The Astronauts’ Adrian Chmielarz told Eurogamer that the updated UE4 version of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a few weeks away. Originally developed on Unreal Engine 3, The Astronauts decided to port it to Epic’s new engine as a means of bringing this game to current-gen consoles. And in order to thank PC gamers, The Astronauts decided to give away this new updated version completely free to all owners of the game.
As Adrian Chmielarz told Eurogamer:
“The PC UE4 update is a few weeks away. We need to make sure that PC gamers do get what is expected: proper support for different screen ratios, extended configuration options, etc.”
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter was one of the most optimized games of 2014 for the PC platform. The game packed incredible visuals – thanks to photogrammetry – and did not require a top of the line system in order to be enjoyed.
Here is hoping that the UE4 build will run just as good – if not better – as the game’s UE3 version.
Stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Ehh, was I the only one that got crazy stuttering with this game? I heard it was because of the engine, but at the highest settings at 1080p and the lowest at 640p I would always have 60 fps with stuttering every few seconds 🙁
Kepler card VRAM limitation issue. Works fine with 4Gb and above cards.
Strange considering the game only used 1.3gb~1.6gb vram?
I had a gtx 780m with 4 gb of vram. Not sure about the kepler part.
I wouldn’t say that. I had plenty of stuttering with two Titan Blacks. It was a known issue that had some suggestions made on the Steam forums. Not sure if it was resolved, but with two Titan Xs, thus far, I’ve noticed less stuttering, but it is still there.
Maybe this update will take care of it.
Really? I doubt this game needs that much VRAM.
LOL and here I thought I was going crazy. Even with Vsync on there was bad stuttering on my 780Ti.
I never played more than half an hour, you?
Got about 2 hours in and then stopped. Not a fan of the ‘walk around and look at stuff’ type of games.
That’s weird, I never had any problems playing it on a 650Ti, though I think I wasn’t playing it 100% maxed out, I don’t remember which settings I turned down, played it a while ago, but it still looked amazing, especially the textures.
Had the same problem. I bought it during Steam Summer sale and was excited about playing it. The graphics looked great. The stuttering was awful though, detracted so much from the game I got a refund for it. I tried all settings. Was running on an SSD and with Higher end hardware GTX970 for GPU.
It was the texture streaming. Modern graphics cards use a ‘unified shader’ architecture, the key word there being shader. Shaders are mathematical algorithms that create textures procedurally, rather than a traditional texture which is an image slapped onto a polygonal object.
Back in the PS3 and XBox 360 days games became shader-heavy because it took less processing to achieve a better looking game, so hardware designers started making graphics cards with ridiculous amounts of shader processing rather than 2D texture-specific bandwidth.
So, when you have a game with lots of objects that have unique textures, your terribly-expensive, monster-shader graphics card stutters when it tries to stream those textures into its memory.
For these ‘next gen’ games (which are mostly console-optimized ports), graphics cards need at least 4GB of VRAM and massive memory BUS width to stream hi-res textures at stable framerates, plus lots of CPU power because most console port developers think just increasing the numbers makes a good PC game, but in reality it just bogs down our CPU/ GPU and makes games stutter like crazy.
I remember John Carmack getting upset with the direction that consoles were pulling the entire industry. Carmack wanted the industry to focus on larger texture bandwidth, but consoles set the trend and now we’re about 10 years behind because of the hardware stagnation that has brought us.
Well would you look at that- someone on the internet that knows what the hell they are talking about. Kudos to you, as one of the last members of a dying breed.
Haha, thanks. You’re probably the only person to read or understand that here, sadly enough.
It was Gears Of war that first convinced me this was happening- a game with extremely poor Textures- whose fans insisted was so very advanced and ‘next gen’. Poor texturing started becoming more commonplace with the advent of modern gaming sadly. One of the main reasons Crysis looked as impressive as it did was smart use of the texture assets. I make textures for TES games as a modding hobby so texture bandwidth matters to me. By now we should be at the point where mega textures are commonplace for assets such as Distant LOD and sky- and yet they are nowhere to be found. Some companies still get away with low res trash- disguised behind shaders (Bethesda, Bioware and now sadly CD Projekt Red).
Have you seen the LOD for Far Cry 4? It’s atrocious – far worse than Skyrim and that came out 4 years prior! I’ve been gaming for about 25 years, and while graphics have indeed gotten better, it’s not because of hardware, it’s because of all the tools that artists now use in order to create the art assets for games, like Z-Brush. Z-Brush and Normal mapping pretty much changed everything.
Awesome news! Fantastic game.
It is great to see more developers doing this. Mind: Path to Thalamus is also getting updated to UE4 for free.
that will be great!
i love UE4 so far!
this game sucks
Your taste sucks, this is the only walking simulator that’s actually good.
Big open world, zero hand holding, an actually compelling mystery to solve, a nice twist and it looks absolutely beautiful. Nothing about this game feels lazy or pretentious.
EDIT: Oh and I forgot it has great music too, I love the theme that plays when you reach the dam.
Don’t loose your time m8, it’s a troll.
no
this game sucks so bad it wont even start on 4 GTX 980 ti’s (OC and watercooled) and i7 4960X
Seems legit.
it is legit. and dont say “HURR U HAEV 2000 PC HURRDUURRRRR” that is retarded as sh*t, and also JRPGs suck, FPS 4 lyfe
Yeah, yeah…
yeah yeah means “ALLAHU AKBAR IM GONNA KILL U LEL”, and also, only noobs need proof, i dont
battlefield 4 is the best game ever
…
but its true this game is boring all u do is walk!! battlefield 4 is better
Btw it is true, I love Battlefield 4 🙂
troll?
i agree with BF4 though!
not a troll. battlefield 4 is from 2013 and has better gfx than battlefield 3
You troll 2 much on this portal…either explain your statement or gtfo.
my statement is: HEIL HITLER LOL
Can’t we get this troll banned ? he doesn’t even contribute anything here but just troll. Didn’t John said he bans trolls here ?
john is dead hes busy sucking d-i-c-k-s now
I have reported him to admins & disqus
good job 🙂
Just have noticed, all his comments from this site were deleted, GJ admins. 🙂
good news!
the UE3 version worked amazing on maxed settings on my GTX 680!
I hope porting to UE4 brings native support for Oculus Rift. That should be nice.
Hellz yeah. That would be amazing. Only have DK1 right now, but I will get CV1 the day it releases.
I hope it will be available for DK2 too (after UE 4 update release).
its graphic is awesome and lets see whats new UE4 brings
Ouch, hell yeah, cant wait to see this in glorious U4 !!! GG astronauts , GG
It already looked amazing. Can’t wait to see how it looks in UE4. I wonder how much better it will look.
My favorite bit of news is that this new UE4 version will introduce a manual save system which many, my self including, thought it needed badly.
Agreed. I wanted to manually save so many times. Great improvement there.
OH yes!
That would be seriously awesome….I still haven’t really played this game more than an hour, but with this update I will be playing it soon!
Think I’m the only one who had major skips in this game and that’s with a 970 and 4790k. Game would be at a high frame rate then stutter thinking it was loading crapnfrom the hard drive often I also have 16gb of ram be nice if games started using it over the drive
I love it when developers do this.
As for the game itself, I loved exploring the game world and looking at the beautiful sights, but the story was mostly nonsensical. It’s like the team was building the world first, then adding the story second? The focus of the game was on graphics rather than mechanics or gameplay or story, I felt.
I actually bought a physical and digital copy just to support the dev of such a great game, shame it didn’t sell better on PC, but they really didn’t market enough, which I’m guessing is due to budget restraints, still they made an amazing game and it’s good to know they will support the PC gamers as well as console gamers, any remaster that bumps up the graphical fidelity should have it’s improvements implemented platform wide if possible.