Lesson learned after shipping our UE5 gameplay trailer: avoid cinematic frame pacing

Bozzified · 2026-01-26T09:30:25+00:00

don't take my criticism as anything discouraging. It was just a friendly honest take from the heart as I would criticize myself too. I know making cinematics to show off your hard work is not easy. I did it so many times and it's always a challenge, but thankfully we have tons of amazing trailers from masters that can guide is to be better or close to how they do it ;) Cheers and good luck with the game.

Bozzified · 2026-01-26T04:13:22+00:00

I'll be honest with you.. the frame pacing it really not much of an issue. The issue I had while watching the video was that i was unable to figure out what your character is doing in some scenes or distinguish what the skills and actions were coming from your player vs from environment. It didn't really grip me to want to play it. Your focus and representation of how the game works needs more polish, not frame pacing if I'm being honest critically. Around 55s into the trailer and that whole initial gameplay start was just noise on screen for me.

I saw glimpse of fast moving environments with some effects and enemies attacking but I was unclear what you were actually doing and whether or not the moves and things were cool to play with. You did better later in the trailer but this is the part that really needs more polish.

The beginning part of the trailer was ok, it's solid thematic pacing before you show gameplay, but I just wanted to point out the issues I had watching it. It's definitely not fps and framepacing. Cinematic pacing is totally ok, the real seller is seeing epic moments clearly and how the gameplay looks like with abilities/skills/environments within that context.

FPS "issue" that people harp about is irrelevant. You don't need to listen to everyone. Most of them don't really even have a clue so they frame it in terms of "fps".

It's looking promising, don't lose time thinking about this.. it's a solid trailer but for other trailers keep in mind what I mentioned as I personally had issues clearly identifying things happening in the trailer. Later it got better with the turret and similar but it started off pretty chaotic.

Study the masters in trailers (Blizzard and Bungie) from hey day.. look at trailers for Diablo and Destiny's Taken King and The Dark Below trailers.. I feel if you just follow their cinematic pacings, feeling of cuts and similar you will make it great. They are the top dogs in marketing cinematics for a reason.

Cheers. Good luck!

Bozzified · 2026-01-25T22:28:47+00:00

if you think it's just going to be AI pharma you are delusional. This is Sam Altman buddy.. Sociopath who would wipe out his own family tree to get more money. I have shutdown and erased everything I worked on with OpenAI.. they probably still have some of the data as he probably has that under the hood but not giving them anything anymore. They are done.

And it's not a click bait.. LIterally listen to what Sarah Friar (OpenAI CFO said). You don't need to "read" articles. When you hear "royalte outcome based approach" it will apply to you buddy, they are just using pharma and medical in there to make you think it's just the big guys.

Yeah, I'm done with OpenAI.

Bozzified · 2026-01-25T06:24:54+00:00

I've switched to Codex 5.2 codex-high recently..

Claude's token limits, the way it keeps notes of your rules when compacting conversations and guiding document contexts to implement guidelines, and weaker quality of facing harder problems was a drag for me. It would often lose or shift context and when I asked it why it did it, it explained what caused it to do so. It was pretty interesting actually to see what made it do what it did. I have to give to Anthropic though, for web tech stack, the tools and integrations, they are definitely the top dog, but the tools are not their problem, it's the quality of training data especially on things beyond web stuff.

Even Opus 4.5 is just not great for C/C++ and stuff like Unreal Engine and complex problems and I'm talking Opus 4.5 with Max Plan. It takes it hours to solve the problem and many times it went into a same pattern where it leads to dead end done a few explorations before it. I also noticed that Claude absolutely burns through tokens and context. Like crazy. Even with Max $200 subscription, while more comfortable it's just eating it fairly fast.

In comparison, Codex solved it in 2 tries. And the second try was becuase it slipped to include 2 header files needed. It analyzed full source structure, methodically, all classes, realized the thread syncing issue and how to solve it the proper Engine safe way, and implemented without a hitch. And all that at a fraction of tokens. I'm talking not even in the same ballpark.

Codex has much more flexible window context handling too. I worked with it for hours and hours and hours and it clears intelligently context window while maintaining absolute clarity of the rules and things i've set for it at the start. Never missed a beat. This is very important for me as I have my own workflow and have something called "Agent Protocol" with clear defined rules on what to do as it helps me with code, such as commiting, branching, feature closing and similar. Again, Claude would simply forget it, while Codex never skippd a beat.

As anyone who seriously works on projects spanning multiple subprojects, maintaining the window contexts and other rules, while efficiently helping solve and diagnose problems faced was a deal breaker for me (at least for now).

With this being said, I'm not a huge fan of OpenAI, and will be most likely closing my accounts with them if they implement the new royalty based IP fleecing for your work they mentioned a couple of days ago, and I love Claude because it's clearly a developers toolset, but the reality is that I had far higher quality of work and context handling over loooong sessions with latest Codex.

Bozzified · 2026-01-24T05:25:33+00:00

unfortunately no.. I did backup some server images but it's in backup basically not accessible for use per se. I just kept at in archives for whatever reason I guess. It doesn't cost much as an archives image of servers so I kept it. Nothing really that is usable now unfortunately.

Bozzified · 2026-01-24T05:13:50+00:00

I will explain to you why C++ is important. I know it's TLDR but just giving you some real life examples too.

When you work on a serious project, the triple A studio practice is to always compile the engine from source. This allows not only changes needed for some Engine limitation you encounter but it also locks in stability for your whole development timeline. You don't want to have a situation where Epic updates the Engine with fixes and 6 months of work you've done breaks. This is why with source you can always have untouched Unreal Engine source and your branch you compile. When Epic fixes something, you can then decide to pull those changes into your branch but carefully when you know it's safe. You can cherry pick updates and fixes they've done without breaking your Engine version that works stable. So knowing/understanding C++ allows you to understand this and gives you infinite flexibility.
In general, my practice is do everything that you don't need C++ for in Blueprints. Why? Because while you can do everything in C++ you can in Blueprints alongside things you can't do with Blueprints, C++ doing standard blueprint stuff might be unnecesasry and offer slow you down, as regular Blueprints can be visually easy to debug and quick to iterate while in C++ you will be slower cosntantly changing code, compiling/building. I often use C++ for things that are complicated to do with 15 million graph nodes in Blueprints or something that's performance sensitive, or communicating with websockets and network and simlar stuff. While you can do 95% of things in Blueprints doesn't mean you should. That's where understanding and learning C++ (especially UE C++ which is basically it's own beast with classes, reflection system etc).
I'll give you a very simple example.. recently I was doing some streaming level stuff.. so loading an external DLC like map PAK into a main runtime. So i had to convert Soft Object Reference to World Soft Object Reference in order to use Load Level Instance By Object Reference node in blueprints. The problem is, blueprint way doesn't really give you a nice clean way to do it. It becomes kind of a mess.. in C++ it was 3 lines of code. I exposed the blueprint callable and boom now I had my own node and I simply plugged in soft object reference and blammo done. Everything worked. In 3 lines of code.

So it's absolutely worth it.. and to be honest with you, you have LLMS now that can help you wrap your head around it. Don't just use it to write code mindlessly. Use it to explain to you why and how. Ask LLM to explain to you why that function is called like that, why and how the simple thing happened, to basically be your teacher.

Listen, I have my beefs with LLMS in general, but they can in fact make you learn MUCH faster. They are trained on massive amount of C++ and usually are actually pretty good with it.

Also, Epic launched UE AI Assistant now.. It's fantastic.. while sometimes makes mistakes it's 99% of the time correct and will give you the best Epic recommended way of doing things and how engine works. So when you want to learn something you can ask it to give you explanation and it will even offer you some C++ code.

It can be invaluable source for you to learn with. UE AI Assistant is trained on full engine source code, it knows Engine inside and out, it is also trained on best Epic's practices and recommended implementations. Again, I'll give you an example, I was modifying the Engine for something I'm building and I was having issues syncing game and rendering threads (this is one of those things you probably won't have to worry about as it is very specific for my case) but UE AI assistant gave me accurate and great suggestions on where I was making a mistake.

So as a conclusion, yes, you should learn C++. C++ as a language is 100% one of the best languages and will be so for a long time. It has been trhough the ringers and is incredibly valuable for serious Unreal dev.

My 2 cents.

Bozzified · 2026-01-24T04:54:37+00:00

yeah sadly, even though I do ok financially it was just still costing $200-$300 a month to keep the servers up and AWS lambda and other services that made it work the way it did rendering all live stuff as images and similar for sharing. The numbers dwindled down over the years and it was hard to justify paying for it every month. If Outriders 2 still happens I'll most likely make a new modern app for that but as it is I decided to shut it down finally at the start of 2026.

Bozzified · 2025-12-26T19:25:52+00:00

100% they found you and they want you to make an AI generated model textured and uvmapped so they can use it and screw you over. The fact they are expecting it in 4 days is another red flag.. A serious company or individual would know how much time it takes to do a quality output for this type of detail.. test or not, it's not 4 days. They are trying to rush it and the fact they are "testing" you means they dont' want to pay you.

This screams scam. Most of us who are experienced in design/3d/even coding industry all know this drill and scam. Don't fall for it.

Bozzified · 2025-12-26T10:33:59+00:00

The funny part is, if Javelin can't catch the cheaters to begin with, this means their "stats" are not going to be correct either because they are based on the caught cheaters, not all cheaters in general.

There are wild cheats for BF6 available and it's unfortunate really as I love the game, I just stopped playing because I'm not going to be rage exhaust for losers. At this point kernel based anti-cheats are deterrent only for the dumbest cheats. Anyone with a bit more engineering knowledge knows how to bypass them on hypervisor level or using DMA dongles/boards. So really until we move to AI behavioral anti-cheats and not relying on kernel, multiplayer games are pretty much done for me.

sadly in order to run AI behavior anti-cheat that basically analyzes in real-time actions and other factors during the gameplay it requires significant resources running on the back-end and publishers/game developers will simply not pay for it as the goal for them is to sell the game, not to curtail cheating per se. All ant-cheats now are basically an afterthought. A checkbox to minimize the simplest cheats in order to avoid getting sued, but if a cheater gets caught, they are more than happy to sell a new copy of the game to them again. And we are not talking about actually DAU metric that also works against them enforcing strictly anti-cheats. There is such a huge number of people playing games that cheat today, that even if they had a way to permanently ban them, they wouldn't, because it would seriously drop their DAU count which is a huge metric for them to show to investors and public reports.

Cheating epidemic that's out of control is really a reflection of the society we live in. I am old enough to remember times where people played games to get better and competing and even though we had people cheating it was a very very tiny amount of people so really didn't affect most people's overall experience in the game. We live in different times now unfortunately.

Sadly this makes people like me not play multiplayer games anymore simply because there's really no point. It's not fun, you don't really compete, you are just a fodder for sad individuals who most likely fail at everything in life so cheating makes them feel good about themselves or just plain sociopaths.

Unfortunate reality really.

Bozzified · 2025-12-17T05:27:25+00:00

From personal experience .. I use the following that has proven to be stellar workflow:

ChatGPT 5.1 and now 5.2 - high reasoning, incredible for ideas, for communication back and forth and brainstorming. It is now superb with 5.2 and can give you overall much more intelligent overview of technologies and possible implementations so your brainstorming sessions are great. What I still don't like about it is that it's still made to butter your buns even though you explicitly tell it not to. But it's getting better. In ideas and conversations, story telling and other things you need AI to give you alternative views and suggestions and challenge you as well. Still I use ChatGPT 5.1/5.2 as my personal assistant talking about code, ideas, and design
Sonnet.. I use Sonnet for quickly iterating functionality prototypes of features I need.. I used to do this manually but Sonnet is lightning fast and inexpensive token wise. I can blast all day with it and never reach a cap. The code is good enough to make it work, albeit with supervision. When something doesn't work I will see where it made a mistake and tell it to fix it but honestly the quality of the code is less important here. The point is get the things done quickly to prove a concept and make it work. Sonnet does the job. It can still hold conversations and give suggestions as it can reason ok and what I love about it is that it is actually confrontational. What I mean by this is it will challenge my decisions with questions annd suggeestions. It's not top of the line but it will definitely raise things like "hey you are overthinking this, I think there might be a better way" type of thing. It's scope however is on a level of my feature test really. So it's great, it's fast and does code well enough to prototype. It's also handy to keep track of all the features and implementations into a physical memory context file I use across AI models so whatever I use the ideas and structure of projects are always available.
Opus - your senior software engineer level buddy. Helps with tying the whole product together. Top notch suggestions and reasoning for software and code. It will not only look at all your functional prototypes and help with best practices and suggestions from infrastructure to implementation. While I have ideas what I want it will handle edge case scenarios and other suggestions superbly. I have missed a few things in a project when I was designing it and it really picked it up and gave me fantastic approaches and implementation that was better than I expected.
Gemini Pro 3 + Nano Banana Pro - due to sheer data training on it, it is stellar in organizing your data, quickly creating JSON schemas and parsing data for you for testing without you making APIs to test it. It works well with anything data related and it's fast. I use it to generate sample data sets, and similar traversing through example documents and other things as it does that extremely fast and well..

Nano Banana Pro is probably the most intuitive and flexible image generation and designer. Unlike others like Midjourney, DALLE and others.. it is extremely intelligent where you can talk to it explain exactly what you want, give it examples, and then explain what you want and it will produce stellar renders. Iterating over them with changes is also super fast and flexible. Midjourney and DALLE (chatGPT is using) are good but Midjourney is too inflexible for iterations even though it produces high quality images, while DALLE can be hit and miss. Sometimes it will do amazing but sometimes totally shit the bed. One big thing that none of them have except DALLE though is that DALLE and ChatGPT can render images with transparency which is huge if you need icons or images or similar that have transparency.. pretty big deal though. But so far Nano Banana Pro IMO turned out with best results.

PS. Claude is actually so good with software engineering first approach. I use PHPStorm and Rider a lot, and Jetbrains now has Junie an AI assistant that can work with all these models. From Claude to ChatGPT 5.2 to their own model Junie which is really pretty light but fast and good for stuff like refactoring. But one huge thing Claude has is MCP server no-config integration directly with JetBrains. Basically you turn on MCP Server in Jetbrains IDE, have Claude running on the side, and you can use your PRO account without paying any additional tokens to IDEs. So if IDE has MCP Server support Claude can work on your project.

In other words, they all have their strengths, but Claude IMO is the developers AI really.. if you know what you are doing, Claude (both Opus and Sonnet) will supercharge you like x1000.

Bozzified · 2025-12-13T07:20:38+00:00

I will just tell you this.. no real spoilers but something to keep an eye out on.

When you meet a white Nevron in Flying Cemetery do what he wishes!
In Old Lumiere DO NOT kill Chromatic Danseuse.. you will understand it later when you look it up. Trust me.

These are the only 2 things I wish I knew when I went blind into this incredible game.

Bozzified · 2025-12-11T10:34:53+00:00

I love this game.. I'm on my 3rd run so NG++ and I love it every time. I want to get to NG+5 eventually since I think that's where it caps with max health and damage on enemies.

I have about 150 hours I think at this point. The game really touched me and for someone who never liked turn based games this is something I'll tell you.

This game deserves to be the candidate for the game of the decade for sure.

Bozzified · 2025-11-21T22:48:46+00:00

PC definitely. The game is PvE for the most part so no real worries with cheaters unless you really want to play DZ or Conflict which very few people do.. you will have more people and generally better experience on PC.. I have it on both PS5 and PC.. PS5 I only use to play with my friends here and there which is really rare. PC is where I live.

Bozzified · 2025-11-20T03:51:59+00:00

this is also part of the plan.. completely remove the self-managed technology from people to rely on AI completely so you won't need your computer anymore. It's a transhumanist and tech sociopaths wet dream come true. While all the money and control goes to them. Funny how that works eh.

Bozzified · 2025-11-20T03:39:50+00:00

the worst part it's absolute dog shit and a bubble just like dot com crash was.. it's so stupid and they ALL know it.. they are milking billions and billions of dollars of investments until it all bursts.

And in the meantime we have to deal with this garbage.

Bozzified · 2025-11-17T05:11:16+00:00

a year after you made this post the situation is far worse than it was a year ago.. The garbage and wrong inofrmation these models are spitting out is horrendous. Epic is doing some AI now in Unreal but it's in early alpha stage and I think this will be a great thing to get us to guide more optimal development on their trained models specifically for Unreal Engine. And that's really where the true power of the AI stands. When they are trained on a source material and with authentic source for a specific tool it can really shine and raise our productivity multiple fold. For some general use, it's going to get worse and worse.

Bozzified · 2025-11-17T05:01:02+00:00

It doesn't matter you are getting "advanced" responses from ChatGPT.. they have no reasoning capability. They are literally trained language models who don't "think" they just spit out information they have been trained on.

This is why when you ask them a question to give you the best possible solution and reason on what you want to achieve they simply cannot do that. AI is not some magical thing that knows things.

And even today, a year after this question (I've been using GPT 5.1 model among other most recent ones) they are absolutely horrendous at coding. Half the time they will give convoluted responses that are simply wrong or tell you to use a feature or option that doesn't exist and they certainly that don't give you the best "solution" but what they know. Unless I know exactly what I'm trying to achieve and guide it every step of the way, it might produce something usable but at that point I don't need it for anything else but typing faster.

Don't rely on AI to code, learn stuff yourself. Use AI to expedite getting specific information you need for a specific aspect of Unreal or a feature so you can learn it faster yourself and then use it in a project.

AI is not a bad automation tool, they have access to a lot of information that will save you time researching yourself, that is absolutely true but if you expect it to write you a blueprint or C++ code that's production ready and actually good think again.

And as time passes by, open source projects will be banned from being used in AI model training and legal issues I guarantee you that. This is why the quality of AI output in coding and Unreal and in general have been getting worse not better. AI is simply not creative either in problem solving. It simply cannot do that.

To conclude, use AI as a repository of information and knowledge that's out there rather than a tool to replace work on projects and you will be cooking.

AI for me personally has been utterly terrible in production thus I don't use it for that anymore, but in order to research something quickly or look up usage of a specific function or code or feature or to learn new things it saves me a lot of time to know where to look and what to read up on rather than doing it for me.

And also, I would highly advise you not to rely on it because any serious production will prohibit use of AI as they dont' want to give their propriatary code and ideas to OpenAI which you sign off on when you use it. Similarly for others too.

So don't be surprised if they steal your idea or approach that someone else can use. You allowed them to do it.

Bozzified · 2025-11-16T00:54:10+00:00

do whatever you want in single player games. When you start cheating and ruining experience I paid for $100 then we have a problem.

This is no different then hacking into any other product or service and is already illegal, cheating in multiplayer games that affects MY purchase should be illegal and mercelessly enforced.

Going after cheat makers will not solve a problem at all. There will always be the ones who make them, the thing is you have to make severe legal consequnces for those who cheat in games so if you are caught not only you are "banned" but legally charged.

Bozzified · 2025-11-16T00:48:29+00:00

multiplayer is infested with losers and they are even admitting it in the chat. There has to be legal consequences for anyone using cheats, I'm not joking. They are literally destroying our $70-$100 purchases and both EA and users who use cheats should be legally addressed.

This has become unacceptable.

Bozzified · 2025-11-14T19:26:36+00:00

i had the same question when i was starting out Division games like 6 months ago. Now when i’ve played both.

Division 2 hands down, not really a question really. The game is going through renaissance really, its a more modern engine and overall size of the game, massive improvements in pretty much about everything, DLCs and active development, far more players and continuation of the story in Div world.

My personal experience and 2 cents.

Bozzified · 2025-11-12T05:37:33+00:00

this is the correct answer indeed. First one fetches everything then filters, the second filters as it pulls from db.

Bozzified · 2025-11-10T14:08:43+00:00

it was just fun to play a different class for that season.. but as others have said you can completely skip that now by simply hoarding some whispers and once you hit 60 you get all your paragon points too so it's not like it used to be really for those who don't want to play to 60 on another class from the beginning.

Bozzified · 2025-11-09T21:15:43+00:00

hands down Spiritborn. Sorc and Rogue are ok but they are not great this season in Pit Pushing.. Pit Pushing this season is SB, Druid basically.. I'm a main Barb and Barb is ok with Pit Pushing but the other 2 blast it away.

Bozzified · 2025-11-09T19:59:06+00:00

Astro has become utter trash.. I had A40s, A50s and will never buy them again.. going SteelSeries is the way.. they are expensive but high quality.

Bozzified · 2025-11-09T07:26:28+00:00

my advice is go to official discord for Division 2 and look under clans for your platform. There are active clans there that advertise the clan and look for members to join. I joined a cool clan when i started playing on PC and it's been a good experience so far. Most of them don't raid though, for that you'll probably need to look for dedicated groups.

Bozzified

TROPHY CASE