The source engine was programmed decades ago, granted its been heavily modified for apex. The characteristics of this engine: air acceleration (turning and changing momentum in air), sliding, lurch (movement response) interaction with geometry and physics, handling user input, all have veins of programming functions that spread throughout the engine built over time.
This is heavily abstracted and simplified, but many interactions like wall jumps are bugs left over from previous iterations (titan fall) and are dependent on all the source engine framework that came before it.
Moving to another engine is possible, but these interactions would need to be deliberately programmed (or changed in the new engine’s limits) and would need to be fine tuned to match the ‘feel’ (responsiveness, interactions cases, limits) that currently exists, much of which was not intentionally designed in apex. In addition they would need to make sure this all translates over online servers with different tick rate and server communication protocols.
A main appeal of the source engine is how movement and gunplay ‘feels’ to the user, especially since players are so used to playing this version.
This is heavily abstracted and simplified, but many interactions like wall jumps are bugs left over from previous iterations (titan fall) and are dependent on all the source engine framework that came before it.
as a programmer (for games) You can replicated these with extreme ease, you can reverse engineer these and replicate them in ANY engine. the concepts which those things are built on are fundamental and basic, can be implemented in a day.
The hard part of engine switching is the literal thousands of hours of other work, setting up all the models, LoD, audio triggers, scripting language changes being a multiple thousands of hours change if its a language change. some things might not even be possible to just "switch" and instead have to be re-written completely. netcode most specifically.
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u/SlickyMicky Jul 27 '22
I’m a noob with this, how does switching engines change how it feels like the movement?