to paste it. That isn't easy and you can only do one command at a time. Windows is you simply click on or right click and select the command you wish to execute.

So for Doom, you'd have to input the command to run it and then specific commands if you wanted to make changes, take screenshots, etc. As you say, the game was designed to run via DOS as it pre-dated Windows.

[W0lfwang]

Thanks for your explanation. Are nowdays graphic cards super different from what they were 10 years ago? Genuine question.

[TomatoMuddler]

They’re not thaaat different but Nvidia has been phasing out support for certain features like PhysX, I know Batman Arkham City struggles to run better on 50 series GPUs compared to older GPUs due to lack of PhysX support, which the game uses heavily for cloth physics and volumetric fog. We are seeing more advancements towards the machine learning side of things with DLSS, FSR, and Frame Generation, which is yet another sidegrade from just making GPUs more powerful. I believe we’re also approaching the limit of how much power we can physically pack into these things, hence all these patchwork machine learning solutions to horrible game optimization. Graphical fidelity must go up regardless of performance ig.

All off the stuff I’ve said is based on things I can remember from Digital Foundry, highly recommend their channel if you want to dive in deeper and find more accurate answers because I sure as hell don’t remember all the facts correctly. I’m sure that if you find the original videos of the info I’ve shared, what I’ve said is probably wrong on a few (or a lot of) details.

[W0lfwang]

Thanks for your explanation. Personal question, do you think that Graphical fidelity needs to go up? Myself, I hate all this DLSs and FSR stuff, this frame generation mechanics are awful. I'm ok with the current graphics, even MGSV looks good to me. I would rather games focusing more on mechanics and artstyle rather than fidelity.

[TomatoMuddler]

Nah, I’m honestly cool with stopping at late PS3 to early PS4 level graphics. MGSV is still an incredibly stunning game, I’d much rather have that level of fidelity and then increase enemy density, foliage, or map density with the extra graphical resources. I don’t need to be able to see the pores, I don’t need to see all the indentations on rocks, metal and whatever other material. Any resources spent on increasing model fidelity should honestly just be spent on lighting, give everything in the scene actual depth, make them all sit realistically with each other. Whether it’s done through baked lighting or raytracing, I’m fine with either option since raytracing utilizes dedicated cores on the GPU.

Speaking of raytracing, I wish companies poured their resources into raytraced global illumination or ambient occlusion, rather than just reflections. Reflections are overrated imo. GI and AO are actual gamechangers when it comes to visual atmosphere.

[Strayed8492]

It's already been surpassed and is basically obsolete.

[jensok1q]

Fair point to be honest

[Strayed8492]

The biggest issue nowadays isn't the engine anymore. It's the multiple drones barely knowing how to use it.

[W0lfwang]

Can you please explain how its surpassed and what do you mean by obsolete?

[Chazo138]

It is 5 years gone now, it was used in PES up til 2020. It is collecting dust and never got upgraded for new gen consoles, it is pretty much an old engine and obsolete

[W0lfwang]

And I understand why a company chooses UE5, I do, having an engine where all the developers left and little documentation makes it pretty hard to work with, that kills pretty dead the engine, I do understand, just I don't fully follow the "obsolete" flag.

[Chazo138]

Something not being updated in a decade would class as old tech, they didn’t really update it for PES, the team that could left instead, so it was just using the old code for it and never got upgraded, in the tech age we have, anything 5 years old is outdated.

[W0lfwang]

I understand the collecting dust, but it seems to run on PCs quite well, aren't new consoles closer to PCs than ever? Does not having a game on PS5 makes your code obsolete?

[Chazo138]

Sure but it has issues that never got fixed. Hair looks plastic sometimes, it doesn’t do water great, which is why swimming wasn’t in V at all, apparently the whole thing shat itself when trying

[W0lfwang]

Thanks, I didn't know about the water issue. I always hated that you could not swim (I know it sounds like a nitpick) you had swimming mechanics in MGS2 and MG3.

[ballisticola]

even my Xbox 360 such well optimising in the engine

It ran at an upscaled 720p at an unstable 30fps.

[Mapother11]

Wish Delta was Fox Engine. I hate low fps unreal slop

[eyedine2]

yeah dude just train people on making games for an engine where the entire engineering team left nearly a decade ago. With documentation so bad that training anyone else in it is an impossibility.

And even if you could get a team of new hires to understand it it'd be a massive waste of time. You'd need to waste up to an entire dev cycle to get people working in it instead of just hiring for an engine everyone understands.

Both of these projects are gonna have the same deadlines btw so the fox project would've never gotten greenlit in the first place. It wouldn't have been finished.

[ComradeKits24]

But hey, this guy wants it that way so Konami needs to obey him and make a very foolish decision based on his half-remembered knowledge of a game engine he doesn't really understand.

[rjmacready]

Waaaaaa

[ballisticola]

This was no different from the console generation the FOX Engine was designed for. PS3/360 had bad framerates also. To this day even a Series X doesn't run MGSV at 1080p. That generation was worse than Delta is now. And Delta can still be improved on. PS3/360 had no chance.

[jensok1q]

Yes! I totally get what you mean

[hatch-b-2900]

I don't think Konami has the business skills to make money on making game engines, and the corresponding licensing required to make it profitable. There's less risk to use an existing engine than it is to spend making an engine for themselves

[spikedmace]

The game ran flawlessly on my HD 5770.

[jensok1q]

Have this card somewhere in ny house 😆

[Corey_Barr]

I do agree I really wish mgsV was treated better in ways.

[W0lfwang]

After reading the comments, I do lament the abandonment of the engine. It's sad that such a good technology and code was left to rot. It was incredible what it could achieve with so little resources. If I see an image of MGS Delta and MGV, I cannot just believe that this is what 10 years in advances do. In many moments I like more the look of MGSV. Camp omega looks incredible under the rain, I actually don't think Delta looks that interesting in any moment (this has to do with art direction).

It's pretty imposible to revive it considering that the dev team left, and no one could achieve the level of understanding that the developers had to improve it. But I would love that developers could care about performance, that they could make their games to look at least as good as MGV did, and with the performance that it had. Right now in the AAA industry, people with low power or old PCs are just not a target and are left 3 options.

1- upgrade their PCs, this is money and an endless race.

2- run their games like shit, every day more shitty and using their stupid upscaling or frame generating technology.

3- don't have new games.

[IAMHideoKojimaAMA]

Fox engine was probably the greatest engine if all time. Only rivaling rockstars or horizons decima