I think we to some extend misunderstood each other as I wasn’t clear enough, sorry about that. I was not trying to advocate a migration to UE as that’s as you said, a complete waste of all your effort as well as against their license, or anyone’s common sense really.
What I was trying to portray to you, is how from my perspective things currently stand with relation to your current business model. While I did intentionally down played the unique/specific features of your engine as well as the effort required to pull it of, I did so because I didn’t want to prolong a already long post and most of all, stray from key points I was trying to pass.
To put it simply, I’m not downplaying enormous effort you all put in the engine, but reality is that a add-on developer only needs to solve the basic needs, like level streaming, procedural algorithms and simply pass this to indie, so by the time indie gets the engine, they’ve cut their work immensely since everything you have yet to solve, like art pipe, rendering, I/O, animations and as you already know yourself, basically crap load of things, are already there. So in that sense, it’s not really hard to focus on unique stuff like solar system, floating point issues and other stuff because that’s pretty much all one has to do really - and yes, that’s barely scratching the surface, but just to relay the point.
I like to believe I’m a rational person and as such, I do believe that a product doing only one thing will always, as long as it’s done right, outperform in that thing any other product that’s generic and tries to address more things at once. Problem with this specific situation is that you’re severely overwhelmed by a project and maybe not even half way through. Your current license makes sense but sadly due lack of man power you’re risking to fall behind to the point, it will simply be too late. Basically you’re risking to arrive single on a party where everyone has already hooked up - figure of speech.
To sum it up, what I was trying to say is, that a path Epic picked may work for you as well. It would solve your lack of man power as well as basically with some luck, speed up your process while at the same time also generate some income for you…sure a pocket change at start, but then again getting rid of bugs and enriching the engine is a salary itself as well as it brings you much closer to final product, where if you choose, start making real money with royalties or some other scheme. And so there’s no confusion, I’m talking about engine, not game. Game is something you market, deal with etc…that’s a completely different thing and in essence, it targets a completely different crowd (players).
Anyway, that’s really just my view on it. I’m sure there are many other angles, but looking at current state and with that little overview I have, I think it’s a sane conclusion. Or I just don’t see the big picture and am completely missing the point, which wouldn’t be the first either.
