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
Game engines are basically like a set of tools, they don’t fit every single case.
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.
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.
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…
You also some aspect of this old XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/
I’d buy it
The beauty of the RE engine is that it looks fucking spectacular while running like a dream too
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.
Yep! I remember being genuinely surprised by the amazing graphics of RE5 and DMC4 back in the day!
Who would have thought that having your own team/colleagues writing/updating their own engine would rely better results (not always) 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.
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.
Are there still old fashioned hackers that make games? Yes, but you’ll want to look into the modding scene. People have been modifying the Java bytecode /MS cli for ages for compiled functions. A lot of which is extremely technically impressive (i.e. splicing a function in realtime). It’s just that none of these devs who can do this wants to do this for a living with AAA titles. Instead, they’re doing it as a hobby with modding instead.
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
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.
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!
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)
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.
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
Optimization is extremely complex and the game engine, while factoring into the equation, doesn’t determine if something is optimized or not inherently.
