It's not yet a widely known thing, but one fella is making forks of Unreal Engine 4 and 5 to move away from Nanites and Lumen, but also from Chaos Physics.

Instead he brings GI library from NVIDIA (which they open sourced time ago), tessellation, PhysX (which was also open sourced), and so on.

Which unfortunately means, he works with 5.0 as the primary source and backport some features to 4.x. For example, nice animation and modelling tools are unavailable.

To use the fork you have to be in Epic Games organization on GitHub (due to how Unreal Engine is distributed). Yes, even forks are tracked by Epic.

https://x.com/theredpix

#GameEngines@GameDEV
#UnrealEngine@GameDEV

Remember Unreal Tournament? You can kinda play it for free in Unreal Engine 5.7 now!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQaLti_E_KY
#UnrealEngine@GameDEV

In most cases you better avoid making hand-painted weights for wind distribution of every single plant, dammit!

You can simply use object-space to apply gradients from the origin based on height and distance from the stem. And apply the angle of the stem. Or at worst a mask that will apply more force to leaves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8WL1Z1W4Gs
#IndieGames@GameDEV
#UnrealEngine@GameDEV
#Tutorials@GameDEV
#Blender@GameDEV

ARK: Lost Colony is seemingly the worst optimized game so far (yes, Unreal Engine 5):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R89rS3tuuRU
#UnrealEngine@GameDEV
#Optimization@GameDEV

In comparison to all the UE5 issues, here's the peak Unreal Engine 3 game.

Crazy enough, AK has been delisted on PC release due to performance issues and bugs, then fixed and re-released to become nearly unbeatable in visual fidelity.

Even now, materials and textures look better than 90% of modern games!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YicXHcJQ5Y
#UnrealEngine@GameDEV
#Optimizations@GameDEV

Bought Dead Island 2 since it is on huge sale. Big mistake and yes, I requested the refund. The visuals are blurry as hell regardless of the settings. Several steps of rendering are blurring every frame in a variety of ways. So you can't fully fix it even with engine commands.

The worst feeling with Unreal Engine game... be aware and do not buy even on sale.

#UnrealEngine@GameDEV

And despite all that, you can still make optimized and visually stunning stuff with Unreal Engine:

https://youtu.be/5bShikCSW-I
#UnrealEngine@GameDEV
#3DArt@GameDEV

Good news, everyone!

Apparently, Arc Raiders fans discovered a new performance issue in Unreal Engine: if your mouse is modern, it can run at 500, 1000, or even 2000Hz (polling rate). The input system of Unreal Engine (and some other apps and engines) go nuts if your mouse is not 250Hz. At 500+ it does some odd compensation and it makes the input inconsistent.

This adds up to extra computation of camera culling, LOD, and lighting that the engine must show and hide when you look around. And it feels as stuttering.

For some mice the setting can be found in apps, for some it's literally a button underneath. You need faster rate for competitive multiplayer, but almost no engine can really work with 2000Hz, for example. Unreal sets no limiter on the input and every USB command make it stop to receive it and review. Now imagine it has 2000 of them when the CPU is already overloaded.

#UnrealEngine@GameDEV
#Hardware@GameDEV

Universal Animation Library 2 - for Godot Unreal and Unity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Hd5nH122OE
#Free@GameDEV
#GodotEngine@GameDEV
#Unity@GameDEV
#UnrealEngine@GameDEV