I don't think anything has changed with that: there are no plans to release that demo that I know of. I was never privy to the full reasoning behind that and I think it's a bummer too because it's a great looking demo, even today. Runs even better than it did at the time of course since the engine has come a long way since then. It sucks, but it is what it is.
@Andrew Lauritzen
Any update on this? Its been almost 3 years since the demo and having just rewatched it, its as stunning as the very first time. There's so many things in it that I and others would like to understand.
While there were no plans to release it back then. Its current status could be because no one in the company has actually brought it up/pushed for its release after the fact.
This also happens sometimes in the companies that I have worked at as a Senior Software Engineer. There are things that my company won't do unless someone suggests/brings it up. Not because we don't want to do it, but because no one has actually pushed for it or brought it up. For example in a meeting. I have had people in other departments personally ask if IT could work on X or they would like Y, or why we are not working on Z.
Usually the case is that no one has really brought it up within our department. Usually, I would mention the request to someone on Teams about us doing the XYZ and the feedback is usually great and gets the ball rolling. Sometimes it might happen in a team meeting.
I say something to the effect of "I think we should do X, it seems like there's alot of interest for it...etc"
Usually everyone is in agreement, its just that no one have actually vocalized it.
It would be AMAZING if YOU could be the one who does this Andrew. if you could bring up the release of lumen in the land of nanite to your fellow colleagues, either the demo team or the team responsible for demo content maintenance/releases. Epic has released almost every demo project created (even released game wow), so I don't see why this would be any different.
It usually takes one person that brings something up maybe once or twice (follow up) and it gets the ball rolling.
Most likely the case back in 2021 and 2022 was "there's no need or we have other stuff we are working on and want to release first" and that has just stuck around. Like a legacy code that was temporarily put in but is now eternally in the codebase.
Alot of times, the people who made the initial decision already changed their mind, but since no one has brought it up, it never actually gets rectified. It's such an amazing demo with painstaking care and pure craftsmanship. It literally turned the entire gaming and game dev industry upside down.
To help convince you, here are some of the points I laid out that Epic could do towards this.
My main point is that something, anything, can be done and its better than nothing.
- Epic could release an Executable, LLN was supposed to be playable at GDC 2020 before covid hit and spoiled those plans. Epic could still go this route. It requires the least amount of work as somebody just has to simply compile and release a build and let us experience the demo as it was meant to be at GDC. They could do this AT GDC and make it into an "come play LLN demo" booth at GDC while also simultaneously releasing it for download.
- Release the demo project as it is with only minor adjustment (to make sure its fully functioning and supports the latest engine version). No re-arrangement, no documentation, no rewrite necessary. I understand there might be a desire to say if we are going to release it we must make it perfect. But i Epic has a history of releasing projects that weren’t intended for public consumption. But it allowed us developers to dig in and learn (for example, Infiltrator, Elemental Demo, Kite demo, etc)
- Release all the assets from the Demo project. Keyword here is "all". This would seem abit harder than #2 because it takes more effort to gather and categorize all the assets. But its still a possibility and better than nothing.
- Update the demo project to use 5.0+ features like World Partition, Data Layers, Foliage as Nanite. This would be the hardest route and would include “non-trivial amount of work”. But its not the only option.
I understand that Epic has been busy with the release of 5.0 EA, then 5.0 and Lyra. But now seems to be the perfect time to release this.
We would be eternally grateful to you Andrew if you helped push for this.
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