Just an observation on game engines

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨delitomatoes@lemm.ee⁩ to ⁨games@lemmy.world⁩

RE Engine: Monster Hunter, REMakes, DMC. All run beautifully

Idtech: Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal are super optimised on low end hardware

Then you have Unreal Engine 5 which needs top end hardware to run (Remnant 2, Lords of Fallen) and

Gamebryo/Creation which still has bugs from Morrowind in Starfield.

Not sure if related but City Skylines 2 needs several times $$ investment for slight improvements over Cities 1 on Unity

Now a splash screen either makes me smile or cringe. Just wished everything ran RE engine

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Comments

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Renacles@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Game engines are basically like a set of tools, they don’t fit every single case.

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- Carighan@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Just remember how plasticky and stiff the characters in Dragon Age Inquisition looked because of the mandate to use the Frostbite 3 engine for ~everything, no matter how unsuited it was to a high fantasy world.
  
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  - Renacles@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Exactly, engines can be as good as they get and still be the wrong fit for a game.
    
    Creation gets a lot of criticism but it’s the whole reason why Bethesda games have that unique feel to them and are as moddable as they are.
    
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EarMaster@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Lamborghini Huracan: fast and exciting Fiat Panda: outstanding fuel efficiency Trucks: lots of hauling space

Why not build trucks with the chassis of a Lamborghini and the motor of a Panda. It would solve all of our problems…

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- Goronmon@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  You also some aspect of this old XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/
  
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Tick_Dracy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Who have thought that having your own team/colleagues writing/updating their own engine would rely better results than using something made from someone else…

The problem is bigger than that. Disclaimer: generalization incoming!

Most game developers are just programmers and nothing else. They know how to write high level languages like C# well enough to write the required functions and that’s it.

Long are the days that devs would need to write their own tools and even engines to put the game running. Some (like Naughty Dog) would even hack the hardware in order to bypass limitations of it.

Yes, there were shitty games made back then , but at least the devs had my admiration. Now, not so much. But this not limited to games, Apps are the same shit. Let’s just use some Chromium framework wrapped as an app and that’s it.

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- stardreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  The problem is that hardware has come a long way and is now much harder to understand.
  
  Back in the old days you had consoles with custom MIPS processors, usually augmented with special vector ops and that was it. No out-of-order memory access, no DMA management, no GPU offloading etc.
  
  These days, you have all of that on x86 plus branch predictors, complex cache architecture with various on-chip interconnects, etc… It’s gotten so bad that most CS undergrad degrees only teach a simplified subset of actual computer architecture. How many people actually write optimized inline assembly these days? You need to be a crazy hacker to pull off what game devs in the 80-90s used to do. And crazy hackers aren’t in the game industry anymore, they get paid way better working on high performance simulation software/networking/embedded programming.
  
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- Goronmon@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  Long are the days that devs would need to write their own tools and even engines to put the game running. Some (like Naughty Dog) would even hack the hardware in order to bypass limitations of it.
  
  Re-using engines has been around for basically as long as game development has existed. This idea of some mythical age when game development was more "pure" is a fantasy. What has changed is that expectations on AAA titles has grown to the point where it's extremely difficult to roll your own engine if you are committed to many, many years of work.
  
  Not to mention, it certainly doesn't guarantee that the engine performs well. Look at Starfield or Baldur's Gate 3. Both have noticeable issues with performance, and both are built on in-house engines by their respective studios.
  
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  - scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Yeah, this guy is basically harping on the concept of re-usable code. That’s why we praise RollerCoaster Tycoon’s dev, he wrote the entire thing in assembly. Beyond that, everything since 2d has used an engine. Hell, to not use an engine would be wasteful and delay games. What, every game should rewrite an engine?
    
    Even Halo CE, 2002, used an engine. The Blam! engine. Dude’s delusional if he thinks people were drawing individual pixels on the monitor.
    
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- spacebirb@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Nah this isn’t true. If you gave the devs a free month I’m sure they could optimize the hell out of things. The issue is there are deadlines and higher priority items. You can technically play cities 2 unoptimized at a lower fps and graphics setting, you’ll have a much worse time playing it if features are incomplete and full of bugs.
  
  They simply didn’t have the time to get to optimization
  
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  - bouh@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    That’s quite true. A friend told me that the red engine from cdpr is one of the most efficient and we’ll made engine today. It didn’t surprised me because cdpr has been working on it for 2 years after cyberpunk failed to meet the technical requirements they sold it for.
    
    That’s what it takes now for an optimized engine: 2 years on a decade old engine.
    
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Paradachshund@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Optimization is extremely complex and the game engine, while factoring into the equation, doesn’t determine is something is optimized or not inherently.

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- scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Yes, this is all a horrible post, game engines can’t really be compared directly. There is no one size fits all.
  
  EA thought that and tried to apply Frostbite to their entire catalogue. What worked amazingly for Battlefield/Battlefront was a disaster for Dragon Age: Inquisition, Mass Effect Andromeda, and let’s not forget Anthem. Engine was optimized for small maps and quick gameplay, but was horrible for large open worlds and RPG elements.
  
  The reason Unreal requires such heavy hardware is because they’re trying to be a one tool fits all, but that requires making sacrifices.
  
  OP’s entire post here is incredibly naive. It’s apples to oranges.
  
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darthsid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
The beauty of the RE engine is that it looks fucking spectacular while running like a dream too

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- Tick_Dracy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  MT framework (which powered several RE’s, DMC, and other Capcom games was also a damn good engine). And Criterion’s Renderware was also an exception back in PS2 days.
  
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  - darthsid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Yep! I remember being genuinely surprised by the amazing graphics of RE5 and DMC4 back in the day!
    
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beefcat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
the games/engines you cite as being “extremely well optimized” are both a lot older than UE5 and do a lot less than some of the “less optimized” games discussed (i.e. simpler lighting, no geometry virtualization, very static environments, etc.)

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the_el_man@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Major Problems with game industry right now… Cost to make a game, and from that the repercussions if it fails.

Making an engine doesn’t happen overnight, and then you need new Devs to learn that engine throughout its lifetime. Fine for a big player, but even a large company like CDPR had issues, hence moving.

It’s a shame, but you can’t write off engines like UE. Epic and the Coalition do incredible work with it. UE5 is still VERY new. Look at Fortnite and wait for the next Gears game. Even if the game is dull I’m sure it will be a showcase for UE5.

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- Ilflish@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  The opposite is also true. You created an engine already, why do you want a new one? Just add to the existing one. Starfield is not the only industry game working on legacy engines
  
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Schaedelbach@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I always wondered on what engine the first Xenoblade Chronicles is running. Absolutely massive beautiful landscapes and it runs absolutely smooth even on the 3Ds! No pop ins either!

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- ioney@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  they made a totally new and optimized engine for those games
  
  The most difficult part of the development was getting the game’s scale to work within the new hardware. This entailed the creation of a new graphics engine with a custom visibility culling and complex level of detail systems. All of the environments were rebuilt and optimized for the new system while keeping the original aesthetic intact.
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenoblade_Chronicles_(video_game)
  
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WereCat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I’ve built this table with a saw and it’s level

I’ve built this table with an axe and it’s not level

Does that mean that saw is superior to making tables? No, I just suck with an axe and it was far easier to chop the wood than saw it.
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- Frogster8@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I would say 99.9999% of the times it’s superior to make a table with a saw instead of an axe
  
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  - WereCat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Yes. But what if most people in your team suck at using saw?
    
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doktorseven@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
All Unreal engine and Unity games run like ass. Any decent engine can create the same visuals and run at least 5x better.

I just do not bother with Unity or Unreal-based games. Absolute trash.

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