Unreal Engine 5 engineers are looking to solve the problems many modern game developers have with its engine

[Windows Central]

Failure to "precache" is catching up with game developers who don't follow basic Unreal Engine development principles.

Unreal Engine 5 engineers are looking to solve the problems many modern game developers have with its engine : Read more

 

[GraniteStateColin]

While games can have that Unreal 5 look and feel, I think for less than the cost of building and maintaining a custom engine, a dev team could sufficiently customize UE5 to still achieve a more game-specific feel. I expect we'll get this in The Witcher IV.

I'd also point to downsides beyond cost in using custom, in-house engines: e.g., the buggy launch of Cyberpunk 2077, the loading screens and on-planet world-segments in Starfield.

Lastly, as a dev-cost issue, this is related to one of my chief issues: the HUGE amount of dev effort that goes into lighting solutions. As functional ray tracing tech becomes more and more mass-market, at some point (maybe games like Indiana Jons and Doom Eternal are already there) games will be able to require RT-capable hardware and leave out the whole development phase for building the lighting components. Scenes will just be illuminated via path tracing by the local hardware.

If you combine using a standard engine (whether UE5 or something else) plus eliminating thousands of hours of custom lighting, that's a lot more time for a dev team to focus on the game. And that's the biggest win for all of us.

 

[coder0xff]

Unreal Engine or not, if you don't preload your assets then your game is going to stutter. Failing to do that has nothing to do with the choice of engine. Beliefs that it's caused by UE5 stem from a misunderstanding of how games work.

In principle, it's generally not possible for the engine to completely unburden the game developer from preloading, because it's impossible for the engine to predict all possibilities of what the game (or users, or OS) will do next. Solving that is equivalent to solving the halting function.