Developer Mark Kern, also known as Grummz, point out About ditching Unreal Engine in favor of its own Kaiju engine, much of which is written using artificial intelligence. To prove that the technology was ready for production, the team ported his old game Firefall to the new engine, using only the Steam client and without access to the source code.
According to Kern, the remastered version of Firefall runs on the Kaiju engine. This transfer allows us to test the engine on real commercial projects, overcoming its inherent difficulties.
Cohen also cited impressive development numbers. According to him, the team was approximately 93 times faster in terms of lines of code and functionality implemented. Project setup time using Unreal Engine has been reduced from 30 minutes to 36 seconds, and implementing new features now takes days instead of months. The number of errors has decreased.
The engine itself took about five months to build and cost just a few thousand dollars. By comparison, the original Firefall engine took two to three years to develop and cost more than $5 million, adjusted for inflation. Use Grok, Codex, and Claude to write code.
The Kaiju Engine includes state-of-the-art mesh rendering and physically based lighting, streaming loading of huge textures, procedural planet generation, and the ability to seamlessly move from planetary surfaces to orbit and into space without loading the screen. In the current version of Firefall, the developers claim about 140 FPS, and after optimization they expect to reach 200-300 FPS.
The ported version uses the original Firefall models and levels. The quality of textures and the appearance of distant objects was limited by the original game state: some high-quality textures loaded through the server were lost after the project was closed.
Cohen believes the technology will be beneficial not only in creating new games, but also in preserving old projects. Firefall closed in 2017, and its return has already sparked a strong reaction from long-time fans.
However, the team won’t be limited to restoring Firefall. The next project will be the EM-8ER, which the developers call the game’s spiritual successor. It should include the return of familiar elements like gliding and jetpacks, as well as a new game world.