Originally Posted by MrBloodworth
When a company has a cross game Platform like SOE or Turbine ( All Trubine games are the same engine ). There is a group dedicated to JUST the engine itself, agnostic of the games made with it.
But do not be confused with engine layer and game layer.
So far SOE has used this engine for Free Realms, Starwars and now Planetside.
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I know this. That's why I said Forgelight programmers, not Planetside 2 programmers. My guess is that they are probably working on more engine specific stuff for use in Everquest Next.
They said Everquest Next would have a lot of sandbox elements, so im guessing they are probably working with adding stuff dynamically to the world for player placed objects (like houses and buildings). The rendered is probably being tweaked for more smaller scale environments with more detail. Planetside 2's focus was on large scale environments with a very large render distance, there is no reason for that kind of a system with a more traditional MMORPG.
I'm sure they have a few Planetside 2 specific tech guys (obviously they have at least one), but the core engine team must be doing other things.
This isn't a bad thing. During SoE live last year Smedly was talking about implementing outfit bases and stuff that would require stuff like player placed objects and whatnot. The stuff they work on for other games could be adapted to Planetside 2. So it's not like time spent working on the engine for other purposes is wasted.
The engine is also both what's running locally on the machine and what's running on the servers. I'm sure they have guys working on both. The increase in render distance is a good indication that the engine is getting more stable when they start really punishing it.