Would it be practical to have SRB2 switch to Unity?

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FishandChips

FishandChips

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I know that I'm making SRB2 in Roblox, but would it be practical to have the main game switch from Doom Legacy to Unity? I'm just wondering.
 
you'd have to recreate the entire engine, rewrite absolutely everything, recreate every stage...redoing twenty years' work just for it to be switched to a slightly more usable engine isn't worth it at all.
 
Not at all, no. Very little could make the jump from one engine to the other. I don't even know if a Build engine port would work (not that it'd be worth it).
 
Yeah, it would take a long time. But if it wasn't to switch the recent version and if it would be another version, the version of srb2 that would take less time to "switch" (or make) would be SRB2 TGF. (which is 2D btw, if its 3d then it needs to be the demos of it) If not them idk but it would not be worth it (unless some people that would want it but you know.... It would still not, I'm sorry for the awnser that i gave you :/)
 
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That's an honest question, but I'm not sure what you're expecting from such a move.

What you gotta realise that the Doom engine isn't exactly a sort of middleware in the way that Unity is, and SRB2's implementation of Doom's engine is also heavily modified from the original source code. It's not like SRB2 is running within Doom, but rather that SRB2 is built on a custom version of Doom. Not to mention that developing on Unity is a completely different subset of skills than working on SRB2's legacy code. It's more than just moving from coding in C to C#, since Unity has its own learning curve and features you'd need to integrate with.

Also, Doom and by extension SRB2 isn't even a fully 3D engine in the modern sense, which would mean a lot of stuff would be lost and need to be completely redone, for instance you'd have to convert or rebuild all the levels and create all this custom code and shaders to replicate SRB2's visual effects. Or you would have to code in some sort of runtime compatibility layer, which would have an impact on either performance or loading times. (In fact, that latter approach is more or less how rendering maps in OpenGL mode works in SRB2 already.)

And for what benefit would it have? Variable frame rates? Better shaders? Yes, SRB2 is held back in some ways by technical decisions made 20 years ago, but it would be held back in other ways by moving to a semi-proprietary engine like Unity. For starters, say goodbye to being one of the easiest games to mod, but more importantly, SRB2 wouldn't be fully open source anymore, making it a lot harder to port to other systems and architectures. And in the end, it probably wouldn't run all that much better than SRB2 does now.

It's a reasonable idea on paper, don't get me wrong, and in the pre-slopes days of Final Demo 1.09.4 it would have definitely been a bigger talking point, but modern SRB2 has advanced so far that there's really no reason to throw it all out and rebuild from scratch now.
 
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I'll Begin said:
That's an honest question, but I'm not sure what you're expecting from such a move.

What you gotta realise that the Doom engine isn't exactly a sort of middleware in the way that Unity is, and SRB2's implementation of Doom's engine is also heavily modified from the original source code. It's not like SRB2 is running within Doom, but rather that SRB2 is built on a custom version of Doom. Not to mention that developing on Unity is a completely different subset of skills than working on SRB2's legacy code. It's more than just moving from coding in C to C#, since Unity has its own learning curve and features you'd need to integrate with.

Also, Doom and by extension SRB2 isn't even a fully 3D engine in the modern sense, which would mean a lot of stuff would be lost and need to be completely redone, for instance you'd have to convert or rebuild all the levels and create all this custom code and shaders to replicate SRB2's visual effects. Or you would have to code in some sort of runtime compatibility layer, which would have an impact on either performance or loading times. (In fact, that latter approach is more or less how rendering maps in OpenGL mode works in SRB2 already.)

And for what benefit would it have? Variable frame rates? Better shaders? Yes, SRB2 is held back in some ways by technical decisions made 20 years ago, but it would be held back in other ways by moving to a semi-proprietary engine like Unity. For starters, say goodbye to being one of the easiest games to mod, but more importantly, SRB2 wouldn't be fully open source anymore, making it a lot harder to port to other systems and architectures. And in the end, it probably wouldn't run all that much better than SRB2 does now.

It's a reasonable idea on paper, don't get me wrong, and in the pre-slopes days of Final Demo 1.09.4 it would have definitely been a bigger talking point, but modern SRB2 has advanced so far that there's really no reason to throw it all out and rebuild from scratch now.
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Best response out of the whole thread, I completely agree.
 
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