Incline Unreal Engine 5: final nail of Unity's coffin?

[Magitex]

Goodluck convincing a programmer to use blueprints.
Getting rid of unrealscript and not replacing it with a viable alternative was a mistake.

I don't understand why the UE can't have blueprints and a script system side by side when they're identical in function. Blueprints are the primary reason I avoid the Unreal engine - they're good for high level logic (and designers), but between dragging out elements and not being able to perform basic arithmetic or functions without clicking on several different elements to input data (as well as the terrible performance of the editor!), ultimately it's just really sluggish for development. Most of my time is spent in UE is working with modding (ark, conan exiles, mechwarrior etc) and I lose enthusiasm immediately due to the pace. I envy people who can sit there and throw their time away using it.

 

[OctavianRomulus]

My specialty right now is 3D Weapons. So now I will be able to make guns in CAD software like MOI3D and directly import them in the game or perhaps in Zbrush first to bang it up a bit.

Only thing I am wondering is how we will unwrap models with so many polys.

Will Quixel replace Substance Painter as the industry standard now that Epic owns it?

 

[Semiurge]

But whether actual games look good or not really seems to depend more on the artists and modelers skills' than the engine itself

When today's game devs look like the things below, don't expect beautiful graphics regardless of their actual skills, especially when designing female characters.

Spoiler

Nope, no agenda here folks. I'll bet that if their superiors commented on their work on female characters and asked them to make them more feminine, they'd throw a fit before logging on to Tumblr to continue the tirade on toxic beauty standards. The aggressively leftardist are always "on" and that's why you can spot them so easily. This is not professionalism, not leaving your agendas at the door. It's juvenile, and frankly it does more harm than good to "the cause", lol.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

 

[DJOGamer PT]

They must be pretty confident to make the new engine already available nearly 1 year before it's official release

And it does look impressive, but honestly why even make a new engine?
I am not going to pretend I am software engineer, but if UE4 projects are not only compatible but can also be transferred to UE5 without trouble doesn't that mean that at it's core UE5 is simply a "retouched" version of UE4?
And if that's the case why not just implement these features in UE4 via updates?


Anyway...
Of all the things they showed that "Data Layers" feature seemed the most interesting.
Multiple versions of the same level cell, you could do some impressive stuff with that.
Like a open-world where the passage of time actually changed the open-world, even in something as simples as different seasons...

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Lumen, Nanite and other new stuff is more than simply a retouch. How far games will actually go to use this micropolygon magick is another question, but movie studios will love that shit.

 

[Baron Dupek]

Hooray for more empty deserts.

For 30 FPS

Poorly performing empty deserts.

 

[OctavianRomulus]

Only 100 GB? How are they able to fit in all those billions of polys in 100 GB? Sizes of high poly models can be really big.

 

[Konjad]

It's not like they are going to make another Unreal Tournament in that engine, so can't say I care.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

The requeriments of the demo are huge but in the end kinda expected...
I mean rendering a level that steches for kilometers filled with thousands of assets, each consisting of millions of polys in quality, on a mid-range machine would be a miracle.

Those 12-core requeriments make me think that perhaps Lumen is mostly tied on the CPU though...
And from the first impressions, it seems that the only aspect where Lumen performes "badly" is in reflections

But overall, aside from the star features (Lumen, Nanite and the various features surrouding open-world development) UE5 functions exactey like UE4
So really I am back to my old question. Why not simply just implement these new features and UI in UE4 via engine updates?

 

[OctavianRomulus]

Actually, 100 gigs is probably accurate. It's not a game, just a game environment. I don't want to think how much a Witcher 3-sized game will occupy. Maybe a terabyte of disk space, which is just crazy and unfeasible, unless they find some amazing optimization tricks. Oh, and that's before stuff like sound files, which are also ballooning in size.

My guess is that this will be used for hero assets and especially stuff like cliffs but for less important assets low poly models with baking might still be used.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Those requirements are for running the demo in the Editor, not running the compiled game itself. Also it's the art assets that require 100GB. The cooked game is around 25GB large.

 

[Bad Sector]

I am not going to pretend I am software engineer, but if UE4 projects are not only compatible but can also be transferred to UE5 without trouble doesn't that mean that at it's core UE5 is simply a "retouched" version of UE4?

Generally no engine is made from scratch (...when you have some other engine code lying around at least, obviously at some point some engines are being made from scratch), even UE4 can trace its lineage back to UE1 from the 90s. They do tend to bump up the version whenever they have a major change in the renderer (which is what most people notice about their engines anyway) and often tools (though the biggest change in tools were from UE3 to UE4, other changes in UE2/UE3 and now UE5 were more about cleaning up the UIs but weren't as dramatic as the UE3->UE4 changes).

Of all the things they showed that "Data Layers" feature seemed the most interesting.
Multiple versions of the same level cell, you could do some impressive stuff with that.

FWIW this is something other engines had for years, you can find it -e.g.- in REDkit in Witcher 2 (the game actually uses it for big world changes as does Witcher 3). In other engines you do not have the exact same feature but similar functionality can be achieved with, e.g. groups. I'm almost sure that in Godot you can use a node that contains overlapping structures in subnodes (e.g. for a village to be in its normal state or burned down state) where only one subnode is loaded at each time.

 

[Gerrard]

I highly doubt UE4 has anything in common with 1.

 

[Perkel]

The cooked game is around 25GB large.

The cooked game is about few seconds of walking.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

game

that word doesn't mean what you think it means

 

[Poseidon00]

I don't know. I can always tell when a game was made in Unity. They all have this plastic, artificial feel and atrocious loading times. In my opinion Unreal is much more performant and somehow games... just feel more professional?

This hasn't changed and trying to play a Unity game on a top end system is like trying to play a modern AAA game on N64 hardware.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

UE4 developers only create graphical and technical masterpieces like Bard's Tale 4 or The Outer Worlds

 

[Pound Meat]

But whether actual games look good or not really seems to depend more on the artists and modelers skills' than the engine itself

When today's game devs look like the things below, don't expect beautiful graphics regardless of their actual skills, especially when designing female characters.

She is gorgeous. What are you talking about?

 

[Tacgnol]

But whether actual games look good or not really seems to depend more on the artists and modelers skills' than the engine itself

When today's game devs look like the things below, don't expect beautiful graphics regardless of their actual skills, especially when designing female characters.

She is gorgeous. What are you talking about?

I have no idea how Zoe Quinn manages to be simultaneously overweight but also entirely assless.

Also how the fuck did she manage to seduce so many reviewers?

 

[d1r]

But whether actual games look good or not really seems to depend more on the artists and modelers skills' than the engine itself

When today's game devs look like the things below, don't expect beautiful graphics regardless of their actual skills, especially when designing female characters.

She is gorgeous. What are you talking about?

I have no idea how Zoe Quinn manages to be simultaneously overweight but also entirely assless.

Also how the fuck did she manage to seduce so many reviewers?

Low Testosterone? Those four fucktards here have less testosterone than a 80 years old man.

 

[Tacgnol]

Low Testosterone? Those four fucktards here have less testosterone than a 80 years old man.

Didn't need a chart to see that.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

I don't know. I can always tell when a game was made in Unity. They all have this plastic, artificial feel and atrocious loading times. In my opinion Unreal is much more performant and somehow games... just feel more professional?

This hasn't changed and trying to play a Unity game on a top end system is like trying to play a modern AAA game on N64 hardware.

a lot of those problems have more to do with the developer than the engine. Unity can be very snappy and clean if you avoid what 90% of the community tells you to do lol.
I'm using Unity for my game after moving away from a modified engine I was working on which wasn't working out I've since ported all my work to Unity so nothing lost. I think Unity works really well for the scope I have since I don't feel over reliance on post-processing is worth it.
The way I see it Unreal Engine is an artist lead engine (because it leverages art talent to make games better) and Unity is a programmer lead engine (because it leverages coding ability over art). They are both vastly different in what they are trying to accomplish but overlap in areas.

I do appreciate Unity's blank slate approach over Unreals "everything's included" but for a lot of people especially for new developers who don't know how to code their own tools this is a huge problem and one Unity hasn't done a lot to fix other than "buy an asset" to fix it.
I will say Unity's business model does need a lot of work there vs what Epic are doing.

Unity if in the right hands can produce fantastic games.
Unreal if in the wrong hands can produce games equally as bad as Unity shovelware.

Its all about the developer and its all about how much effort they put in.

The competition with Unreal and Unity has been a massively positive thing for the industry overall I'd prefer neither to lose and neither to win.

 

[JarlFrank]

The weirdest thing about Unity is how it makes my PC's temperature rise more than games in other engines.
Granted, my PC is a bit aged now (CPU from 2011, but the GPU is from 2019 so pretty new) but it can run most games on medium to high settings. I'm able to play Conan Exiles, Dishonored 2, Shadow of the Tomb Raider on high graphics settings and my PC stays on a reasonable temperature.
But when I play something made in Unity, even when the game's visuals are way less demanding than those AAA games mentioned before, my CPU fans go into overdrive and when I touch my case I can feel it getting warmer.
Why?
What the fuck is Unity doing?
Why does it tax my hardware more than visually more demanding games?
It makes no sense.

Noticed it the most when playing Valheim and Conan Exiles with friends. Conan Exiles runs on UE4 and has a high visual fidelity, and I can run around in that game for hours without my PC complaining. Meanwhile, when we're playing Valheim, my PC starts sounding like a jet engine and the case is getting hot to the touch after a mere 30 minutes of sailing through the ocean - for some reason the water in this game is particularly bad.

I also noticed it in Railway Empire, a tycoon game that shouldn't be very taxing at all... and yet it makes my fans go brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Even though it doesn't have anything graphically demanding about it, nor are the CPU calculations any more complex than in the strategy games I like to play (Crusader Kings, Total War).

And I've heard from others too that Unity games are unusually taxing on their hardware compared to games in other engines. What gives?

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Better art != Better games.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

What the fuck is Unity doing?

just an idea test it with the Shadows turned off and see what happens.
From a developers perspective this seems to be the main problem with Unity its inbuilt shadows are terrible and unoptimized.

The other factor for a city builder would be Monobehaviours this is why Unity recommends using DOTS/Structs instead.
Too many GameObjects with Monobehaviours can also hit hard its recommended changing those scripts to DOTS and using the burst compiler. But that's on a developer end. Problem is not a lot of developers know how to use em.