Devs Can't Optimize: Specs for a LEGO GAME
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I know my PC isn't great, but damn if it's not barely minimum specs. Yet I can't think of any game I've tried to play that I can't get running at a fairly acceptable 1080p 60FPS.
I almost wonder what workflow they are doing in Unreal to make it such shit. I'd played around with it a decent amount, I had dumped tons of physics objects in a room with Lumen turned on and was getting 30fps on a 1660. While running around having them interact with each other. Granted almost everything I'd added to the game was either native Unreal or C++. I'm guessing they all just use blueprints. Messed with those too. Fine for simple stuff, but holy crap they get convoluted for some things.
I'd make them all develop on a crappy PC myself. That will hold them down. I've been working on a game in Godot for a while now. I'm pretty comfortable if I ever finish it the requirements will be low, because it will have never have been tested on something high spec.
I've read that one big issue is devs building stuff on what might as well be supercomputers that can run anything you throw at them, they overbuild the game because their own computer can run it just fine, hit crunch time, realize their game can't run on even a high-end PC and then try and fail at optimization. They're building games without thinking about optimization and failing at doing it when they have to right before it releases.
Part of optimization occurs at inception. Anyone can create an ugly primitive game that chokes the very best hardware available. It's not even a challenge. Optimization isn't just more efficient code. It's also designing your game to run on widely available machines.
It's also the art assets. What was that city builder game that ran like shit because the retard devs modeled all the citizens with teeth? Thousands of additional polygons, multiplied by thousands of NPCs running around. For characters that you probably couldn't even zoom in far enough to see the insides of their mouths.
Yeah. "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" is the root of all computing evil.
Meh, there's some truth to the sentiment, but it's more at the level of "not all projects need to be optimized", but when you're building something like this you go in knowing from the word "go" that you're going to need to optimize for performance. It should be getting baked into the preliminary design choices that "whatever we build, it needs to be extremely performant, so structure everything accordingly." Building and designing for that though? That requires genuine skill and intelligence, something which you're not allowed to select for anymore because you'd just get a room full of John Carmacks and that's simply too White and too male.
Another thing too, they probably don't have the mindset to think through it ever at all.
As an example, I've played around with AI-generated 3D art a lot lately, because coding is my forte, not artwork. It's surprisingly good for a lot of things. Something I was just doing, I'm designing a harbor scene, and all the little props that need to lay around, moorings, rope, a life preserver, whatever I'm just letting AI make. They can be plug and play but the AI generated assets are HUGELY unoptimized. Tiny little object that should be no more than 500 polygons is 70,000. That's a massive performance hit. I'm sure AAA studios would swear they never do that and only use the real confirmed castrated alphabet artists, but they are all lying. They are totally using AI.
If I gave a dump of my raw AI prop library to someone who doesn't understand what they are doing on a super high end development PC, they'd just dump them all in there and then at the last minute wonder why everything runs like crap. It's because every little object you have is massively un-optimized. I've been cleaning them up, but it's tedious. It's just a better workflow for me because my mind really just has no concept of how I'd get from "I need a model of an old style metal desk" to an actual model that looks any good. I'd end up with an engineering drawing.
It has to be the models being terrible. Either that or the game is loading the entire map, because idiots are making it.
Unreal I believe can stream huge maps built-in. It's really quite a nice engine. I blame a lot of the problems attributed to Unreal to the developers. There seems to just be a penchant for making the same old shiny rubber console game. Something I've noticed is every single time I use a texture, like a generic thing everyone uses, some rock, some dirt, etc., it's always a bit shiny by default. I'm using lots of little point lights, street lights, things of that nature and shiny looks so wrong. But it seems to be the default for some reason.
I really think the secret trick would be just to force developers on lower end machines. I mean I know because I'm starting so low that if I do ever finish this game that suddenly I release it and it's already good for Steam Deck or whatever. I didn't have to optimize it much because it was optimized in process. If I do something that kills performance I go fix it before it's ballooned. They will never do that though.
Nah, it's overuse of Lumen. Lumen is cpu bound so it slows everything down as the draw has to now wait even longer for the CPU each frame. Since most games are already CPU bottlenecked it just makes everything so much worse.