time. So, following your advice, I'm just not going to mention the engine, I'm just going to say that I'm updating the game.

I'm not worried about which engine will power the game, I'm worried that I'm going to show videos and screenshots of the game in one engine, then the engine would be switched and my backers would be shown screenshots and videos in a completely different engine.

Again, make sure the game looks better in the newer engine, or mention the new features / performance improvements made possible by the new engine.

An engine from 10 years ago most probably is not able to multithread at all... Unity is not top of the class here, but at least the physics are now properly multithreaded with PhysX 3.3...

10 years ago, pixel lighting and bump mapping was just starting to appear in most games.... with Unity 5, you can use GI and other modern technologies to make your game look better with just a little bit of tweaking.

You could probably upgrade the old assets to use the new PBR standart shader if you create the additional maps needed in an image editor. For non-metallic parts of the assets thats gonna be easy if you take the specular route instead of the metallicity one. Take the old spec map, create gloss and spec from it, tweak the brightness. For the metallic ones you need to add colors to the metallic parts, which is a little bit more complicated, still, the result does look spectacular if done well, so might be worth it.

Just mention the good stuff, leave out the boring technical details that consumers mostly don't care about. If somebody asks, you can still tell him what engine you switched to. If somebody is questioning the decision ("Why u not Cryengine???"), you could just respond with some clever prepared statement, and then again let the shiny before-after pics do the talking.

Really, your upgrade should give you more than enough improvements to talk about.

3 years instead of 7 sound very viable considering how good and intuitive the Unity editor is if you have used Unity before, and how engine editors mostly looked 10 years ago.

time. So, following your advice, I'm just not going to mention the engine, I'm just going to say that I'm updating the game.

I'm not worried about which engine will power the game, I'm worried that I'm going to show videos and screenshots of the game in one engine, then the engine would be switched and my backers would be shown screenshots and videos in a completely different engine.

Again, make sure the game looks better in the newer engine, or mention the new features / performance improvements made possible by the new engine.

An engine from 10 years ago most probably is not able to multithread at all... Unity is not top of the class here, but at least the physics are now properly multithreaded with PhysX 3.3...

10 years ago, pixel lighting and bump mapping was just starting to appear in most games.... with Unity 5, you can use GI and other modern technologies to make your game look better with just a little bit of tweaking.

You could probably upgrade the old assets to use the new PBR standart shader if you create the additional maps needed in an image editor. For non-metallic parts of the assets thats gonna be easy if you take the specular route instead of the metallicity one. Take the old spec map, create gloss and spec from it, tweak the brightness. For the metallic ones you need to add colors to the metallic parts, which is a little bit more complicated, still, the result does look spectacular if done well, so might be worth it.

Just mention the good stuff, leave out the boring technical details that consumers mostly don't care about. If somebody asks, you can still tell him what engine you switched to. If somebody is questioning the decision ("Why u not Cryengine???"), you could just respond with some clever prepared statement, and then again let the shiny before-after pics do the talking.

Really, your upgrade should give you more than enough improvements to talk about.

3 years instead of 7 sound very viable considering how good and intuitive the Unity editor is if you have used Unity before, and how engine editors mostly looked 10 years ago.

Because I use the same assets in both engines, they look the same no matter where they're placed. But once they get to be replaced, it will look much better :)

Because I use the same assets in both engines, they look the same no matter where they're placed. But once they get to be replaced, it will look much better

The asset alone is only one half of the equation. You can still use a better shader, better lighting and post effects to make the assets loke nicer than in the old engine.

Especially the lighting has come a long way since 2005 (I'm just guesstimating the age of the old engine here)... use deferred (that wasn't used a lot back then) and you can put much more lights in your scene (though you still need to find a good balance to not overburden the system)... use the new enlighten system, and the standart shader to make the assets look pbr like (you might need to improvise an additional map for that though)...

Some shaders can also add additional glitz to your assets without additonal work from your side, be it rim lighting, the mentioned pbr, or some other effects that make your assets look more "high quality".

And I would bet the old game lacked many modern post effects... no idea if your platform of choice has enough grunt for it, but with some AO, bloom, and light flares things already start to look much better with little work involved on your side (just be aware, if you want the best posteffects and light flares, you might need to spend something on the Unity asset store as the built in versions are rather crappy).