Support NeoGAF

[BlownUpRich]

For me, it was using an OLED TV. Due to OLED panels having essentially zero pixel blur, low framerate games often look extremely choppy. It requires games with well-implemented motion blur and such to counter this.

That said, I still choose quality 30fps in games that handle it well (Final Fantasy XVI, Control).

I think that 40fps in a 120hz container is the best option overall.

I have noticed when I played on OLED the 1st time, I just didn't mind it, and I like Motion blur in my games so I guess it worked best for me (and you too ), there are games with stutters & bad frame-pacing too, but people tend to lump them altogether in order to keep raising their voices to feed into this demand of "60/higher FPS or die!!"

I just don't see any justification in lowering the overall graphical quality or decreasing the overall complexity of such game all in order to chase after 60 FPS, just imagine if GTA VI has a 60 FPS option on base PS5? You immediately begin to think that it may not be a very impressive game, something had to give in order to make its world adhere to that CPU being able to simulate all that 60 times a second, and as a result, it may not be as ambitious or as advanced as I or others would've liked it to be. But hey that's me.

 

[FalconPunch]

I´m a designer, not a coder,

Then stop talking about things you don't know. Why don't you list where you work and the projects you've worked on since you're in a hurry to post your public identity on a gaming forum to win a useless argument. I can't imagine how that could possibly backfire.

 

[ScHlAuChi]

Then stop talking about things you don't know. Why don't you list where you work and the projects you've worked on since you're in a hurry to post your public identity on a gaming forum to win a useless argument. I can't imagine how that could possibly backfire.

You´re right, it is a useless argument, as winning it will not change the fact that the games industry will continue to move towards Unreal Engine, no matter how much you stomp your feet and complain how terrible it is
So ultimately it doesnt matter who I am, what I know or what I say, you believe in whatever you want to believe!

 

[bender]

You´re right, it is a useless argument, as winning it will not change the fact that the games industry will continue to move towards Unreal Engine, no matter how much you stomp your feet and complain how terrible it is
So ultimately it doesnt matter who I am, what I know or what I say, you believe in whatever you want to believe!

 

[ZehDon]

The question then becomes… Why do you know this, but the giant successful game companies don’t?

No, the question becomes: everyone from Epic to NeoGAF posters already know this. Why don't you?

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

No, the question becomes: everyone from Epic knows this.

Need to see those receipts.

 

[ZehDon]

Need to see those receipts.

This post doesn't make sense. Do you expect anyone to believe that Epic, a company who licenses their industry leading engine to industry leading developers to make large scale games for hundreds of millions in revenue every year, doesn't know that the well known games made on its well known engine are having well known and widely publicized performance issues, of which they're actively trying to resolve as demonstrated in the release notes for their engine's updates? Given the truly unbelievable nature of this presumption on your part, I'm gonna need you to go ahead and show me those receipts.

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

This post doesn't make sense. Do you expect anyone to believe that Epic, a company who licenses their industry leading engine to industry leading developers to make large scale games for hundreds of millions in revenue every year, doesn't know that the well known games made on its well known engine are having well known and widely publicized performance issues, of which they're actively trying to resolve as demonstrated in the release notes for their engine's updates? Given the truly unbelievable nature of this presumption on your part, I'm gonna need you to go ahead and show me those receipts.

Obviously every engine developer has a list of their engines shortcomings and works on that list continuously. Epic is no different than any other competent engine maker there.

My receipts for UE5 being best in class would be that numerous other large game companies (and mid size and small) seem to be using it at increased rates relative to 10 and 20 years ago. If companies like EA and PlayStation are using UE5 over proprietary engines, then it’s obviously distancing itself from other engines on the market. I doubt message board types know more than PlayStation and EA.

 

[ZehDon]

... My receipts for UE5 being best in class would be...

No, that's not what I asked for. I'd like you to provide receipts for Epic not knowing high profile games made on its engine are having high profile performance issues. All evidence to contrary - they appear to be more than well aware.

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

No, that's not what I asked for. I'd like you to provide receipts for Epic not knowing high profile games made on its engine are having high profile performance issues. All evidence to contrary - they appear to be more than well aware.

“Having issues” is such a vague, basically meaningless, statement.

All engines have issues. All I’m saying is that the most competent game developers in the world sure do like using UE5 for some reason and you’re suggestion that it’s because Epic “lied” in their sales pitch seems laughable. As if we’re the only people who understand how sales works.

 

[ZehDon]

“Having issues” is such a vague, basically meaningless, statement...

Which is why I said "high profile performance issues". And the rest of your post continues pretending I've said things I self-evidently haven't. If you're just going to ignore what I've said as an excuse to run off on your own, please don't reply to me.

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

Which is why I said "high profile performance issues". And the rest of your post continues pretending I've said things I self-evidently haven't. If you're just going to ignore what I've said as an excuse to run off on your own, please don't reply to me.

I see your point here. I confused what you said with what others said in the thread. My pushback was against the thread title (Well make sure the game companies who choose UE5 know this) and not your points. I reread our exchange and agreed with most/all of your responses. My apologies.

 

[Herr Edgy]

I mean in the end it's simple.
An engine is a toolset above all, and all engines are under performance and memory constraints. Some of them set the bar a little higher, some a little lower, but in the end you always have constraints.
What Epic can do and is doing is put the bar of perf concerns a little higher, making it harder for devs to run into issues. But if a dev isn't running into issues with their high poly trees with 4k textures, non-instanced, everywhere, guess what the dev is going to do? Put down even more trees.

When developers start pushing against those constraints, incapable or unable to work around them with their own set of constraints (deadlines, budget, ability, you name it etc.), you get issues as with STALKER 2.
This isn't going to change with any engine. In-house engines that deliver impeccable results deliver them precisely because they aren't available to the wider market. You don't see what smaller or more constrained teams would be up to with these in-house engines.

You have tight integration between game requirements & tech, and regular users of their engine can be easily directed towards best practices.
Unreal is not magic, it's just a really good engine. This means it doesn't magically solve all technical problems for you, you have to figure them out for your own case.
There is documentation available for many things, but the reality is development is messy and engines are larger than ever, supporting more features, more use cases, more platforms.
Documentation will not solve problems for you. It can merely direct you to solutions.
Then other parts are strictly undocumented and the documentation is the tribal knowledge your studio forms over years of experience.

This tribal knowledge in the end is the *main driver of expertise* of any studio. You'll never beat the experience gained through hard work.

 

[simpatico]

Depends on the lens you are looking at this from. I still don’t think that Cyberpunk was the game they set out to make, nor was their engine probably a great fit to do everything they wanted.

On top of that they have been trying to grow and they now have offices in Poland, Canada, and the US. I imagine it is difficult to help people get the most of out their proprietary engine opposed to middleware like Unreal.

I know there are plenty of people that will come out and disagree, but Unreal has been incredibly versatile compared to engines like Luminous, Creation, and Frostbite.

That’s not saying there aren’t great proprietary engines, but they are usually made and tooled for a specific type of game and they do those really well.

Look at Naughty Dog, Insomniac, Guerilla with Decima, and the types of games those teams continue to make.

RE Engine has also been getting its uses outside of Resident Evil, and while it works it hasn’t been without difficulties or drawbacks similar to EA with Frostbite.

Where are the great Unreal games showcasing this versatility? I keep reading this, first usually from devs. They say it's easier to make a bad game with Unreal. Then gamers end up copycatting and repeating it. Personally, I haven't seen any evidence for this.

 

[Clear]

Yawn. Just the usual lame-brain video.

UE is not a game, its a toolkit. And results tend not to be entirely the consequence of the tools used to get there,a and more about the worker's skills atttitudes, and intentions.

Its mainly used because being the most popular middleware engine its got the widest pool of people with experience using it.

Bespoke engines are fine if you've got the time to spend implementing comparable features, but anyone recruited in to work on it still needs to be trained-up,
and their aptitude at that might well be different from that with the things they've used previously.
Also, being bespoke, skills acquired learning it aren't always beneficial career-wise. Years of experience with tech nobody else uses isn't worth shit on a resume,
so it less easy to recruit in the first place.

PC's are not magical insofar as they don't guarantee certain results. If games are more demanding then requirements rise if you want maximum performance.
On multi-plat titles the baseline is likely to be the least capable console supported, and this last generation has seen a pretty substantial jump in baseline cpu, gpu, and I/O capability.
This translates onto PC as their capability advantage shrinking, typically being hit hardest at the lower end due to overall pipeline perf always being limited by throughput at its slowest point.

 

[64bitmodels]

The question then becomes… Why do you know this, but the giant successful game companies don’t?

being successful isn't always about competence.

 

[SF Kosmo]

Don’t blame UE. Blame publishers who can’t be bothered to invest in in-house engines and training. UE5 is merely a response to market trends. More and more devs are using it because maintaining custom engines is too costly and it takes too much time to get contractors and new employees up to speed with them. Everyone knows UE, so that saves a lot of time and money on training.

The problem is that it takes years of work to develop an engine and you can't really do dev work on a game until the engine is finished. It's hard to dedicate a team to working on an engine for years knowing you won't be able to make anything with it for a long time.

This is why CDPR moved to Unreal, because upgrading red engine and developing Cyberpunk at the same time led to all kinds of dev problems and a buggy rushed engine that seriously damaged them reputationally.

It's also why Valve didn't release anything for a lot of years, because they couldn't while their engine tech was unfinished.

Unreal might have its issues but engine development has a lot more. Also potentially more rewards, as we've mentioned with Insomniac or idTech, but it's a gamble.

 

[Wildebeest]

The question then becomes… Why do you know this, but the giant successful game companies don’t?

They probably know that UE is shit. They are motivated by the fact that their biggest cost is hiring people who can make content for them, and it is easy to find people trained in UE tools, so they have more flexibility for hiring and firing.

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

They probably know that UE is shit. They are motivated by the fact that their biggest cost is hiring people who can make content for them, and it is easy to find people trained in UE tools, so they have more flexibility for hiring and firing.

The benefits still outweigh the costs.

 

[Kazekage1981]

I like Capcom's RE engine, because they always target 60fps, but balanced with nice textures and density of foliage, NPC's, buildings etc. I think UE 5.6 should target efficiency, fps, since they have almost everything else (foliage, light, etc) just about right.

Japanese game developers always target fps, while American European target density, textures at a cost of fps. Japanese and Western developers should have a collaborative open-source agreement on an effort to create a game engine that combines the best of both worlds technical achievements.

 

[Salty Pickle]

Decima feels so underrated.

 

[Herr Edgy]

The problem is that it takes years of work to develop an engine and you can't really do dev work on a game until the engine is finished. It's hard to dedicate a team to working on an engine for years knowing you won't be able to make anything with it for a long time.

This is why CDPR moved to Unreal, because upgrading red engine and developing Cyberpunk at the same time led to all kinds of dev problems and a buggy rushed engine that seriously damaged them reputationally.

It's also why Valve didn't release anything for a lot of years, because they couldn't while their engine tech was unfinished.

Unreal might have its issues but engine development has a lot more. Also potentially more rewards, as we've mentioned with Insomniac or idTech, but it's a gamble.

The premise of what you are saying is faulty, although I overall agree with the point that moving to UE is done for multiple reasons, a big one being efficiency and getting proven tech, in the end.
Games are being developed alongside the engine. Of course there are basic systems you have to get into an engine if you start developing one from scratch, but clearly that's not what we are talking about here.
UE is being developed as we speak, as Fortnite is developed alongside it, and it's never finished. Even UE4 is not 'finished', nor is UE5, it's just continuous upgrades of varies sizes.
CDPR doesn't stop doing engine development just because they moved to Unreal. In fact CDPR is contributing to UE's engine development and Epic is supporting CDPR achieve their goals using UE.

Engine Tech is never *finished*.

 

[Phase]

If there's one thing I dislike about games released in the last few years it's the generic Unreal Engine look.

 

[simpatico]

If there's one thing I dislike about games released in the last few years it's the generic Unreal Engine look.

I think there's a feel too. A floaty sense of disconnection from the environment. Everything feels like an FPS game on Unreal, even if it's not. Halo was a game that always had great physics and a grounded feel. Really curious if they can pull that off in UE.

 

[SF Kosmo]

The premise of what you are saying is faulty, although I overall agree with the point that moving to UE is done for multiple reasons, a big one being efficiency and getting proven tech, in the end.
Games are being developed alongside the engine. Of course there are basic systems you have to get into an engine if you start developing one from scratch, but clearly that's not what we are talking about here.
UE is being developed as we speak, as Fortnite is developed alongside it, and it's never finished. Even UE4 is not 'finished', nor is UE5, it's just continuous upgrades of varies sizes.
CDPR doesn't stop doing engine development just because they moved to Unreal. In fact CDPR is contributing to UE's engine development and Epic is supporting CDPR achieve their goals using UE.

Engine Tech is never *finished*.

Obviously engines and games are a developer in tandem to SOME extent, but the amount of development requires to get a game engine to a state where dev can reasonably begin without negatively impact each other is so high now that it simply isn't feasible for a lot of devs, especially if they haven't been investing it it so far.

The companies that have decent proprietary engine tech are the ones that have been continuously developing that tech for 10+ years. Insomniac is always upgrading their engine for example but they haven't developed a new engine from scratch since they moved on from PS3 (and even then they likely carried over a lot of tools).

 

[Herr Edgy]

Obviously engines and games are a developer in tandem to SOME extent, but the amount of development requires to get a game engine to a state where dev can reasonably begin without negatively impact each other is so high now that it simply isn't feasible for a lot of devs, especially if they haven't been investing it it so far.

The companies that have decent proprietary engine tech are the ones that have been continuously developing that tech for 10+ years. Insomniac is always upgrading their engine for example but they haven't developed a new engine from scratch since they moved on from PS3 (and even then they likely carried over a lot of tools).

Yes, but we weren't talking about new engines that are built from scratch. You were talking about CDPR moving to Unreal because upgrading their engine was proving a burden. But that's not stopping on Unreal.

 

[SF Kosmo]

Yes, but we weren't talking about new engines that are built from scratch. You were talking about CDPR moving to Unreal because upgrading their engine was proving a burden. But that's not stopping on Unreal.

Cyberpunk's engine and Source 2 were pretty close to new engines though. Cyberpunk was a near total rewrite of RedEngine that led to a lot of issues doing patchwork fixes to cope with an engine that wasn't done yet.