The WHAT?

Unity and Epic Games announced a partnership plan to make Fortnite creative mode stronger. It will support games made with Unity and aimed at lower-powered systems.

For Epic, it will help to gain wider audience and compete against Roblox. All the people who are not able to run heavy games will now be able to try more simple and common experiences from the same launcher.

For Unity, it will provide an additional market and going to help them to earn far beyond the subscription plan.

And Unity will bring their In-App Purchases SDK to Unreal Engine developers too. Which will make it easier to use cross-platform stores and accounts.

#Unity@GameDEV
#UnrealEngine@GameDEV
#EpicGames@GameDEV
#WTF@GameDEV

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

Each time someone says "20 000 games are being released every year on Steam", remind them: these are the games!

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

Claims UE5 game is optimized + owns a 5090... it's getting 80 FPS indoors on that setup (ignore his 472 claim on the preview).

#NVIDIA@GameDEV
#UnrealEngine@GameDEV
#Optimization@GameDEV

And the Gothic Remake is coming out in 18 hours: what do you think about it?

The art direction is very solid: dirty, dark, and grim aesthetics, a unique visuals (not even instantly giving away the Unreal Engine underneath). I like how magic looks, how old monster models were readjusted.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1297900/Gothic_1_Remake/
#RPG@GameDEV
#UnrealEngine@GameDEV

Gothic Remake launched at 60K+ CCU on Steam and over 200K viewers on Twitch (that's the third place after Casual Talks and CS2). Here's what to keep in mind from the initial user reviews:

- The game is not working well on Linux, even with your perfectly assembled gaming distro

- For some users it's not launching on Windows too. It's rather rare, but keep that in mind.

- The performance on max settings is fully relying on GPU. Even 5090 can't run ultra. And I've seen "there's no DLSS, only outdated FSR and TSR" from reviews. TSR is not bad, but it's clearly inferior.

The rest is seemingly praised: hardcore, brutal, and follows the vibe of the original game.

#RPG@GameDEV
#UnrealEngine@GameDEV

A curious physics benchmark (from here), then the person ran Unreal Chaos and it's somehow not scalable at all

#Physics@GameDEV
#Optimization@GameDEV
#Unity@GameDEV
#UnrealEngine@GameDEV