Hey everyone, I’m an art conservator student working on preserving an artwork built on Unreal Engine 3. It seems like emulation is my most likely outcome (the artist hasn’t provided the source code, although we’re asking) but I was wondering if there are any key works or resources that I could refer to for a better idea on how this process would work, or if the artwork could likely be moved to newer versions of UE without much change.
In conservation circles, having the work replayable or redisplayable in 50 years is a great, but 500 years is more ideal, just to give you an idea of our timelines.
Thanks! And apologies if my questions are a bit basic or if this should be in another forum. I know enough about UE and gaming in general to understand much of the jargon, but don’t have much technical expertise.
Copyright is going to be an issue, the UE3 games are fairly recent and whomever owns the rights is going to protect them.
Without permission and source code there’s little that you can do, and it’s inevitable that games will not be able to support future hardware.
And all this applies to the game itself and the art assets used in the game.
This is actually a huge field of study and is much much harder to achieve then before. Unless its engraved in stone like Mount Rushmore there is no telling what the future holds. just look at floppy disks and tape drives, sure they are still around but heading towards extinction soon and it hasn’t even been 50 years since IBM introduced them.
on a scale of 500 years we could all be reading and writing to diamonds chips by then, or some other insane technology that we have no clue about today. So really your options decrease as your time horizon increases and since we only have history to look back on its either stone or diamond.