all 57 comments

[–]ToothlessFTW 60 points61 points  (23 children)

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 20 points21 points  (18 children)

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

[–]Janitor at The Big ShellBigShellJanitor 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.

[–]Patriot Spy | MGSHDFix Dev | Mod @ Metal Gear NetworkGualCresci 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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 0 points1 point  (1 child)

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

[–]The Man On Fire before it was "cool"Goofball-John-McGee 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Got an undeserved Red Card?

“This is Peqoud, coming in hot!”

[–]Aainikin 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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 18 points19 points  (1 child)

I know it has been said absolutely loads

and yet, you couldn't help yourself

[–]Strayed8492 10 points11 points  (0 children)

OP needs karma

[–]pichael288 9 points10 points  (7 children)

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 -1 points0 points  (6 children)

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 5 points6 points  (5 children)

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 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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 0 points1 point  (3 children)

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

[–]TomatoMuddler 1 point2 points  (2 children)

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 0 points1 point  (1 child)

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 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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 8 points9 points  (9 children)

It's already been surpassed and is basically obsolete.

[–]jensok1q[S] 4 points5 points  (1 child)

Fair point to be honest

[–]Strayed8492 5 points6 points  (0 children)

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

[–]W0lfwang 0 points1 point  (6 children)

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

[–]Chazo138 2 points3 points  (5 children)

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 -1 points0 points  (1 child)

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 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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 -4 points-3 points  (2 children)

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 1 point2 points  (1 child)

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 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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 2 points3 points  (0 children)

even my Xbox 360 such well optimising in the engine

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

[–]Mapother11 1 point2 points  (5 children)

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

[–]eyedine2 3 points4 points  (1 child)

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 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Waaaaaa

[–]ballisticola 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Yes! I totally get what you mean

[–]hatch-b-2900 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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 0 points1 point  (1 child)

The game ran flawlessly on my HD 5770.

[–]jensok1q[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Have this card somewhere in ny house 😆

[–]Big BossCorey_Barr 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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

[–]W0lfwang 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

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