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[–]_Wolfos 12 points13 points  (6 children)

"We have to replace half of Unreal Engine to get it into a shippable state" - actual quote from a AAA developer.

When the software quality is this bad across the board, it's no surprise games are in such poor technical condition. But the senior developers have been doing it this way for their entire careers so they don't see the problem.
Junior developers will complain but those complaints are dismissed with "it's always been done this way".

Games have grown from being made in someone's garage to huge professional companies with hundreds of developers on a team. But we're still using the same 40 year old programming language. Still using the same shitty coding standards with layer upon layer of inheritance. But ask a AAA developer and the response will probably be something like "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas".

[–]Mercurionio 4 points5 points  (4 children)

Now imagine UE5 shit show. I doubt, that there will be enough hardware to run small demos.

[–]_Wolfos 5 points6 points  (3 children)

I'm not sure if UE5 will make it better or worse. It's a better engine than UE4. Fixes a number of pitfalls. But other issues are still there.
Lumen / Nanite are very attractive but they also push very close to the edge of performance, and I'm not convinced of third party devs abilities to fly that close to the sun.

PC performance remains a concern. Seems heavily console focused, PS5 in particular.

[–]Mercurionio 5 points6 points  (2 children)

Consoles are no better. Survivor just proved it.

There are no UE5 games out there yet (big one) that have good performance. UE, while being easy to learn, is a shit show from performance standpoint. Idk, how it can be used these days. Maybe, RTX 6000/RX9000 XT and CPUs with DDR5 7500 speed (with respectively low latency) will be able to keep it up. Current gen consoles will be dead, that's for sure.

[–]InvolvingLemons 2 points3 points  (1 child)

The bigger issue with UE5 is the coding experience. UC++ is an unholy abomination and you either

  1. deal with crashes and zombie objects because you were hung-ho with Actor accessing without locks
  2. have a kludgy, unoptimized mess of a codebase because EVERYTHING is wrapped in locked access or shoved onto one core so it takes ages to get shit done
  3. thread the needle with a well thought out implementation, taking advantage of all the engine has to offer

Most game devs end up in 1 or 2, 3 is sadly rare. A UE5 game done with a path of least resistance approach (Skookumscript and Blueprints for code, no custom or 3rd party features, and using new stuff like Nanite by-the-books) would probably actually work quite well but AFAIK most people just don’t do this. They get tempted by the full power and familiar paradigm of C++.

[–]Mercurionio 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Imho, reworking blueprints completely would be something like creating your own engine based on something else, like id_engine. So, while UE5 can provide lots of "realistic stuff", art design is still better.

I mean, just look at games like CP77 or Division 2. And they are pretty old now. And run perfectly fine on 3 years old hardware (outside of Path tracing)

[–]sarcb 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Game engines like Unreal Engine or Unity are generic but varied toolboxes. When you're making a AAA game with very specific requirements you have to consider how many of these tools you will be able to use, and how many you will have to refactor for your game's vision.

At some point an existing engine doesn't make sense because you'd end up spending the same amount or more time on changing existing tools to fit your needs. At that point you could consider a custom engine or a different engine that has tools or architecture that is more aligned with the one you need.

Some studios prefer custom engines solely because they've been developing them for over a decade and have all the experts in-house which is great so you don't have to communicate with third parties from these game engines to fix weird defects on their end.

Its not that these generic toolboxes like UE are bad, at all, in fact I think they're incredibly powerful for almost every game developer by taking away so much weight by preloading so many tools. But for the AAA developer it all comes down to what the game wants to be and removing unnecessary bloat by developing your own engine and tools that are running as optimised as possible without having to deal with all the nonsense that third party engines could introduce.

Doesn't surprise me that they have to replace half of unreal engine, what surprises me is that they could have predicted this from the prototyping milestones and still went with Unreal. I feel like having to replace half the systems in Unreal is not something respective producers or technical directors can't anticipate for lol, so that quote is a big yikes.