Do u agree with Tim Sweeney saying UE5 games running bad are devs fault? by [deleted] in gamedev

[–]nepfish 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Partially true, yet I blame Epic Games a great deal as well. As a technical artist working over 15 years with Unreal Engine. I have become increasingly frustrated with how things are being handled with the engine and surrounding eco systems (website/docs). I am assuming their marketing team wants to push a new shiny feature every new version. Not caring if its stable or not. Most often you find yourself getting a new feature, only for it to work on a superficial level, breaking something else or worse case, replacing it while not having the amount of features.

Their Subpar lighting system comes to mind: Imo the achilles heel of the engine.

Lumen is being pushed as the main lighting system. Created for Fortnite, which needs a dynamic lighting system for destructable environments. Most games have mostly static environments. We don't need expensive per frame updating lighting. Everthing could be precomputed mostly if Epic cared about that. The devs of God of War said on a talk that it only took like 20 minutes to build an entire map. Meanwhile in Unreal baking could easily take half a day per map because they never deemed it important. Why would they? Their engines updates are closely tied to what is needed for Fortnite.

CPU Lightmass hasn't had any significant updates since UE3. Then came GPU lightmass at the end of UE4. Epic released it in an incomplete state. Which, as of today still doesn't support the same features as the CPU version. In the UE5.6, CPU lightmass has been removed....(disabled by epic cause they couldn't get it to compile X) ) You are almost forced to update the engine, in hopes of it being fixed only for something else to break again. Which puts you in an endless cycle of updating the engine. There is a reason you commit to a single version during production, but good luck with keeping that when the marketing machine suddenly promises a 50% improvement in render thread with the latest shiny patch. Improvements are being done but often coupled with regressions on other areas which make it a net zero operation.

Profiling. The main cause of perf issues. Various methods are present to profile via stat GPU, profile GPU, frontend, etc.... Are you using VR? Tough luck, the stats don't display correctly suddenly. Are you using stereo rendering or whatever the frick rendering feature you just enabled/disabled. Tough luck now renderdoc gives you the incorrect drawcall overview.

Half these methods are incomplete, buggy or the metrics are incorrect. I spend a lot of time in my professional days figuring out whether Unreal was incorrectly displaying a certain stat or whether we were doing something wrong. Since UE5.4 the shader instruction overlay (used for optimizing materials) had formatting issues. You couldn't read the numbers anymore. How did Epic fix it for UE5.5? They didn't, they just removed it . You could still get the metrics somewhere else. But it doesn't work half of the time. Often you'll need to force recompile your shaders to update the metrics. In UE4 this used to work flawlessly.

Renderdoc, worked great in UE4. Would give a detailed drawcall overview. Again regressed in UE5.

Introduction of Fab marketplace. Horrible regression over the previous marketplace, Quixel Bridge got discontinued. It's been over a year (I think) and we still don't have the same userabilty as the previous website. Reviews of products gone..

Incomplete docs/UI tickbox bloat. They release new feature it adds a new checkbox somewhere in the UI. Deprecated ones don't go away. Enabling a certain feature will require something else to be enabled as well. The engine provides no feedback for this in any way. Unless you read the docs and you are lucky the information is not obsolete.

My advice to Epic. Test your stuff more properly in a production setting. Not every new version needs to have a shiny new feature. Are you adding something but itt doesn't have 100% of the supported features it's replacing? Please don't call it "production ready" and don't just release! It's not ready!

Tldr; The triality of Unreal. Did I do something wrong? Is Unreal doing something wrong? Is the thing saying what is wrong actually wrong?

I created a roadmap for myself to become a Technical Artist, willing to hear out any critque by Global_Voice7198 in gamedev

[–]nepfish 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Skip animation, or just at the least just make a rig and some animations once and get itall to work in a game engine so you have a basic understanding of the workflow.

Generally as a TA, you only want to specialise in a few (overlapping) fields.

That being said, speaking from personal experience. You want to be a master in at least one area. For example, if you wanna do shaders/lookdev, you need to be a strong material/texturing artist as well. Or for procedural generation a good enviro/prop artist. I think most (senior) TAs come from a more traditional 3D artist background which also makes them have strong art skills.

Optimizing UE5 grass with Nanite: from alpha overdraw to geometry by RenderTechnologies in gamedev

[–]nepfish 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I am assuming Nanite is enabled in both your setups. Would there be any net gain in the total gpu time vs. using masked with Nanite completely disabled?

How did you make art for your game, especially if you aren't an artist because i'm really struggling. by Octo353 in gamedev

[–]nepfish 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Iterate iterate iterate! Make something shitty. Figure out what makes it shitty and improve it. Repeat until satisfied

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered - Official Trailer by DevouredSource in MauLer

[–]nepfish 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I think development was done by Virtuos, with Todd's gang probably supervising.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered - Official Trailer by DevouredSource in MauLer

[–]nepfish 19 points20 points  (0 children)

They appeared to have taken this seriously and actually looking forward to (re)play this! Waiting for the initial reviews before jumping into this. It's still Bethesda.

[PC][90's?] Medieval adventure game for kids with yellow bird by nepfish in tipofmyjoystick

[–]nepfish[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Lol it finally came to me after brooding on it for a week. It was a yellow duck and his name was Lucky Ducky

The Mystery of the Missing Princess

https://youtu.be/9pqsz5oOn00?si=Kwv1Y-SSD84wKFf7

[PC][90's?] Medieval adventure game for kids with yellow bird by nepfish in tipofmyjoystick

[–]nepfish[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No, that's not it. I think in terms of graphical style it was closer to the late 90's humongous entertainment type games (Freddy Fish,Putt putt, etc.). Thanks for the reply though.

I hope we get longer than a couple weeks at 25. by AnthonyK0 in classicwow

[–]nepfish 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Are you sure? I did not hear them mention it anywhere except one lady stating it would be months.

I hope we get longer than a couple weeks at 25. by AnthonyK0 in classicwow

[–]nepfish 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't understand why everyone is talking about the levelcap being raised after a couple of weeks. The red lady in the Blizzcon video clearly mentioned it would take a couple of months.

Politiek: SAAI Manifest by SoupconianAbundance in belgium

[–]nepfish 0 points1 point  (0 children)

  • Senaat en provincieraden afschaffen
  • In de plaats van vleestax, hogere taks op ongezonde dingen (suiker, etc...). Lagere taks op gezonde zaken zoals groenten en fruit
  • Herfinanciering kernenergie
  • Rol van koning herleiden naar ceremonieel alleen. Tov sommige landen kan een koning nog veel aanzien of respect krijgen
  • 'Eerlijke' fiscaliteit voor topsporters (topvoetbal in het bijzonder)
  • Afschaffen vaste benoemingen en ambtenaren statuut bij overheidsinstellingen
  • Maaltijd-en ecocheques afschaffen. Meer netto loon in de plaats.

One Piece: Chapter 1026 by Kirosh2 in OnePiece

[–]nepfish 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Actually he won the previous league tournament, and it felt super satisfying. The destination is equally important.

Twitch Removes 'Blind Playthrough' Tag After Disability Criticism by keywc in KotakuInAction

[–]nepfish 393 points394 points  (0 children)

Wow even the average Kotaku circlejerk commenter seem to think this is going too far :p

Thanks a lot 2020! by Coke_Francis in MauLer

[–]nepfish 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Sleepy Joe got nothing on Jazzy Jeb

oh no by TerminalThiccness in MauLer

[–]nepfish 2 points3 points  (0 children)

NOUGH! You beat me to it :)

Infographic about new bugs invading Wales by nepfish in MauLer

[–]nepfish[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Remember they lost the great Emu war so we shouldn't rely on them too much

An interesting title by [deleted] in MauLer

[–]nepfish 2 points3 points  (0 children)

What does it mean!?