Thing is, only half the features actually work properly outside of a demo in UE5. If you want to use them in production, you'll have to make a lot of compromises and it all directs your game towards a template solution, in which you have very little wiggle room for innovation. In-house built engines will not go away any time soon and games like Teardown will continue to look so much more impressive than engines with marginally better looking lighting for 10 times worse performance, which in turn is necessitating the purchase of new hardware, wink wink.
I really appreciate your thoughts here ... I believe there are a lot of benefits to building your own game engine, but I'm not so sure about whether a newbie is starting on that path; it also seems to be the least financially feasible way... but what are your thoughts here?
@@ccorrales It's less about money and more about whether you have the knowledge to do it at all. It only really takes 1-2 good programmers, depending on what kind of visual and technical requirement your game has. There are 3 components to this: graphical fidelity of the game engine on a technical level, some algorithmic innovation in the game engine and expensive beautiful art assets (which the game engine has to be able to accommodate). The last one is just straight up off limits to indie devs. Some examples: Reflex Arena is a Quake clone and was made by 1 man from scratch, looks ok, but the important part is that it has flawless netcode and mapping tools which you can use collaboratively with other players within a multiplayer match. Teardown was made by one man, looks ok but has unparalleled destruction. Animal Well is a 2D pixel platformer, made by one guy, uses some interesting shaders, otherwise really basic, but it's exactly what the project needed and nothing more. The RTX mod for Quake 2 was made by one guy, makes for a neat little remaster. This is upgrading the technical graphical fidelity of the engine. Shadow Warrior 2 had a custom engine, was made by a team. On a technical level, the game engine was graphically very advanced for its time, but ironically the art assets weren't high enough quality. It also had nice sword cutting boolean operations for dismemberment. This right here is what people expect AAA devs to do, with the addition of pretty art assets, because only they have the resources to do that. The marriage of expensive graphics and innovative systems. Deep Rock Galactic, runs on modified Unreal Engine 4 (or 5?), the programmers were able to implement real-time boolean operations for map geometry ("Constructive Solid Geometry"). It's the kind of engine modification that's just barely simple enough to give the game an innovative gimmick for destruction, that's not too expensive to compute. Here you would think "why not use Chaos? it's built-in! It has to be workable!" Well, turns out it's computationally too expensive for a completely dynamic environment and is used mostly to bake animations for cinematics or specific scripted events. It's a custom solution for a highly specific use-case. AAA game devs should have no problem hiring smart programmers for their project, but ironically this is exactly where the budget cuts or creative conflicts happen, like in your video). Lastly there are devs who don't have the technical knowledge, but still want to develop a videogame. They will use Unity. It is tailored specifically for them, unlike UE, which is tailored for AAA studios. I'm working with 1 other guy on a game and we half-regret choosing UE. I mean it doesn't even have a pre-built system for a basic menu UI. Even linking 1 menu item to another menu is something you have to code yourself. In Unity you just get a tool for this. UE5 has full locomotion with distance matching and motion warping, which is something you don't get in Unity, but if you're indie-dev, you don't have the resources to make use of this anyways!
@@ccorrales I guess I could throw Hydrophobia Prophecy in there as an example of what happens when a small team with not enough resources takes way too big of a bite. It's a 3rd person action game with (at the time) relatively good graphics and revolutionary real-time fluid dynamics which are incorporated into the gameplay as well. Alas, it was too big a project for such a small team and it ended up being just a 4h long experience.
Thing is, only half the features actually work properly outside of a demo in UE5. If you want to use them in production, you'll have to make a lot of compromises and it all directs your game towards a template solution, in which you have very little wiggle room for innovation. In-house built engines will not go away any time soon and games like Teardown will continue to look so much more impressive than engines with marginally better looking lighting for 10 times worse performance, which in turn is necessitating the purchase of new hardware, wink wink.
I really appreciate your thoughts here ... I believe there are a lot of benefits to building your own game engine, but I'm not so sure about whether a newbie is starting on that path; it also seems to be the least financially feasible way... but what are your thoughts here?
@@ccorrales It's less about money and more about whether you have the knowledge to do it at all. It only really takes 1-2 good programmers, depending on what kind of visual and technical requirement your game has. There are 3 components to this: graphical fidelity of the game engine on a technical level, some algorithmic innovation in the game engine and expensive beautiful art assets (which the game engine has to be able to accommodate). The last one is just straight up off limits to indie devs. Some examples:
Reflex Arena is a Quake clone and was made by 1 man from scratch, looks ok, but the important part is that it has flawless netcode and mapping tools which you can use collaboratively with other players within a multiplayer match.
Teardown was made by one man, looks ok but has unparalleled destruction.
Animal Well is a 2D pixel platformer, made by one guy, uses some interesting shaders, otherwise really basic, but it's exactly what the project needed and nothing more.
The RTX mod for Quake 2 was made by one guy, makes for a neat little remaster. This is upgrading the technical graphical fidelity of the engine.
Shadow Warrior 2 had a custom engine, was made by a team. On a technical level, the game engine was graphically very advanced for its time, but ironically the art assets weren't high enough quality. It also had nice sword cutting boolean operations for dismemberment. This right here is what people expect AAA devs to do, with the addition of pretty art assets, because only they have the resources to do that. The marriage of expensive graphics and innovative systems.
Deep Rock Galactic, runs on modified Unreal Engine 4 (or 5?), the programmers were able to implement real-time boolean operations for map geometry ("Constructive Solid Geometry"). It's the kind of engine modification that's just barely simple enough to give the game an innovative gimmick for destruction, that's not too expensive to compute. Here you would think "why not use Chaos? it's built-in! It has to be workable!" Well, turns out it's computationally too expensive for a completely dynamic environment and is used mostly to bake animations for cinematics or specific scripted events. It's a custom solution for a highly specific use-case.
AAA game devs should have no problem hiring smart programmers for their project, but ironically this is exactly where the budget cuts or creative conflicts happen, like in your video).
Lastly there are devs who don't have the technical knowledge, but still want to develop a videogame. They will use Unity. It is tailored specifically for them, unlike UE, which is tailored for AAA studios. I'm working with 1 other guy on a game and we half-regret choosing UE. I mean it doesn't even have a pre-built system for a basic menu UI. Even linking 1 menu item to another menu is something you have to code yourself. In Unity you just get a tool for this. UE5 has full locomotion with distance matching and motion warping, which is something you don't get in Unity, but if you're indie-dev, you don't have the resources to make use of this anyways!
@@ccorrales I guess I could throw Hydrophobia Prophecy in there as an example of what happens when a small team with not enough resources takes way too big of a bite. It's a 3rd person action game with (at the time) relatively good graphics and revolutionary real-time fluid dynamics which are incorporated into the gameplay as well. Alas, it was too big a project for such a small team and it ended up being just a 4h long experience.
@@1InVader1 , impressive response, thank you... I think this topic is imperative for a video :) ....