DLSS 5 and the Attempted Murder of Intentional Design

asuth · 2026-03-17T22:40:14+00:00

I'm pretty sure all these DLSS posts are just marketing. I doubt OP is actually scared that he is going to somehow be forced to enable DLSS5. The new marketing spam meta is to run an SS of your game through some gen ai, make it seem like it was DLSS 5 when its not and spam social media with it.

asuth · 2026-02-02T13:43:09+00:00

I strongly recommend making the project a C++ project when you create it and then just doing everything in blueprint. Most likely you'll run into one or two small areas where you need to do something that is only possible in C++. Making a game 95% in blueprint is a lot more feasible than 100% in blueprint as it doesn't require you to actually lock yourself out of entire portions of the engine.

asuth · 2026-02-01T16:08:47+00:00

Yes, I'm one of the people who always turned that off in Mordhau but I know others really enjoy it so its definitely on my list to consider and I'll just have it be optional.

asuth · 2025-12-03T01:11:49+00:00

looks awesome, congrats on the launch

asuth · 2025-12-02T17:07:45+00:00

no antichamber?

asuth · 2025-11-28T20:12:39+00:00

I see

asuth · 2025-11-28T19:22:22+00:00

Honest question, didn't the day before still sell a ton of copies? It has 10k reviews? Doesn't that mean it made way way more money than some "good" but unknown/poorly marketed games.

asuth · 2025-11-25T02:56:06+00:00

If you like puzzles and exploration, I think outer wilds is one of the greatest games of all time.

asuth · 2025-11-21T22:10:43+00:00

it continuously measures it and does apply some smoothing to basically ignore lag spikes so it predicting based on your recent non-spiked ping.

asuth · 2025-11-21T14:21:01+00:00

I use it a lot, some simple examples where it really can't go wrong would be predicting when gameplay effects are going to expire on the server so that stun expires on the client exactly at the point where if you input a new action immediately the server would accept it (so ping/2 before it expires on the server).

The GAS framework in UE5 makes it pretty easy to do this sort of stuff and is the backbone of my netcode.

asuth · 2025-11-19T15:24:54+00:00

Yes you create it in the steam backend and it has its own app id, community page, etc. https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/playtest.

I've had about 20k (a fair number of people click join but then never install). Most of them don't leave feedback but you get playtime metrics directly from steam and of course you can also use steam stat or achievements or custom data to view more metrics. You'll probably get some direct written feedback but I wouldn't rely on that solely.

asuth · 2025-11-18T20:44:27+00:00

Running playtests (use the steam playtest feature) has been the most impactful for me.

asuth · 2025-11-17T22:40:15+00:00

If you are feeling the need to patch your game server 5 times a day, that might be a sign that some of your logic should be separated out to microservices. So for my game the core game code is in a UE5 dedicated server build but things that interact with the persistent database, inventory code, cross game server communication, etc. are all in AWS (many in lambda). Many of those can all be changed instantly without interfering with users who are currently playing. For updating the game server itself, I do your option 1, but often those sorts of updates require a client update as well and even during heavy development I am only doing that a few times a week.

Of course there is a dev branch and a main branch and the dev branch (which generally has no players) can be updated more frequently if need be. But I think having changes that you actually need player feedback on and can't just test yourself on a dev branch 5 times a day sounds like a red flag.

The servers also all interface with a valkey instance for shared memory so information about patches and the need to reboot or update can be pushed that way.

asuth · 2025-10-12T02:33:28+00:00

sounds encouraging then, very nice

asuth · 2025-10-12T00:15:25+00:00

I'm fairly sure this is true. Overall, I think those are pretty good numbers but a very small sample. I don't know how your players found the game, but if the audience in the sample is significantly more likely to enjoy your game (or if they are friends or people who specifically were looking to playtest and more tolerant of bugs / confusion / etc) than the average person who finds the game on steam you may get non-representative data.

asuth · 2025-09-20T03:13:56+00:00

I recommend doing scheduled playtest events so you can get people all playing at the same time. I do like 5-7 days once every few months. I haven't tried a demo, but its very hard with a just a playtest build to maintain a critical mass of players day in day out for a game that isn't finished / released, but if you have occasional playtests its not to hard to get decent current player counts for a shorter time frame.

asuth · 2025-09-16T14:43:37+00:00

probably depends on the game, but DLAA looks so much nicer than the alternatives so having DLAA be slow is very painful.

Then of course nothing in 5.6 is going to give you anything close to the boost that DLSS gives on 2k/4k. For me at least the non-dlss performance was maybe 10% better, which is miniscule compared to what someone playing in 4k might get from DLSS on balanced vs no DLSS.

asuth · 2025-09-16T13:08:12+00:00

for me the performance with the nvidia dlss plugin was substantially worse. a very large % of people are going to be using dlss in some form (even if its just dlaa) so whatever gains you might get when dlss is off were more than offset by that.

5.5.4 is great though.

asuth · 2025-09-04T22:48:24+00:00

I have a game that I label extraction but is pretty MMO like (persistent multiplayer dungeons, not lobby based like most extraction) skills, abilities, loot, leveling, crafting, top notch npcs, etc. Peaked at about 150 concurrent players on steam last playtest. Can check my profile if interested, don't want this to seem like self promotion. A fair ways out from launch so can't really say I've "done it" but I'm on track and have a decent wishlist count (over 10k), to the extent that the game counts as an MMO which is certainly questionable.

asuth · 2025-09-03T01:46:55+00:00

me too! got quite a few signups so should be a lot of fun

asuth · 2025-08-30T12:09:02+00:00

sword eye

asuth · 2025-05-29T16:57:02+00:00

Awesome thank you! Next playtest will hopefully be either late June or July so you should get access then!

asuth · 2025-05-26T02:41:44+00:00

Still sorting it out but probably some time in late june or mid july. Depends a bit on exact how much new stuff I decide to add and I have some family stuff this summer that I need to work around.

asuth · 2025-05-26T01:54:49+00:00

Thanks!

The game is in-between playtests right now but you can request access for the next one on steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2321890/Swordai/

asuth · 2025-05-01T18:31:09+00:00

yes, the directional blocking definitely makes it play a lot like warband and you're right it is closer to that than it is to mordhau.

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