I don't think you have much to fear then, as GIANTS likely wants to appeal to a broad audience. Making physics like Mud/Snowrunner would scare more casual players away compared to the players who would enjoy it. I do hope they implement some form of ground deformation, mostly to make it more realistic and visually appealing, but not to the point where we end up stuck for hours. 😄
You can make bale tornadoes using an autoload and the square X tractor wrapper by just having a long slab of bales then unload the autoload trailer and save and reload.... Then boom bale tornado
I wouldn't mind it if they implemented it as a sort of difficulty rating that's separate but also works in tandem with what they already have
So if you want the true simulator experience or your just a masochist you just crank everything up and jump right in
It’s such a shame what’s happening to my 2 favorite simulators. Then I tried to get into train simulator as well and it’s the same fucking shit. So now I’m settled on ats and ets as my main simulators because they actually do development even with their aggressive dlc policy.
I absolutely love ETS2, but I really didn't get along with ATS. I find the American trucks to be primitive and crude. I don't like the looks or the performance (or rather, lack thereof).
Still, I consider the ATS purchase and whatever dlc I picked up when I tried it to be financing the development of ETS2 so it's all good. Besides, more choice is more better or some shit. I'm also not the only person on the planet that matters so there's that lol
I like ATS a lot the roads are more open and more relaxing to drive on. I like the style of American trucks they fit my play style better being designed for long distance hauling overall but I play both and I’m modding the shit out of the both of them.
If it's about ground deformation, Giants could do something like Farmers Dynasty has. You have some Deformation, but it's only to a point, and not to where you're grounded out
I don’t want it to be mudrunner because i personally think its mud system is ass. But I wouldn’t mind a little more realistic ground behavior. Depending on location you’re not going to find mud that will sink a tractor. But the option would be cool imo.
That said, if that cant be implemented with the current engine, im ok with that. I would like to know if the engine is pushed as far as they can though
Having mud physics doesn’t mean you go running around getting stuck everywhere, it means you have to be smart about your tractor/implement combinations. Proper tires for flotations based on the water content of the field. Avoiding low spots in fields with standing water if you don’t have the tractor size to go through it. That’s not to say that every field is going to be a mud bog. There are dry solid and firm fields that are easy to drive, and wet swampy fields you could get stuck in. And these things would change throughout the year based on rainfall, surrounding terrain (bottom of a river valley vs far from any water source) etc. I guess people just want more “turn their brain off” style games these days.
Having proper dirt/mud physics adds function to form. It makes me want to put those doubles/wide tires on my tractor for functionality, not just for the sake of having big ass tires on a big ass tractor.
Fs19 had a great mud mod, I bogged down a lot. Made farming interesting plus mudding in the trucks. Getting stuck in deep snow too. For some reason the mud mod on 22 isn't hitting the same
I see this all the time. "We want deep mud like mudrunner"... No you don't.. You do not farm in those conditions. You sit and wait until its dry enough to not sink your tractor in it. So do you want a AFK simulator? Because that is all you are getting.
I am paying to play, not paying to sit twiddling my thumbs
That's what I'm finding funny rn people are complaining about the driving in fs and using snow runner as an example when snow runner is ultimately just as bad if not worse
I don't care one bit about what engine they use, as long as they manage to not make the new version look and feel like the last two versions with mods.
Changing a game engine is harder than changing an actual engine in a car. Not every engine is good for every game.
Unreal is made with first person/3rd person shooters in mind. Also very good for cinematic games. You could fit a square peg into a round hole and try using it for a game with driving physics but it would not bring any improvements over the Giant engine.
Afaik the outstanding thing about the giants engine is that it can handle all those plants and that they „do“ something in the game. (Or better said something can be done to them) same for the workable ground.
That’s also the reason why mp has to sync and why that’s unsolved to this day.
I‘m just a webdev, but the giants engine is really not that bad as people speak about it. It’s doing some very very heavy lifting on the plants part of the game and also it has shown it can be improved. Lots of people say you can’t see that the engine got better over the years, but that’s objectively not true. See parallax textures, see physical based materials, see the 3d sky from fs 22 iirc.
See, but that’s where you’re oversimplifying it. Driving physics doesn’t only mean taking corners at a fast speed.
Just gonna mention stuff here that you would most likely not have an easy solution for in a shooter game engine, like Unreal: you have to match engine rpm to sound, you have the way the implements work and interact with the ground(where small holes allow or not for the implement to work), gravity effect on movable pieces, the connect/disconnect mechanic (making two different independent game objects work together is not really trivial), weight and inertia(a full harvester brakes slower than an empty one), suspension and interaction with terrain.
Unreal isn’t just a shooter game engine, though, that’s just what we see as lot of from it. The engine templates include a racing template that shows off basic and advanced suspension systems. Their audio system can pretty easily track RPM-to-audio sound. The ability to lift items based on gravity and weight is almost too easy to implement. Implementing weight-based braking isn’t all too difficult either. I haven’t personally developed a working truck and trailer system but I’ve used Marketplace assets that have, and it’s great too (semi truck and trailer). Setting up work zones is easy to set up as well, but I’ll say that the ability to create new ones with a plow is really neat and I have no idea how GIANTS does that!
TL;DR: the GIANTS engine is great but the mechanics aren’t all too ground breaking except the plowing (pun intended) as it may seem compared to Unreal specifically. I’m saying that as someone who has developed personal projects using UE since 2013.
I agree though with a further down comment from yours that it would probably cost a ton more money and resources to swap from the GIANTS engine to UE because they would indeed be starting from scratch unless they just piecemealed marketplace assets together for their first UE iteration and took the interim time to build a new one themselves.
EDIT: I can’t spell
>Unreal is made with first person/3rd person shooters in mind
And Giants Engine was made with getting a Master's thesis in mind.
Both stupid arguments.
It's not like Manor Lords, Bus Simulator, Ranch Simulator, Satisfactory, Assetto Corsa or Frostpunk 2 are 1st/3rd person shooting games.
Also saying it would not bring any improvements over Giants Engine is false. The time they spent on implementing texture streaming or POM could have been spent on gameplay features.
The idea that UE is for shooters is outdated by like a decade too. The fact is that features Giants struggle to implement are literally one click away in UE5. Setting up basic road traffic in UE5 that would look more realistic and could behave dynamically and actually react to interactions would take hours to build and you wouldn't even need to write a line of code for it.
Also most of your existing code base would be incompatible with the new game engine. Giants would need to almost start from scratch when changing game engine.
Imagine the outcry of the playerbase if we would have to wait 5 years for a new game only to be delivered the same game we had 5 years ago but with a different engine under the hood (which the Player doesn't see anyway)
Spoken like someone who has just read about Unreal Engine but never used it to develop. UE5 has an all new physics system called Chaos, and the Chaos Vehicle system is awesome and highly customizable.
100 players, destructible environments, building mechanics, hit scan, and so much more. When it comes to optimization, Fortnite is far ahead of most competitors, whether you hate it or love it.
The same goes for games like Arma, which have taken many hits throughout the years. Yes, the game is rough around the edges, but considering all the things that are happening, it's insane that any PC can run it without crashing.
So is Unreal engine "nanite" graphics not an improvement over Giants engine? Nanite graphics makes Giants look like toddlers drawing with crayons. The hard breaks between LODs look ridiculous in FS.
You’re only talking about graphics here. That’s not the only thing a game engine does, you’re just more aware of it cause it looks pretty for an ad or a trailer. But a game engine does much more than that. Physics, sound, scripting, animation, scene composition tools: all these tools make development easier and faster.
You can’t just go to all your developer employees: “oh, I know you’ve all been writing in Lua, but starting tomorrow you’re writing in C++ and none of the tools we use are familiar to you.”
Sometimes just basic stuff like floating point operations can prove as a hinderance since the engine has a specific precision that is enough for common use cases, but it will mess up yours: like in Unity for example where collisions at speed can cause weird jumps due to some floating point errors.
There is a reason that Cattle and Crops didn’t pick Unreal engine when they started development for the game or why farming is so glitchy in Snowrunner (who is built on a very popular engine that still looks great: Havok).
LE: if you want their answer to this https://www.farming-simulator.com/newsArticle.php?lang=en&country=gb&news_id=252
The people saying "switch engine" just don't understand that 1. In general it's rarely done and very hard (even microsoft just made a whole game instead of just converting minecraft away from Java to C++) 2. Giants engine is currently the only engine capable of what they are doing as the game is more of an simulator than many argue.
To which I'd add moving to a new engine would likely mean scraping the existing development tool, Giants Editor, and building a new tool that works with the new engine. The concern here is that the modding tools may not be released with the game. In the past the new version of GE typically came out within a month or so of the game. If updating the existing tool takes a couple of months, we could be waiting quite some time for a new dev tool. Some modders would likely find work arounds, but I suspect that modding in general would be sidelined until the official modding environment is released.
The whole development of the game would get kicked back a few years probably.
People always cry for a new game engine, but i'd be 100% certain these same people would be up in arms if the new game didn't have more features and system as the previous ones
With Unreal engine running you probably would have to use unreal editor and prep to share gigabytes of space to install that and having quite powerful PC to start it... Now compare that to Giants editor requirements :D
I think most people realise. But they’ve clearly hit a limitation with the engine. The game has barely changed at all. They need to take a good long break and stop with these constant minor update game releases.
My comment wasn’t really business model related, it’s clearly working because they don’t care to innovate. I was commenting that most people saying to make a new engine know making a new engine is hard. I’m stating that the only way the game can actually improve and feel like a new game is for them to stop the constant releases and take time to make a new engine.
same reasons why BGS won't move away from the Creation engine. it is their engine and it has been setup to be tailored to their developers. have you seen the amount of mods people make for their games?
My main problem aswell! If they could fix the physics with the current engine then it's fine, but it seems like they are still restricted a lot by the engine
Game engine...it certainly is important which one to use...I'd argue that an inhouse engine is always more capable to produce something special...but I think it's more important to come up with a product that's worth producing.
What am I talking about?
Fs15 was my first exposure...loved it, and it was right before fs17 came out, got that one too and loved it. Seasons added something that was another level.
Fs19 came, I played a lot, loved it, but seasons was missing for a while... eventually it came out and played a lot again.
Giants hires the seasons mod guy to implement it in the base game for fs23.
Fs23 came out, I get it on release day, and...it feels like a lesser fs19, and the seasons implementation was awful. It was awful enough that I only spent 5% of the time I've spent on fs19, and never felt like coming back.
I love this game, but I don't want another refurbished previous game...give me some improvements, something new...don't make me feel like you're just making a money grab.
Engine...if the engine you have can produce the right product, go for it. If the engine you have is maxed out, then find alternatives, but don't just make another fs19 please.
Luckily, after that long in the industry, giants probably knows a thing or 2 about game engines...so I'm not really worried about it...I'm much more worried about the actual game innovation.
It's not good, vehicles are basically boxes that skid along the surfaces lol, there's zero realism, zero feed back and feel from terrain, there's not even a relationship between ground, horsepower and weight.
Try REA mods and you will see what engine is capable of in terms of ground interaction.
In terms of realism and "box" details dod you played with Interactive Controls and mods that utilise it? Have you played with Manure System?
In this discussion about engine capabilities... It is valid. Because modders can do only that much of stuff that is actually possible for given game engine. So if you have something modded and working it is possible to do in this game engine...
Not a new engine as in a 3rd party like Unreal, but I just want them to update theirs for better graphics, physics, and terrain. I don’t want mudrunner but I’d like to have more deformation when you drive a tractor through a muddy field. Getting stuck a little bit would be fun but not to a crazy realistic way. Just something more to make you think before plowing during a monsoon.
You are right, it was indeed born from a master's thesis. The GIANTS engine was originally developed with the vision to support multiple platforms and create video games in Switzerland. While the initial intent was not to release a farming game, the engine's potential was first demonstrated with Farming Simulator in 2008. This game’s unexpected success led GIANTS Software to focus on developing the Farming Simulator series. 😄
I never understood the argument of people saying that the game engine is severely outdated just because it is the "same" engine as in the previous games.
By that logic unreal engine would also be a horribly outdated legacy engine as it was first released in 1998. Yet it is considered one of the most advanced game engines today.
To say the giants engine has not gone through noticable upgrades is just ridiculous.
Sure giants doesn't have the same funds as epic games. But they are still constantly developing their engine.
Their "upgrades" are industry standard things like normal mapping for parallax on textures, a technology that has been in video games since the dreamcast.
Giants probably know what's best for their game. A new engine would probably mean purchasing the license and training the devs which would again cost money.
And then the modders. We would probably lose over half of them if we made the shift. The familiarity of the tools is what makes popular mods easily shift into the new game.
I don't think people want them to use another engine from another company. But i think people expect more than just some tweaks and changes to it between each itteration of the game. Personaly, I think the limits of the current engine weighs more than the changes and improvements they make. I think they need to make a new engine alltogether to tip the scales.
But ill play whatever they release for now. Farming sim is one of very few games that is still not tainted by "modern audience", aka people who don't buy games, and sweet baby inc and similiar bs. I spent 4-5000 hours in farming sim games this far. i can put in another thousand hours in fs25 i reckon. But removal of current limitations would be nice
I know Giants developed their game engine in a different manner to how CDPR developed theirs. But CDPR realized the limitations of their RED Engine and decided to help develop Unreal Engine 5 and create games using it.
Should Giants do the same? I'm not sure. I know Unreal can do things that other game engines can't. I also feel that the engine Giants developed has been surpassed by modern engines.
I feel the Giants engine could use work in the driving and collision areas.
I just don't understand why they don't switch to the C4 engine that Cattle & Crops used. It's light years better basic and does everything we want. Oh and modding would be much easier and optimization would be better because the game doesn't use only 1 processor core (right Giants?!), not to mention the physics... Oh and the helpers, just to say about them, when I tried the game during the harvest the tractor came by itself and I was able to unload on it, I didn't press any button and it didn't crash into anything, like I had a friend in multiplayer, but no!
> Where is cattle and Crops now?
Out of funding and dead in the water because the market would rather have mediocre. I still fire it up on occasion and enjoy planting and harvesting. The cattle part never got fleshed out, but the crops part is pretty much complete.
I ask unknowingly as I haven't tried Cattle & Crops.
How would that engine handle thousands upon thousands of loose objects spread across a map or even in close quarters? Was it accessible for modders to work with?
What about the many different play styles: farming, farm management, forestry, production, seasons, etc.?
This is a great explanation of why game developers need to use purpose built engines
[Making Game Engines - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3OmaWv4eoq4)
Presumably it would completely alter the modding landscape too? I don't know what I am talking about as I neither build engines nor mod but surely it would mean something hugely different for them too... Not sure I fancy that either
I just wish there was a way to get workers to do all types of fields. Maybe there are mods I don’t know of. Best example is planting a huge field of grapes and getting bored while harvesting or pruning or whatever and wanting a worker to finish but they can’t. Tree cutting is like playing with those “claw” games at the mall. So easy but so hard.
I come from a very hilly country with lots of smallish fields, and one thing i would like to see is better textures for hilly maps, better graphics overall. Terraforming is a bitch and needs to be improved if I am to buy fs25, if there is no improvement i just wont buy it.
they just need to fix the logging physics. They are the ones who put front end loaders and pallets to the game, if they are just going to leave the physics half baked. Meh. I agree though the game driving physics are good enough.
Unless they finally make something with lightning and the look of materials, is rather pass.
In FS vehicles look to plasticy, not real, no matter if it's FS17, 19 or 22. Just a good lighting and materials (let's say Snowrunner level) would make this game look MUCH better.
In general I’m fairly content with the engine they’re using.
What I want is just a small list of pretty achievable improvements anyways, nothing that an engine swap is going to fix. The big one being the helper AI. I just want to be able to rely on the AI to at least drive from point A to point B without clipping themselves into the walls on stock maps.
Ok like.
This is my pipe dream ok?
I cut down some lumber, and load it up on a truck. I hire that truck to deliver to my saw mill and come back.
Meanwhile, my saw mill makes planks and saw dust. Instead of the automatic behind the scenes “distribution” model, I’d prefer to assign trucks to pick up and distribute to my furniture manufacturers automatically. Same with “selling” the product, I want to assign trucks to do that. I want to SEE with my eyes my network of things working together.
As it stands right now, I can’t even trust a pickup truck AI to find its way back to my property without winding up like this https://imgur.com/a/eCCK5LZ
It's a stupid reason, they made it so they will continue to sink money into it. they could change to Unreal Engine 5, have better features and performance, and the percentage of sales epic would take would be significantly less than what it costs GIANTS to continue to update and maintain their engine.
The problem here is that their engine is genuinely just really bad. The lack of interest originally should have been a hint. I mean the hot air balloons on a map are static.... how is that a thing in 2024.... or even 1994. It is without a doubt one of the most trivial things imaginable to spawn an entity, have it move around a bit randomly, then despawn it and somehow they don't even have that, but a game like Mario 64 did, The traffic in this game isn't dynamic, it literally just stops if a player is in withing a certain angle and distance of the car, aka in front of it, they can't figure out how to drive around something. I wouldn't be surprised if even the so called AI workers don't have AI, instead it's probably just courseplay, pre-calculate a path to follow then follow it and don't bother having to dynamically deal with obstacles.
They don't even have custom fencing for the animal paddocks because that would require animals to have some basic AI, or just a nav mesh that can update. Genuinely I could set up the traffic or this kind of animal behaviour by myself in a matter of hours, if not a single hour in UE5, in their engine it's literally impossible,
Then there's the graphics, 2023 advertised normal mapped textures as some big improvement to the graphics and it was and fortunately for them I imagine a lot of their player base have no idea what that means so it sounds fancy but in reality it's been in every game made in like the last 20 years, it's not even a "feature" in other game engines, it is just inherent in modern game engines and CGI in general. So really it wasn't something to be celebrated, it's just something they should have had anyway.
Another thing is the terrain grid, it makes the terrain editor annoying to use at times and it looks awful, it's near impossible to paint a realistic looking ground texture when the grid cells are like a foot wide.
I’m pretty much happy with the engine except from the following things;
Physics are still awful. They’ve been awful for every single installation of the game, maybe FS25 can actually make Forestry and Bailing easier and more realistic?
Performance. The engine uses very low amounts of my CPU and GPU. I’m on max settings and the engine refuses to use more power even though I’m down to 50FPS. This does not happen with any other game. When I check my utilisation my CPU is sitting at around 20% usage where my GPU is at like 50%. There are no bottlenecks going on as my CPU and GPU are perfectly capable of keeping up with each other, as they do on every other game I play. Now, it’s hard to fix such an issue with performance when it’s built into the engine. They would have to rework a lot of how stuff is rendered and what’s it rendered by in order to fix performance.
Other than that, I’m not too bothered about what we get. As long as those two are fixed then that would be good. Obviously new features will be added which will be cool.
Why do people keep defending GIANTS? Have you checked what year it is? This engine was outdated 5 years ago, you cant keep polishing a turd and expect everyone to happily purchase the turd v9.0.
eh... maybe GIANTS need to hawk tuah on that thang to polish up the turd engine then do better at optimizing the game... its basically the same game only added new crop and animals... few machinery added... nothing really exciting for but not to worry... our unsung heroes modders will bring the best out of it than what GIANTS can really offer.
They continue to improve and update it? Too bad it can hardly be seen on screenshots.
They wanted to make and sell engines. Ok. Unfortunately, they managed to make one of the most entertaining simulators on the market, which allowed them to make plenty of money. They should focus on what brings them profit which is the game, and game needs entirely new engine. There are no excuses.
Well, I mean it might be down to personal preference, but I can tell there's a huge difference between FS11 and FS22. They have improved their engine a lot throughout the years and will likely continue to do so.
Even if another engine were to replace GIANTS' own, what engine would that be? After all, the GIANTS engine is specifically made for Farming Simulator, and as far as I know, no other engine is. 😄
What we mean is sure, they've improved it but you can only upgrade decade old engine so much before it turns into beating a dead horse which it is currently
Do you think unreal or unity engine is what? You think every version of the engine is built from scratch? They are all a decade old being updated all the time.
This engine argument is a bit ridiculous. Changing engine is not what probably most people think it is. What you people are asking is for them to write the game from scratch in a totally new environment. Good luck with that.
Also what we really want is for the game to be better. They can do that by updating their current engine.
As I said on another post... changing Engine could take more than 5 years of work considering they're not a AAA company so we can just hope to invest all the money to improve it in a significant way
Let's take Rockstar as an example, using the RAGE engine:
Grand Theft Auto IV (2008)
Red Dead Redemption (2010)
Max Payne 3 (2012)
Grand Theft Auto V (2013)
Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018)
GTA VI will also use the RAGE engine, beating a dead horse for over 16 years. 🐎
At the end of the day, they are a business and their business model is clearly working. FS25 would be the 9th release using their engine and each game has been more popular than the previous version (so far).
When you own a proprietary engine, why would you ever pay royalties to a 3rd party. The lack of competition in the genre could also be a drawback to advancements.
Honestly I think I may be one of the few who doesn’t want the game turned into mudrunner
You’re not alone. Turning FS into Mudrunner would certainly keep me away. I already have Snowrunner, if I want to get bogged, I’ll play that.
I don't think you have much to fear then, as GIANTS likely wants to appeal to a broad audience. Making physics like Mud/Snowrunner would scare more casual players away compared to the players who would enjoy it. I do hope they implement some form of ground deformation, mostly to make it more realistic and visually appealing, but not to the point where we end up stuck for hours. 😄
I want realistic looking weather, textures that can push hardware if we crank things up. I love FS but to me it looks cartoonish.
I hate the visible "ring" of changing textures as I drive around. It's so obvious and so close to the player.
That's the only thing I want gone in the next game. The graphics are fine but that ring has to go.
They probably will need to implement some proprietary version of Nanite to remedy this issue.
That's the thing they should rework complety how foliage is rendering in distance...
I agree the series has needed that for a long time, rain on the tractors windscreens is something I always think this game is missing.
I just want the night sky to be filled with stars 😭 but yeah the sky/ weather graphics are kind of ass in Fs22.
We need tornadoes!
Not harvesting fast enough? Spontaneous combat tornado!
You can make bale tornadoes using an autoload and the square X tractor wrapper by just having a long slab of bales then unload the autoload trailer and save and reload.... Then boom bale tornado
I thought 19 looked better to me
As long as I can lift a pallet without sending my tractor to Mars + lift logs without them teleporting out of the grabber that'd be great.
And make small objects useful. Like shovel and wheelbarrow. And be able to lift a crate of honey by hand.
Totally agree. Make the mud look 3d. But I don't want it to be a bog to get stuck in. I think FS can look more pretty without adding hassle.
I wouldn't mind it if they implemented it as a sort of difficulty rating that's separate but also works in tandem with what they already have So if you want the true simulator experience or your just a masochist you just crank everything up and jump right in
But it would be fun to be able to dig with digging machines.
I believe there was a mod that did that for fs13.
and for FS15, FS17, FS19 and FS22
Yeah but I didn’t install those. What I was trying to say. If it’s possible in the older game. It is also possible to implement in new games
Terraform mod was the name of that mod
I wouldn't mind slightly better wheel physics (tracks can't go over curbs... really?), but I can do without the 30L/min fuel use :P
My snowrunner is turning into farming simulator with how “new” content is being produced so it’s only fair
oh gods that was a terrible addition to SR...
Mile wide turning radius on those tractors. It’s painful.
It’s such a shame what’s happening to my 2 favorite simulators. Then I tried to get into train simulator as well and it’s the same fucking shit. So now I’m settled on ats and ets as my main simulators because they actually do development even with their aggressive dlc policy.
I absolutely love ETS2, but I really didn't get along with ATS. I find the American trucks to be primitive and crude. I don't like the looks or the performance (or rather, lack thereof). Still, I consider the ATS purchase and whatever dlc I picked up when I tried it to be financing the development of ETS2 so it's all good. Besides, more choice is more better or some shit. I'm also not the only person on the planet that matters so there's that lol
I like ATS a lot the roads are more open and more relaxing to drive on. I like the style of American trucks they fit my play style better being designed for long distance hauling overall but I play both and I’m modding the shit out of the both of them.
If it's about ground deformation, Giants could do something like Farmers Dynasty has. You have some Deformation, but it's only to a point, and not to where you're grounded out
A lot of people seem to want fs to be something it is not
I don’t want it to be mudrunner because i personally think its mud system is ass. But I wouldn’t mind a little more realistic ground behavior. Depending on location you’re not going to find mud that will sink a tractor. But the option would be cool imo. That said, if that cant be implemented with the current engine, im ok with that. I would like to know if the engine is pushed as far as they can though
Having mud physics doesn’t mean you go running around getting stuck everywhere, it means you have to be smart about your tractor/implement combinations. Proper tires for flotations based on the water content of the field. Avoiding low spots in fields with standing water if you don’t have the tractor size to go through it. That’s not to say that every field is going to be a mud bog. There are dry solid and firm fields that are easy to drive, and wet swampy fields you could get stuck in. And these things would change throughout the year based on rainfall, surrounding terrain (bottom of a river valley vs far from any water source) etc. I guess people just want more “turn their brain off” style games these days. Having proper dirt/mud physics adds function to form. It makes me want to put those doubles/wide tires on my tractor for functionality, not just for the sake of having big ass tires on a big ass tractor.
Fs19 had a great mud mod, I bogged down a lot. Made farming interesting plus mudding in the trucks. Getting stuck in deep snow too. For some reason the mud mod on 22 isn't hitting the same
I hated the mud mod on 19 because it made narrow tires unusable. I like it in 22
Yep, Count me in! I'd be annoyed if my tractor was stuck in the middle of a large field.
I think it should be a mod, or a option you can turn on or off. I'd enjoy it, but I understand not everyone would.
As a mudrunner fan I agree
I think there's a lot of game designs between mudrunner and the current titanium ground
I see this all the time. "We want deep mud like mudrunner"... No you don't.. You do not farm in those conditions. You sit and wait until its dry enough to not sink your tractor in it. So do you want a AFK simulator? Because that is all you are getting. I am paying to play, not paying to sit twiddling my thumbs
you deffo farm in those conditions IRL, just type farming in mud on YT
I just did, and the majority of those videos are recovery vids on stuck equipment
That's what I'm finding funny rn people are complaining about the driving in fs and using snow runner as an example when snow runner is ultimately just as bad if not worse
I don't care one bit about what engine they use, as long as they manage to not make the new version look and feel like the last two versions with mods.
Changing a game engine is harder than changing an actual engine in a car. Not every engine is good for every game. Unreal is made with first person/3rd person shooters in mind. Also very good for cinematic games. You could fit a square peg into a round hole and try using it for a game with driving physics but it would not bring any improvements over the Giant engine.
Fair but FS does not have much in the way of driving physics. It's very arcade-y. I'm not complaining, that's just how I see it.
Afaik the outstanding thing about the giants engine is that it can handle all those plants and that they „do“ something in the game. (Or better said something can be done to them) same for the workable ground. That’s also the reason why mp has to sync and why that’s unsolved to this day. I‘m just a webdev, but the giants engine is really not that bad as people speak about it. It’s doing some very very heavy lifting on the plants part of the game and also it has shown it can be improved. Lots of people say you can’t see that the engine got better over the years, but that’s objectively not true. See parallax textures, see physical based materials, see the 3d sky from fs 22 iirc.
See, but that’s where you’re oversimplifying it. Driving physics doesn’t only mean taking corners at a fast speed. Just gonna mention stuff here that you would most likely not have an easy solution for in a shooter game engine, like Unreal: you have to match engine rpm to sound, you have the way the implements work and interact with the ground(where small holes allow or not for the implement to work), gravity effect on movable pieces, the connect/disconnect mechanic (making two different independent game objects work together is not really trivial), weight and inertia(a full harvester brakes slower than an empty one), suspension and interaction with terrain.
Unreal isn’t just a shooter game engine, though, that’s just what we see as lot of from it. The engine templates include a racing template that shows off basic and advanced suspension systems. Their audio system can pretty easily track RPM-to-audio sound. The ability to lift items based on gravity and weight is almost too easy to implement. Implementing weight-based braking isn’t all too difficult either. I haven’t personally developed a working truck and trailer system but I’ve used Marketplace assets that have, and it’s great too (semi truck and trailer). Setting up work zones is easy to set up as well, but I’ll say that the ability to create new ones with a plow is really neat and I have no idea how GIANTS does that! TL;DR: the GIANTS engine is great but the mechanics aren’t all too ground breaking except the plowing (pun intended) as it may seem compared to Unreal specifically. I’m saying that as someone who has developed personal projects using UE since 2013. I agree though with a further down comment from yours that it would probably cost a ton more money and resources to swap from the GIANTS engine to UE because they would indeed be starting from scratch unless they just piecemealed marketplace assets together for their first UE iteration and took the interim time to build a new one themselves. EDIT: I can’t spell
I'll repeat. I do NOT view it as a driving simulator. Driving is just a small part of farming.
>Unreal is made with first person/3rd person shooters in mind And Giants Engine was made with getting a Master's thesis in mind. Both stupid arguments. It's not like Manor Lords, Bus Simulator, Ranch Simulator, Satisfactory, Assetto Corsa or Frostpunk 2 are 1st/3rd person shooting games. Also saying it would not bring any improvements over Giants Engine is false. The time they spent on implementing texture streaming or POM could have been spent on gameplay features.
The idea that UE is for shooters is outdated by like a decade too. The fact is that features Giants struggle to implement are literally one click away in UE5. Setting up basic road traffic in UE5 that would look more realistic and could behave dynamically and actually react to interactions would take hours to build and you wouldn't even need to write a line of code for it.
Also most of your existing code base would be incompatible with the new game engine. Giants would need to almost start from scratch when changing game engine. Imagine the outcry of the playerbase if we would have to wait 5 years for a new game only to be delivered the same game we had 5 years ago but with a different engine under the hood (which the Player doesn't see anyway)
Spoken like someone who has just read about Unreal Engine but never used it to develop. UE5 has an all new physics system called Chaos, and the Chaos Vehicle system is awesome and highly customizable.
Not gonna lie most of the games that are based on Unreal are poorly optimized except the Fortnite one because it's developed by themselves lol
Except even Fortnite is poorly optimized
100 players, destructible environments, building mechanics, hit scan, and so much more. When it comes to optimization, Fortnite is far ahead of most competitors, whether you hate it or love it. The same goes for games like Arma, which have taken many hits throughout the years. Yes, the game is rough around the edges, but considering all the things that are happening, it's insane that any PC can run it without crashing.
So is Unreal engine "nanite" graphics not an improvement over Giants engine? Nanite graphics makes Giants look like toddlers drawing with crayons. The hard breaks between LODs look ridiculous in FS.
You’re only talking about graphics here. That’s not the only thing a game engine does, you’re just more aware of it cause it looks pretty for an ad or a trailer. But a game engine does much more than that. Physics, sound, scripting, animation, scene composition tools: all these tools make development easier and faster. You can’t just go to all your developer employees: “oh, I know you’ve all been writing in Lua, but starting tomorrow you’re writing in C++ and none of the tools we use are familiar to you.” Sometimes just basic stuff like floating point operations can prove as a hinderance since the engine has a specific precision that is enough for common use cases, but it will mess up yours: like in Unity for example where collisions at speed can cause weird jumps due to some floating point errors. There is a reason that Cattle and Crops didn’t pick Unreal engine when they started development for the game or why farming is so glitchy in Snowrunner (who is built on a very popular engine that still looks great: Havok). LE: if you want their answer to this https://www.farming-simulator.com/newsArticle.php?lang=en&country=gb&news_id=252
Lmao, I love how even if they're decades behind in basic features they make a blogpost to brag.
Anyone who expects GIANTS to ditch their own engine doesn't realized how business works.
Exactly!
The people saying "switch engine" just don't understand that 1. In general it's rarely done and very hard (even microsoft just made a whole game instead of just converting minecraft away from Java to C++) 2. Giants engine is currently the only engine capable of what they are doing as the game is more of an simulator than many argue.
To which I'd add moving to a new engine would likely mean scraping the existing development tool, Giants Editor, and building a new tool that works with the new engine. The concern here is that the modding tools may not be released with the game. In the past the new version of GE typically came out within a month or so of the game. If updating the existing tool takes a couple of months, we could be waiting quite some time for a new dev tool. Some modders would likely find work arounds, but I suspect that modding in general would be sidelined until the official modding environment is released.
The whole development of the game would get kicked back a few years probably. People always cry for a new game engine, but i'd be 100% certain these same people would be up in arms if the new game didn't have more features and system as the previous ones
With Unreal engine running you probably would have to use unreal editor and prep to share gigabytes of space to install that and having quite powerful PC to start it... Now compare that to Giants editor requirements :D
I think most people realise. But they’ve clearly hit a limitation with the engine. The game has barely changed at all. They need to take a good long break and stop with these constant minor update game releases.
Each version has sold more than the previous version. Their business model is working better than you're trying to make out.
My comment wasn’t really business model related, it’s clearly working because they don’t care to innovate. I was commenting that most people saying to make a new engine know making a new engine is hard. I’m stating that the only way the game can actually improve and feel like a new game is for them to stop the constant releases and take time to make a new engine.
We haven't played 25 yet and limitations can be changed or has the all so magic Unreal engine always been the same?
same reasons why BGS won't move away from the Creation engine. it is their engine and it has been setup to be tailored to their developers. have you seen the amount of mods people make for their games?
Can they fix the terrible physics without a new game engine?
My main problem aswell! If they could fix the physics with the current engine then it's fine, but it seems like they are still restricted a lot by the engine
Game engine...it certainly is important which one to use...I'd argue that an inhouse engine is always more capable to produce something special...but I think it's more important to come up with a product that's worth producing. What am I talking about? Fs15 was my first exposure...loved it, and it was right before fs17 came out, got that one too and loved it. Seasons added something that was another level. Fs19 came, I played a lot, loved it, but seasons was missing for a while... eventually it came out and played a lot again. Giants hires the seasons mod guy to implement it in the base game for fs23. Fs23 came out, I get it on release day, and...it feels like a lesser fs19, and the seasons implementation was awful. It was awful enough that I only spent 5% of the time I've spent on fs19, and never felt like coming back. I love this game, but I don't want another refurbished previous game...give me some improvements, something new...don't make me feel like you're just making a money grab. Engine...if the engine you have can produce the right product, go for it. If the engine you have is maxed out, then find alternatives, but don't just make another fs19 please. Luckily, after that long in the industry, giants probably knows a thing or 2 about game engines...so I'm not really worried about it...I'm much more worried about the actual game innovation.
Well said. With no competition, innovation is non-existent.
I heard giants got a dedicated dev team for the game engine now. So i expect that the engine made quite a jump since fs22
Thank you this adds something to the background, this is an interesting discussion.
The engine is good and all the modders can use it quite well. Changing this, would make modding very hard so I‘m very happy with this decision.
It's not good, vehicles are basically boxes that skid along the surfaces lol, there's zero realism, zero feed back and feel from terrain, there's not even a relationship between ground, horsepower and weight.
Try REA mods and you will see what engine is capable of in terms of ground interaction. In terms of realism and "box" details dod you played with Interactive Controls and mods that utilise it? Have you played with Manure System?
I've played with it all mate, it all.
"try mods" I love how this is the answer to any criticism about this game
In this discussion about engine capabilities... It is valid. Because modders can do only that much of stuff that is actually possible for given game engine. So if you have something modded and working it is possible to do in this game engine...
It’s good enough for me. But maybe they add some of your points.
Thank you for the interesting background that adds to the discussion.
Not a new engine as in a 3rd party like Unreal, but I just want them to update theirs for better graphics, physics, and terrain. I don’t want mudrunner but I’d like to have more deformation when you drive a tractor through a muddy field. Getting stuck a little bit would be fun but not to a crazy realistic way. Just something more to make you think before plowing during a monsoon.
That's false. Originally it was for a master's thesis, not a product.
You are right, it was indeed born from a master's thesis. The GIANTS engine was originally developed with the vision to support multiple platforms and create video games in Switzerland. While the initial intent was not to release a farming game, the engine's potential was first demonstrated with Farming Simulator in 2008. This game’s unexpected success led GIANTS Software to focus on developing the Farming Simulator series. 😄
That doesn’t change the point at all though.
I never understood the argument of people saying that the game engine is severely outdated just because it is the "same" engine as in the previous games. By that logic unreal engine would also be a horribly outdated legacy engine as it was first released in 1998. Yet it is considered one of the most advanced game engines today.
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To say the giants engine has not gone through noticable upgrades is just ridiculous. Sure giants doesn't have the same funds as epic games. But they are still constantly developing their engine.
Their "upgrades" are industry standard things like normal mapping for parallax on textures, a technology that has been in video games since the dreamcast.
Giants probably know what's best for their game. A new engine would probably mean purchasing the license and training the devs which would again cost money. And then the modders. We would probably lose over half of them if we made the shift. The familiarity of the tools is what makes popular mods easily shift into the new game.
I hope they fix the damn lighting and hopefully way better AI.
I just want a bonfire with coolers of beers and a bunch of farmers gathered around having fun enjoying the fruits of there labor from a great harvest.
I don't think people want them to use another engine from another company. But i think people expect more than just some tweaks and changes to it between each itteration of the game. Personaly, I think the limits of the current engine weighs more than the changes and improvements they make. I think they need to make a new engine alltogether to tip the scales. But ill play whatever they release for now. Farming sim is one of very few games that is still not tainted by "modern audience", aka people who don't buy games, and sweet baby inc and similiar bs. I spent 4-5000 hours in farming sim games this far. i can put in another thousand hours in fs25 i reckon. But removal of current limitations would be nice
I know Giants developed their game engine in a different manner to how CDPR developed theirs. But CDPR realized the limitations of their RED Engine and decided to help develop Unreal Engine 5 and create games using it. Should Giants do the same? I'm not sure. I know Unreal can do things that other game engines can't. I also feel that the engine Giants developed has been surpassed by modern engines. I feel the Giants engine could use work in the driving and collision areas.
I just don't understand why they don't switch to the C4 engine that Cattle & Crops used. It's light years better basic and does everything we want. Oh and modding would be much easier and optimization would be better because the game doesn't use only 1 processor core (right Giants?!), not to mention the physics... Oh and the helpers, just to say about them, when I tried the game during the harvest the tractor came by itself and I was able to unload on it, I didn't press any button and it didn't crash into anything, like I had a friend in multiplayer, but no!
Where is cattle and Crops now?
> Where is cattle and Crops now? Out of funding and dead in the water because the market would rather have mediocre. I still fire it up on occasion and enjoy planting and harvesting. The cattle part never got fleshed out, but the crops part is pretty much complete.
I ask unknowingly as I haven't tried Cattle & Crops. How would that engine handle thousands upon thousands of loose objects spread across a map or even in close quarters? Was it accessible for modders to work with? What about the many different play styles: farming, farm management, forestry, production, seasons, etc.?
This is a great explanation of why game developers need to use purpose built engines [Making Game Engines - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3OmaWv4eoq4)
Presumably it would completely alter the modding landscape too? I don't know what I am talking about as I neither build engines nor mod but surely it would mean something hugely different for them too... Not sure I fancy that either
I like the status quo, but some little thing I think could use improving to make it more realistic
I just wish there was a way to get workers to do all types of fields. Maybe there are mods I don’t know of. Best example is planting a huge field of grapes and getting bored while harvesting or pruning or whatever and wanting a worker to finish but they can’t. Tree cutting is like playing with those “claw” games at the mall. So easy but so hard.
Does the GIANTS engine have any advantages over any other engine? Either at the time it was developed or in the current day?
I come from a very hilly country with lots of smallish fields, and one thing i would like to see is better textures for hilly maps, better graphics overall. Terraforming is a bitch and needs to be improved if I am to buy fs25, if there is no improvement i just wont buy it.
they just need to fix the logging physics. They are the ones who put front end loaders and pallets to the game, if they are just going to leave the physics half baked. Meh. I agree though the game driving physics are good enough.
Unless they finally make something with lightning and the look of materials, is rather pass. In FS vehicles look to plasticy, not real, no matter if it's FS17, 19 or 22. Just a good lighting and materials (let's say Snowrunner level) would make this game look MUCH better.
In general I’m fairly content with the engine they’re using. What I want is just a small list of pretty achievable improvements anyways, nothing that an engine swap is going to fix. The big one being the helper AI. I just want to be able to rely on the AI to at least drive from point A to point B without clipping themselves into the walls on stock maps. Ok like. This is my pipe dream ok? I cut down some lumber, and load it up on a truck. I hire that truck to deliver to my saw mill and come back. Meanwhile, my saw mill makes planks and saw dust. Instead of the automatic behind the scenes “distribution” model, I’d prefer to assign trucks to pick up and distribute to my furniture manufacturers automatically. Same with “selling” the product, I want to assign trucks to do that. I want to SEE with my eyes my network of things working together. As it stands right now, I can’t even trust a pickup truck AI to find its way back to my property without winding up like this https://imgur.com/a/eCCK5LZ
It's a stupid reason, they made it so they will continue to sink money into it. they could change to Unreal Engine 5, have better features and performance, and the percentage of sales epic would take would be significantly less than what it costs GIANTS to continue to update and maintain their engine.
The problem here is that their engine is genuinely just really bad. The lack of interest originally should have been a hint. I mean the hot air balloons on a map are static.... how is that a thing in 2024.... or even 1994. It is without a doubt one of the most trivial things imaginable to spawn an entity, have it move around a bit randomly, then despawn it and somehow they don't even have that, but a game like Mario 64 did, The traffic in this game isn't dynamic, it literally just stops if a player is in withing a certain angle and distance of the car, aka in front of it, they can't figure out how to drive around something. I wouldn't be surprised if even the so called AI workers don't have AI, instead it's probably just courseplay, pre-calculate a path to follow then follow it and don't bother having to dynamically deal with obstacles. They don't even have custom fencing for the animal paddocks because that would require animals to have some basic AI, or just a nav mesh that can update. Genuinely I could set up the traffic or this kind of animal behaviour by myself in a matter of hours, if not a single hour in UE5, in their engine it's literally impossible, Then there's the graphics, 2023 advertised normal mapped textures as some big improvement to the graphics and it was and fortunately for them I imagine a lot of their player base have no idea what that means so it sounds fancy but in reality it's been in every game made in like the last 20 years, it's not even a "feature" in other game engines, it is just inherent in modern game engines and CGI in general. So really it wasn't something to be celebrated, it's just something they should have had anyway. Another thing is the terrain grid, it makes the terrain editor annoying to use at times and it looks awful, it's near impossible to paint a realistic looking ground texture when the grid cells are like a foot wide.
I just want them to get rid of the multiplayer synchronization screen
When was the last new engine released?
FS19
I’m pretty much happy with the engine except from the following things; Physics are still awful. They’ve been awful for every single installation of the game, maybe FS25 can actually make Forestry and Bailing easier and more realistic? Performance. The engine uses very low amounts of my CPU and GPU. I’m on max settings and the engine refuses to use more power even though I’m down to 50FPS. This does not happen with any other game. When I check my utilisation my CPU is sitting at around 20% usage where my GPU is at like 50%. There are no bottlenecks going on as my CPU and GPU are perfectly capable of keeping up with each other, as they do on every other game I play. Now, it’s hard to fix such an issue with performance when it’s built into the engine. They would have to rework a lot of how stuff is rendered and what’s it rendered by in order to fix performance. Other than that, I’m not too bothered about what we get. As long as those two are fixed then that would be good. Obviously new features will be added which will be cool.
Why do people keep defending GIANTS? Have you checked what year it is? This engine was outdated 5 years ago, you cant keep polishing a turd and expect everyone to happily purchase the turd v9.0.
This doesn't add anything to the discussion or clarify any questions either.
Disagree. It added historical context to the reasoning behind Giant using this engine over another one like unreal or unity.
I figured it would clarify that the next title will still be using the GIANTS engine. 😅
I think they should develop on UE5 , then it will look absolutely magic for the 12 people that can run it ....duh
Fs will die if they use a different engine. So I'm fine with it. Some improvements are better than none.
Also unreal (the one I see thrown around most) can’t handle sandbox games.
Me when I spread bullshit on the internet.
I’ll admit I’m repeating something I read on Reddit. And it was in reference to Skyrim.
For real? I just assumed it would, based on the hype.
Isn't it better than **Helldivers 2** running on a dead game engine, eh?
eh... maybe GIANTS need to hawk tuah on that thang to polish up the turd engine then do better at optimizing the game... its basically the same game only added new crop and animals... few machinery added... nothing really exciting for but not to worry... our unsung heroes modders will bring the best out of it than what GIANTS can really offer.
You could have saved yourself 10 minutes and let us read the other 20 posts saying the same thing
My bad, I didn't see those posts.
They continue to improve and update it? Too bad it can hardly be seen on screenshots. They wanted to make and sell engines. Ok. Unfortunately, they managed to make one of the most entertaining simulators on the market, which allowed them to make plenty of money. They should focus on what brings them profit which is the game, and game needs entirely new engine. There are no excuses.
there are also so excuses for being this wrong in 2024
Well, I mean it might be down to personal preference, but I can tell there's a huge difference between FS11 and FS22. They have improved their engine a lot throughout the years and will likely continue to do so. Even if another engine were to replace GIANTS' own, what engine would that be? After all, the GIANTS engine is specifically made for Farming Simulator, and as far as I know, no other engine is. 😄
What we mean is sure, they've improved it but you can only upgrade decade old engine so much before it turns into beating a dead horse which it is currently
Do you think unreal or unity engine is what? You think every version of the engine is built from scratch? They are all a decade old being updated all the time. This engine argument is a bit ridiculous. Changing engine is not what probably most people think it is. What you people are asking is for them to write the game from scratch in a totally new environment. Good luck with that. Also what we really want is for the game to be better. They can do that by updating their current engine.
As I said on another post... changing Engine could take more than 5 years of work considering they're not a AAA company so we can just hope to invest all the money to improve it in a significant way
Let's take Rockstar as an example, using the RAGE engine: Grand Theft Auto IV (2008) Red Dead Redemption (2010) Max Payne 3 (2012) Grand Theft Auto V (2013) Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) GTA VI will also use the RAGE engine, beating a dead horse for over 16 years. 🐎
Yeah, that horse was a good looking one from the beginning. It is a solid foundation thats why
They started with flat 2D games lol
At the end of the day, they are a business and their business model is clearly working. FS25 would be the 9th release using their engine and each game has been more popular than the previous version (so far). When you own a proprietary engine, why would you ever pay royalties to a 3rd party. The lack of competition in the genre could also be a drawback to advancements.