Hello dear ones,
finally we have news and finally we are ready to share it with you.
TLDR: LOTUS simulator switches from in-house to Unity engine! Development has already started, was interrupted in the meantime to investigate alternatives and is now continuing. We have a new addition to the development team, Ekranos , and are very much looking forward to the times ahead!
RTFA: Where to start? We share your displeasure with the performance of LOTUS. We don't necessarily share every criticism of the associated graphics of LOTUS, but we know as well as you do that there is a lot of room for improvement. At the beginning of the development period, we decided against using an engine for very specific reasons. And we have to be honest: The fact that we are now revising this decision is mainly due to our friend and new collaborator Ekranos , who brings ~11 years of experience and expertise with him. But more on that later.
The three of us went through a lengthy process of discussing every potentially critical implementation detail of LOTUS and its special requirements and evaluating the solution(s) in Unity. We were convinced - and then, in view of the once again questionable change of course behind Unity, temporarily completely demotivated, thrown back on the plan to rather program the engine ourselves, but perhaps to start all over again...! In the meantime, the wind is blowing - once again - from a different direction in San Francisco and we dare to stay with Unity...
With the arrival of Unity, the programming language in which the simulator itself (not the tools) is programmed has also changed. Instead of ObjectPascal, we are working on the new LOTUS in C#. Different language, new (modern ;) ) development environment, professional engine.
Our plan is - and I cannot stress often enough, that it is our plan. If circumstances change, plans may still need to be adjusted. - that we continue the reprogramming of LOTUS and raise it to a level that each of you can experiment with and then add it to the current game in a patch at no cost to you. Initially it will be optional to use the new LOTUS and eventually we will get to the point where the old LOTUS is no longer available. Its development will also be more or less frozen at the current level.
The changeover should mean as little inconvenience for you as possible, which has a very, very high priority for us. We are striving to ensure that all content that has already been created can be loaded 1:1 in the new LOTUS. There will be a new script language and we are aiming for the old scripts to be able to be ported and processed in their current state. The tools will remain in their current state, but we will continue to work on bug fixes and long-awaited optimisations and there will certainly be some adjustments to the content file format, for example to optimise loading processes in the new LOTUS. As a content developer, it is therefore worthwhile to re-export your own add-ons every now and then after updates.
By switching to the engine, a number of compatibility problems will be a thing of the past, e.g. with Linux, the use of DirectX, etc.
There are also some graphic effects that we spent countless hours programming, only to be rather mediocrely satisfied with the implementation in the end (real-time shadows, for example...), which are now available for free. This frees up programming resources, which is a great benefit to LOTUS!
We are very happy to be working with our new development environment and are making good progress. On the one hand, we plan to keep you up to date with patches on the new LOTUS after a certain deadline and, in the case of a patch shortage, to inform you about what we are currently working on via posts here in the forum.
I can imagine that some people are calculating that the development of the new LOTUS will now take as much time as we have spent so far on the development of the old LOTUS. I can reassure you - it definitely won't.
We are not - for the time being - redeveloping the tools, we are saving a lot of time programming, debugging and optimising our own engine, with our new development environment we have a tool that actually supports us in programming and with Ekranos we have someone on board who cannot stand inefficiency in code, workflow or testing and knows how to prevent it. We feel well positioned, motivated and in good spirits. Many chunks, such as the timetable module, are already finished and only need to be transferred by diligence.
Now, for all those who have made it this far, something to look at:
引用框:
亲爱的朋友们，你们好
我们终于有消息了，终于可以和你们分享了。
太长不看：LOTUS 模拟器从内部引擎切换到 Unity 引擎！开发工作已经开始，在此期间曾因研究替代方案而中断，现在仍在继续。我们的开发团队有了新成员 Ekranos，我们非常期待未来的发展！
从何说起？我们和你们一样对 LOTUS 的性能感到不满。我们不一定赞同对《LOTUS》相关图形的所有批评，但我们和你们一样清楚，《LOTUS》还有很大的改进空间。在开发初期，我们决定不使用引擎是出于非常特殊的原因。老实说，我们现在能重新考虑这个决定，主要归功于我们的朋友和新合作者 Ekranos，他带来了约 11 年的经验和专业知识。稍后再详述。
我们三人经历了一个漫长的过程，讨论了 LOTUS 的每个潜在关键实施细节及其特殊要求，并评估了 Unity 中的解决方案。我们被说服了--然后，鉴于 Unity 背后再次出现的令人质疑的路线改变，我们暂时完全失去了动力，又回到了自己编程引擎的计划上，但也许又要从头开始.....！与此同时，旧金山的风向又变了，我们敢于继续使用 Unity。
随着 Unity 的到来，模拟器本身（而非工具）的编程语言也发生了变化。我们正在用 C# 编写新的 LOTUS，而不是 ObjectPascal。不同的语言，新的（现代的；）开发环境，专业的引擎。
我们的计划是--我再三强调，这是我们的计划。如果情况有变，计划可能仍然需要调整。- 我们将继续对LOTUS进行重新编程，并将其提升到你们每个人都可以尝试使用的水平，然后将其免费添加到当前游戏的补丁中。最初，使用新 LOTUS 将是可选的，最终我们将不再使用旧 LOTUS。其开发工作也将或多或少地冻结在当前水平。
转换过程中，我们会尽可能减少给您带来的不便，这也是我们的首要任务。我们将努力确保所有已创建的内容都能在新 LOTUS 中以 1:1 的比例加载。我们将采用新的脚本语言，并力求使旧脚本能够在当前状态下进行移植和处理。工具将保持现有状态，但我们将继续进行错误修复和期待已久的优化工作，而且肯定会对内容文件格式进行一些调整，例如优化新 LOTUS 的加载过程。因此，作为内容开发人员，值得在更新后每隔一段时间重新导出自己的附加组件。
改用该引擎后，许多兼容性问题将不复存在，例如与 Linux 的兼容性、DirectX 的使用等。
此外，还有一些我们花费了无数时间编写的图形特效（例如实时阴影......），现在可以免费使用了。这释放了编程资源，为 LOTUS 带来了极大的好处！
我们很高兴能在新的开发环境中工作，并取得了良好的进展。一方面，我们计划在某个截止日期后向您提供新 LOTUS 的最新补丁；另一方面，在补丁短缺的情况下，我们会通过论坛上的帖子告知您我们目前正在开发的补丁。
我可以想象，有些人正在计算新LOTUS的开发时间将与我们迄今为止开发旧LOTUS所花费的时间相当。我可以向你们保证--绝对不会。 我们暂时不会重新开发工具，我们正在节省大量编程、调试和优化自己的引擎的时间，有了新的开发环境，我们就有了真正支持我们编程的工具，有了Ekranos，我们就有了一个不能容忍代码、工作流程或测试效率低下并知道如何防止这种情况发生的人。我们感觉自己已经准备就绪，干劲十足，精神饱满。许多模块，如时间表模块，已经完成，只需勤奋工作即可。
现在，对于所有走到这一步的人来说，有些东西值得一看：
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