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

[Remij]

I feel like, as a consumer, it's often very difficult to get a lot of developers on board to fixing these issues, precisely because we don't have much or any insight into what's causing them.. and that's where ultimately I think I come back to the engine providers. I think it's fair to say that the only people who programmers take seriously is the opinions of other programmers. On game forums or support forums it's extremely annoying when half the battle is arguing with people who claim they don't have any issue. Specifically coming into threads to deny that your issue exists among others who, while often having good intentions.. post stupid placebo fixes. If I make a thread on Steam forums, or a support ticket and say something like "you're spawning too many actors.... yadda yadda.." they're just mostly going to ignore me.

In my eyes, there's a systemic issue in the industry where we've gone on accepting this stuff for far too long, and not enough of the right people are calling it out to where things systemically change. In my mind that's where the engine providers come in. I know they can only do so much.. but when there's as prevalent of an issue as this, is it not prudent to bring more awareness of how to do these things properly to the studios who use the engine? I thought the same thing about the shader compilation thing. How on earth was Epic not reaching out to more developers sooner and being like "hey you should do this and this to pre-compile and prevent these issues from happening."

I ultimately don't know what the developer/engine provider relationship is like.. but I feel like if I was the engine provider, I'd be reaching out far and wide and ensuring people were in the best position to see their games succeed on my engine.

 

[ILikeFeet]

South of Midnight runs on UE4, I was surprised by that. I think it's among the best in terms of graphics and they targeted 60 FPS with it on Series X, so presumably in high resolution.

It will be a nice slap in the face to low-res console ports of UE5 games.

I highly doubt there's any correlation between UE4 and high resolution and frame rate. Jedi Survivor was also UE4, for example.

nay, it's less engine and more "here are the targets we want to hit, and we are prepared to make cuts to hit them"

 

[Pjotr]

Satisfactory is also a game that has very high frame rate and uses UE. When it came out in early access they used UE4 but migrated to UE5 (they don't use nanite but have an option to use lumen which is off by default and the quality is scaled back a lot since early access) After migrating they had some minor performance problems but those were fixed at the end. So yeah you can it does not matter if you use UE4 or 5 it is all about the features you use. If you use lumen or volumetrics your frame rate will be hit hard. This is something a lot of modern UE games opt in for because it's the easiest way to get a consistent image and good lighting.
Btw: Satisfactory also let you build insanely large factories and has a large open world with very high speed travel options. So you would expect lost of stutter but haven't experience much which is pretty good of them. It does have a lot LOD pop in though, especially when traveling very high in the air as the LOD's aren't tweaked for that view angle. I would love to see DF cover that game.

 

[techuse]

Consumers are the ultimate enabler of the continuance of poorly made games. I don’t know what the refund policy is for consoles, but on PC there is no excuse given Steam’s extremely generous policy. Money is the only feedback that matters to companies.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Consumers are the ultimate enabler of the continuance of poorly made games. I don’t know what the refund policy is for consoles, but on PC there is no excuse given Steam’s extremely generous policy. Money is the only feedback that matters to companies.

I played this game for 1000 hours and it’s unacceptable!

 

[cheapchips]

Satisfactory is also a game that has very high frame rate and uses UE. When it came out in early access they used UE4 but migrated to UE5 (they don't use nanite but have an option to use lumen which is off by default and the quality is scaled back a lot since early access)

They do use nanite for cliffs. They don't use them for for the impressive factory bits, which is all just conventional LOD.

 

[DavidGraham]

This has been a very fruitful and insightful discussion indeed, thanks for all involved.

 

[QPlayer]

This makes them even more motivated to create beauty due to UE4's more limited toolset. And apparently they're doing well, South of Midnight looks pretty good. For example, seeing those detailed opponents/characters, I would simply point out that it uses Nanite, but no, it doesn't. And that's why it will probably be in high resolution with 60 FPS on console. Moreover, based on the presentation I saw, I am convinced that 10 out of 10 random gamers would easily believe that this game is using UE5.

The essence of what I am saying is that it is welcome to see high image quality on the console with 60FPS together with great graphics.

 

[Pjotr]

They do use nanite for cliffs. They don't use them for for the impressive factory bits, which is all just conventional LOD.

Oh you are right. Pretty cool, didn't catch that. I did a search and here they show it here:

Pretty cool that they only use nanite for some selected assets. Means they really did some investigation of where they would be getting a win and where not. This is something a good dev should do.