Unreal Engine 5, [UE5 Developer Availability 2022-04-05]

[mr magoo]

Perhaps controversial for me to say.
For most of us in the world looking to solve problems, first you solve it, and if you can solve it that is the hardest part.
If your only job afterwards is to optimize and make it cheaper, that is a great problem to have.

UE in general solves a lot of problems, but ontop of all of that technology they have to solve issues, they also have one of the largest labour forces that knows how to use unreal. That's a major problem that custom engines tend to have, you can't just hire people and they can get right to work, there is a learning period that UE somewhat addresses due to it's popularity in a variety of industries and verticals.

That being said, I think that's one of the largest reasons why MS continues to put more and more of their studios on UE5, one could imagine that they spent a lot of time evaluating between UE5 vs IDTech for the next Halo. I mean, this isn't cheap either, UE has licensing fees that they don't have with IDTech which they own.

One must imagine, that they don't fear the optimization challenges that this thread continues to harp on - as much as they fear not being able to get content out in time, and I very much think that's understandable.

They will have 3 major studios (NT, Halo Studios, and Coalition) all working Unreal, their extensive knowledge of the engine runs deep. I think it would be fair to say, if they can't get performance to work, then perhaps no one other than Epic can. But MS has a pretty good track record here with UE.

I wonder if big AAA studio use ue5 and find a way to optimize issues with it are those changes / optimizations shared and back ported to UE? Or perhaps custom tweaks are so project depended that it doesn’t make sense? Perhaps they use own fork of UE but then you would miss new features introduced with official upgrades.

 

[Dominik D]

I wonder if big AAA studio use ue5 and find a way to optimize issues with it are those changes / optimizations shared and back ported to UE? Or perhaps custom tweaks are so project depended that it doesn’t make sense? Perhaps they use own fork of UE but then you would miss new features introduced with official upgrades.

Typically if studio can afford dedicated engine developer (or developers) changes that have chance of going upstream will be contributed back. It's expensive to maintain tons of engine changes for the project so there's an obvious benefit for pushing some stuff upstream. Not all studios do it (it's a culture issue) but many do. CDP RED, for instance, contributed significant changes to the UActor initialization decoupling parts of the world attachment from game thread (I think this landed in 5.4). I don't follow changes that closely but I think there was another optimization related to mesh rendering w/o the need for UMeshComponent (making part of the rendering lighter). Not sure if this landed in main or not.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

I wonder if big AAA studio use ue5 and find a way to optimize issues with it are those changes / optimizations shared and back ported to UE? Or perhaps custom tweaks are so project depended that it doesn’t make sense? Perhaps they use own fork of UE but then you would miss new features introduced with official upgrades.

I'll reiterate though that a lot of the differences between how things run on game A and B are due to the game code, the content and the engine settings. Often there are not any specific engine modifications but rather a better understanding of how to use the (many!) tools that are available in the engine efficiently.

Engine changes and improvements do sometimes come back from licensees as well, but I think folks are still too attached to this notion that "optimization" is mostly in the realm of "engine code". Specifically when it comes to stuff like animation and actor spawn/management hitches, that still is largely on the game side. Again - obviously - improvements can be made to both sides and to the methods people get steered towards, but it's worth keeping in mind.

 

[mr magoo]

I'll reiterate though that a lot of the differences between how things run on game A and B are due to the game code, the content and the engine settings. Often there are not any specific engine modifications but rather a better understanding of how to use the (many!) tools that are available in the engine efficiently.

Engine changes and improvements do sometimes come back from licensees as well, but I think folks are still too attached to this notion that "optimization" is mostly in the realm of "engine code". Specifically when it comes to stuff like animation and actor spawn/management hitches, that still is largely on the game side. Again - obviously - improvements can be made to both sides and to the methods people get steered towards, but it's worth keeping in mind.

Got it. Thanks for making this clear.

 

[raytracingfan]

I mean, this isn't cheap either, UE has licensing fees that they don't have with IDTech which they own.

CDPR has a special Unreal licensing deal with Epic. I would be surprised if Microsoft (or at least The Coalition) didn't have one as well. Whatever Microsoft is paying is likely cheaper than training costs for all those contractors Halo Studios is going through. That being said Microsoft now owns the Infinity Ward Engine too, and the amount of devs who've been trained to use that is much greater than the amount that know id Tech 7. In fact, there are more multiplayer shooter devs under the Microsoft umbrella using the IW engine than any other engine, so I wonder if it was ever considered for Halo.

 

[iroboto]

CDPR has a special Unreal licensing deal with Epic. I would be surprised if Microsoft (or at least The Coalition) didn't have one as well. Whatever Microsoft is paying is likely cheaper than training costs for all those contractors Halo Studios is going through. That being said Microsoft now owns the Infinity Ward Engine too, and the amount of devs who've been trained to use that is much greater than the amount that know id Tech 7. In fact, there are more multiplayer shooter devs under the Microsoft umbrella using the IW engine than any other engine, so I wonder if it was ever considered for Halo.

good insight, they definitely have options, so due process would have had them explore those options and they still chose UE5.

They have the talent and know how to make it work where other smaller studios would fail at being able to augment the engine to their needs.

 

[Scott_Arm]

good insight, they definitely have options, so due process would have had them explore those options and they still chose UE5.

They have the talent and know how to make it work where other smaller studios would fail at being able to augment the engine to their needs.

One of the other problems is if you made all of these microsoft games use id tech, then id tech needs to support all of them, add all of the features they want. Then it becomes a question of whether they can maintain the streamlined optimization they're known for if you're trying to get the engine to support all things well.

 

[iroboto]

One of the other problems is if you made all of these microsoft games use id tech, then id tech needs to support all of them, add all of the features they want. Then it becomes a question of whether they can maintain the streamlined optimization they're known for if you're trying to get the engine to support all things well.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is primary reason here to stick with UE5, so you definitely nailed it. Each one of their studios has different needs from UE as they all make very different games that Epic can provide (featureset wise) and the studios can customize for their performance. But it would be way too much for ID Software, or IW to do something like that. And I can only assume that some of that friction exists today with T10 and now their engine being used for Fable as opposed to just racing games.

With MS moving towards needing to build content with as few delays as possible for gamepass, while having the expectation of pushing the boundaries for graphical quality and consistently pushing that envelope with each release, and needing a large labour force to support all this content; I can't see another engine that would be suitable.

An internal engine has you building game content, the engine, as well as training up a large labour force, where if they leave, you're on the hook again to train again.
UE is the most sensible decision here for their needs.

 

[raytracingfan]

One of the other problems is if you made all of these microsoft games use id tech, then id tech needs to support all of them, add all of the features they want. Then it becomes a question of whether they can maintain the streamlined optimization they're known for if you're trying to get the engine to support all things well.

Indiana Jones is apparently using a fork of id Tech 7, Arkane used a heavily-upgraded fork of id Tech 5 for Dishonored 2 and Deathloop. So unless the changes from the forks are getting merged back into main, the studios using id Tech under the Bethesda umbrella aren't even trying to make the main id Tech engine support all their use cases anyways.

 

[DavidGraham]

Arkane used a heavily-upgraded fork of id Tech 5 for Dishonored 2 and Deathloop

Yeah, the fork is called the Void engine, there is also another fork called the Stem engine (used in Evil Within 2).

 

[Scott_Arm]

Indiana Jones is apparently using a fork of id Tech 7, Arkane used a heavily-upgraded fork of id Tech 5 for Dishonored 2 and Deathloop. So unless the changes from the forks are getting merged back into main, the studios using id Tech under the Bethesda umbrella aren't even trying to make the main id Tech engine support all their use cases anyways.

If they fork it and maintain it themselves, then I guess that's fine. That's one way to avoid the problem of feature creep and maintenance. But usually what happens is something like Frostbite, where there's a whole internal support structure around the engine. I know id software people were involved in the making of Indiana Jones, because they're the experts on the engine. Eventually you have too many customers, or you keep scaling up the engine staff to be able to support all of these customers.

 

[jlippo]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1866269800122728744

Looks like UE5 is finally getting decent transparency.

 

[gabdeg]

Seems like the latest patch fixed HWRT for Fortnite PC.

 

[DavidGraham]

Trailer for the Witcher 4 just dropped, pre-rendered in UE5 on an unannounced RTX GPU.

 

[Dampf]

Why would they mention the GPU on a pre-rendered trailer?

Would be an entirely different story it was real time. But pre-rendered the GPU doesn't matter for us at all lol.

 

[Charlietus]

Why would they mention the GPU on a pre-rendered trailer?

Would be an entirely different story it was real time. But pre-rendered the GPU doesn't matter for us at all lol.

Yeah, i mean, with enough time even a PS4 could have prerendered that

 

[Karamazov]

i remember in the 90s when my brother was letting his PC work all night to generate a few seconds Vista Pro animation.

 

[DieH@rd]

Why would they mention the GPU on a pre-rendered trailer?

Probably because they wanted to brute-force higher resolution and perfect AA for the unveil.

When we get the game, it will look the same, only for many it will be lower res and upscaled.

 

[Dominik D]

Probably because they wanted to brute-force higher resolution and perfect AA for the unveil.

UE comes with built-in feature where you can render offline whatever you need for your trailer with insane quality (known as "cinematic"). You don't need to use unannounced GPU to do that (but you need latest RTX and copious amounts of memory). Using unannounced GPU makes sense only if it comes with newer version of DLSS that buys you some quality you can't get otherwise.

 

[Bludd]

UE comes with built-in feature where you can render offline whatever you need for your trailer with insane quality (known as "cinematic"). You don't need to use unannounced GPU to do that (but you need latest RTX and copious amounts of memory). Using unannounced GPU makes sense only if it comes with newer version of DLSS that buys you some quality you can't get otherwise.

or: using an unannounced GPU for marketing purposes to get those sweet sweet nv sponsorship bucks