Nothing annoys me more as a AAA dev than weird, annoying armchair critic nerd-ass dweebs thinking we’re “lazy”. Okay, you try this shit, then. I have the UE5 editor open right now, and I’m busy squashing bugs and optimizing our game. I’ve been doing it for 18 hours a day for months, sometimes 7 days a week. This stuff is way harder than you think, even with the proper amount of time, money, staffing and expertise.
There are a lot of bold promises in Unreal Engine 5 advertisements, that get taken up by publishers and producers - and then end up in the game budgets…
And then, near the end of the project, when it turns out that performance isn’t good because the advertisement promises have been a bit too bold, there is no money for optimization left…
My comment on a different post relates to this well:
I think a lot of the plugin tooling for Unreal promotes bad practices with asset management, GPU optimization, and memory management. I’m trying to say that it allows shitty/lazy developers and asset designers to rely on over-expensive hardware to lift their unoptimized dogshit code, blueprints, models, and textures to acceptable modern fps/playability standards. This has been prevalent for a few years but it’s especially egregious now. Young designers with polygon and vertex counts that are out of control. Extraneous surfaces and naked edges. Uncompressed audio. Unbaked lighting systems. Memory leaks.
I’ve found that in my personal experience in experimenting with Unreal, the priority matches developing DNNs and parametric CAD modelling applications for my day job: effective resource, memory, and parallelism management from the outset of a project is (or should be) axiomatic.
I think Unreal 5 runs exceptionally well when that’s the case. A lot of the time, one can turn off all of the extra hardware acceleration and frame generation AI crap if your logic systems and assets are designed well.
I know this is a bit of an “old man yells at cloud” rant, but if one codes and makes models like ass, of course their game is gonna turn out like ass. And then they turn around and say “tHe EnGiNe SuCkS”.
I can’t think of a single AAA game using UE5 that requires that level of performance due to its size and complexity and doesn’t use audio middleware, which by default compresses audio when generating soundbanks. I have no idea where this myth of “everyone uses uncompressed audio” came from, but it’s annoying and wrong most of the time, as most social media misinformation is. Maybe people think there’s real-time compression of audio at runtime in shipped games? Idk, because that’s just not how anything works; audio files are usually pre-compressed into a nearly lossless audio format before the game binaries are even compiled into a .exe for distribution, and there are usually unique compression settings per-area-of-your-game to further compress less-critical audio into the smallest filesize possible.
Source: literally generating Vorbis/WEM Opus files (for Playstation) in Wwise as I type this.
Admittedly, the audio argument was based on my own hearsay and light reading about the subject (in-game audio).
I’ve never dealt with audio too much in Unreal, but it was my understanding that games began ballooning in size in the early 2010s due to shipping with uncompressed audio files. If my memory serves me, the biggest example that comes to mind was Titanfall (whether 1 or 2, I can’t recall). That of course wasn’t made in Unreal; my unfounded assumption was that it had carried over into audio systems-design Unreal 5. Clearly, I’m wrong.
My work is around DNN-powered CAD asset generation, procedurally and statically, and I do actively experiment with Unreal environments. I still stand by my stated criticisms of young developers and designers in areas related to environment logic systems and asset creation and optimization.
Its not too advanced. It encourages developers to be lazy and develop unoptimized games.
Nothing annoys me more as a AAA dev than weird, annoying armchair critic nerd-ass dweebs thinking we’re “lazy”. Okay, you try this shit, then. I have the UE5 editor open right now, and I’m busy squashing bugs and optimizing our game. I’ve been doing it for 18 hours a day for months, sometimes 7 days a week. This stuff is way harder than you think, even with the proper amount of time, money, staffing and expertise.
I would not say “lazy”.
There are a lot of bold promises in Unreal Engine 5 advertisements, that get taken up by publishers and producers - and then end up in the game budgets…
And then, near the end of the project, when it turns out that performance isn’t good because the advertisement promises have been a bit too bold, there is no money for optimization left…
Not true. It takes advantage of hardware features that are available on consoles but not on PC. That isn’t laziness.
My comment on a different post relates to this well:
I can’t think of a single AAA game using UE5 that requires that level of performance due to its size and complexity and doesn’t use audio middleware, which by default compresses audio when generating soundbanks. I have no idea where this myth of “everyone uses uncompressed audio” came from, but it’s annoying and wrong most of the time, as most social media misinformation is. Maybe people think there’s real-time compression of audio at runtime in shipped games? Idk, because that’s just not how anything works; audio files are usually pre-compressed into a nearly lossless audio format before the game binaries are even compiled into a .exe for distribution, and there are usually unique compression settings per-area-of-your-game to further compress less-critical audio into the smallest filesize possible.
Source: literally generating Vorbis/WEM Opus files (for Playstation) in Wwise as I type this.
Admittedly, the audio argument was based on my own hearsay and light reading about the subject (in-game audio).
I’ve never dealt with audio too much in Unreal, but it was my understanding that games began ballooning in size in the early 2010s due to shipping with uncompressed audio files. If my memory serves me, the biggest example that comes to mind was Titanfall (whether 1 or 2, I can’t recall). That of course wasn’t made in Unreal; my unfounded assumption was that it had carried over into audio systems-design Unreal 5. Clearly, I’m wrong.
My work is around DNN-powered CAD asset generation, procedurally and statically, and I do actively experiment with Unreal environments. I still stand by my stated criticisms of young developers and designers in areas related to environment logic systems and asset creation and optimization.
Apologies for the unnecessary audio argument.
This and DLSS.