They haven't announced anything. J-F said he is investigating the possibility of porting the current engine into a more recent DX version until the Unreal update arrives.
As Balrog said, nothing is set in stone right now, it may never happen, unreal may never happen. I assume there will be an official announcement once they either decide what they're going to do or once it ready to be released.
Does R3E really need a complete new graphic engine or just an update for a better lighting and new features like day-night transition or weather effects (fog and rain)??? I don't think so … the current look of the tracks is amazing and every time a real eye candy! … I know the UE4 engine from other pc games, and I can say, that I hate it!
I don't no why we started here again, but as I told several times before, the change or work on the engine is not only needed for eye-candy. The current engine is totally limited in it's possibilitys as it is to much CPU-Bound and there bound to a single core. That is absolutly the different way that the PC-Development of the last 5 years was heading to - and will in future... DX9 is just outdated and will not be further supported by future Hardware-Releases... new GFX-Cards will run DX9-Games slower than old ones. Tripple-Screen with 144hz and 4K - don't even think a second about that... VR will rise it's resolution more and more - no chance for those.... If you want lighting, day/night Transitions or Weather-Effects there is no chance to use the current engine as you will not get enough performance to run it smoothly. On rather good/normal graphics-settings I doubt that you would even get 60fps in a field of cars during wet weather-conditions... I now what you want, but that would mean so much work and then you wouldn't get the result that you could with a new engine and so it would be more efficient to start from scratch...
New engine is "relative". There is different subsystems and depending on how entangled (or ideally not) they are, it should be possible to upgrade some independently. I am quite the proponent to attempt the dx11 sidegrade, however it's not a "lasting" solution. So it ought to be cheap. Actually vulkan would be an option, too and not kill win7 users and be multi-threading friendlier. Focus on CPU performance and break up the single threading performance problem. Agreeing that visually the game is still holding up okay thx to great artists. But it's showing its age. At some point seeing the tracks in the same conditions becomes boring. But mostly I would like to see more cars, more detail objects, and also netcode for that...
It needs something to help with performance in VR ! If that's a new engine , i dont know but it certainly needs something because even my 1080ti/7700k cant manager 90 fps even with low on some tracks ! I love R3E but dont play it because of this reason !
I think that new cars and tracks have a lot of details so the models are fine. The lightning system though is really outdated, i think that improvements should be focused on that.
except thats not possible without changing the graphics engine , so we will wait until that is possible (ue4) or dx11: but until that is finalised i cant see any improvements happening Andi
Yup they have to switch engine of course. Milestone did it with MotoGP 2018 and the improvements are significant. Unreal Engine 4 might be the best option available and Sector 3 are used to work on PC platform.
I don't really think anyone says R3E is ugly as is but more the need for more features and better performance ! DX9 cant deliver that ! Simple !
RRR is not ugly, but every other up-to-date-"sim" looks better. I think RRR looks way to lean. There is need to put dirt on the cars after a couple of laps. We need more dirt on the tracks (leaves, rubber pieces, etc), we need windscreen going dirty with more laps (features that deliver older sims btw). We need Penalty for crossing the white line on pit exit.... I dont need rain or night. I need dirt. That gives much immersion. Its like in real live: Stagnation means regression
For myself I can say, R3E got enough „eye-candy“.... I would appreciate a DX upgrade just for the performance aspects, especially for VR. Although I would like to have this things @Eisprinzessin mentioned. Dirt and all this imperfections would make it more immersive, but this would be just nice to have. I would rather have some new tracks or series, than some dead insects on the windscreen...