Devs Can't Optimize: Specs for a LEGO GAME
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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.