[Cpoll]

> Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel.

I think this is a bit of a myth. Unreal gets this criticism a lot, but it's usually because many studios choose to stick close to the rendering defaults, which does lead to a certain look.

To that point, it's probably a lot cheaper to configure Unreal or Unity into a unique "grain" than it is to develop your own engine. It's also possible to use custom physics instead of those built into the engine.

[willis936]

I can tell you that the fact that id tech 6 engine games look as good as they do and pump out 200+ fps is pretty novel in a way that the massive epic games and their flagship UE5 (and no painstakingly optimized case studies one may conjure) come close to matching even a decade on. The reward for lapping the entire industry? Early retirement.

[ahartmetz]

I have also been very impressed by the performance and fluidity of Doom and Doom Eternal. Even when playing from a HDD (on a computer made from leftover parts), when high res textures and geometry didn't load fast enough, the engine just showed a low res version before smoothly blending to higher res without ever stuttering. It's a minor miracle how well these games run, even on GPUs 2-3 tiers lower than most others require.

[midnightclubbed]

id tech is probably the last engine that used a signature game to showcase the engine to licensees. The business model of idTech, Unreal Engine, and Crytech used to be 'make amazing looking game that sells the engine to licensees'. The problem with that model was you got a cut of the game code for whatever the 'amazing looking' game was and told to figure it out. If you wanted to make a Gears of War clone then Unreal Engine 3 was perfect... for every other game genre you had to rewrite and implement huge chunks of code.

Unreal Engine managed to evolve and expand the engine to the point where it is somewhat game agnostic, crytech became lumberyard under Amazon and died, idTech became the engine solely for iD games (ie the same business model as every other game or publisher custom engine).

iD tech's rendering pipeline is focussed on the one AA game iD are publishing that year and making that one game run efficiently and beautifully on mid-high end PC and current consoles. UE5 is focussed on providing tools for anyone to (relatively) easily make good looking games and applications that can be published to a wide range of devices.

[danbolt]

I think the big reason they get such good framerates is their conservatism with shader counts. A staff member mentions that in an interview with DigitalFoundry for Doom: The Dark Ages. I wonder if their in-house technology made such restraint easier.

Compared to other engines, making a new material asset is easy for someone less technical to do willy-nilly.

[midnightclubbed]

For sure, if you restrict what can (and can't) be done in shaders you can optimize buffer layouts and rendering passes, not allow things that explode shader permutations/switching or explode shader instruction count and kill occupancy.

The flip side is the artists loose control and cannot author custom materials.

[flohofwoe]

> The flip side is the artists loose control and cannot author custom materials.

...which is a good thing tbh. No game needs hundreds or thousands of custom materials.

[cyber_kinetist]

I think it can actually be a bit better in terms of artistic consistency to have a fixed set of materials you can work with in a given game. Very important if you want any sort of stylized rendering!

[WillPostForFood]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_6#Games_using_id_Tech_...

It may have been great, and lapped the entire industry, but it wasn't getting used very much, even internally at Microsoft. So how much value was really bringing?

[canelonesdeverd]

"How much value can this bring?" Is the question that the incompetents at microslop needed to ask themselves before absorbing half the industry, not the smug justification for killing great tech after failing to capitalize on it. Specially when it brought great value to the industry for decades.

[NooneAtAll3]

> usually because many studios choose to stick close to the rendering defaults, which does lead to a certain look

that's exactly the argument?

you can do anything if you put enough effort in - but effort is finite, so in aggregate the distribution will cluster around the defaults

[superxpro12]

I can pick out a creation engine game from a mile away. Engine "Grain" is a real phenomenon. Same for UE5. There's just something about the lighting and the FPS 'feel' that is a dead giveaway.

[RajT88]

Can you pick it out of films and TV shows?

(Not being snarky - legit question)

[maxsilver]

Sometimes yes absolutely.

Netflix shows often have a "house look" to them, because they enforce specific camera requirements and have a standardized / commonly-reused lighting setup -

https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360...

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a61878509/netflix-s...

---

Marvel movies often reuse a particular pattern of color grading, that can give them a sort of 'similar grain' (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpWYtXtmEFQ )

[dzonga]

yeah Netflix easy to tell & some documentaries.

hell most of these you can even guess the type of camera used even if you're a non pro.

[wisty]

I think they mean the use of UE5 in movies.

[slopinthebag]

Non-realtime use cases for UE5 have much more generous performance constraints, and so the giveaways of UE5 are less apparent. Eg. raytracing instead of lumen.

[tadfisher]

Very few projects change the default diffuse lighting algorithm for raster graphics in UE, which is Lambert shading. It has a particular "look" that reminds me of really early use of graphics shaders in games [0].

0: https://agraphicsguynotes.com/posts/physically_based_shading...

[tmtvl]

I thought they meant 'can you pick out a Creation Engine game when it appears in a movie or show', though on second thought your idea seems more likely.

[extraduder_ire]

Is UE5 used in many without post processing or other VFX on top?

As far as I know, the heaviest use of it is driving lighting volumes which by their nature are hard to notice fine details in.

[kranke155]

A24 enforces a list of cinematographers you have to work with I believe.

Netflix enforces time-budget-nr of episodes per season and HDR tech spec requirements that seems to have lead to the single most recognisable “house style” in modern studios (a mix of tech specs and limited budgets I think).

So yes it’s possible.

[zetanor]

There's only so many built-in and drop-in components available for the big engines; player movement, physics, render pipeline plumbing, UI frameworks, user settings, etc. You definitively do notice these things, if you care. It doesn't help that many devs (even AAA) keep bad defaults, so a huge chunk of Unreal games release with a comically-bad, laggy motion blur turned on.

Someone certainly could painstakingly replicate each badness of Unreal in Unity (and vice-versa), but until then, UE and Unity games often do feel like UE and Unity games. It's also rare to play a UE game that feels good and polished.

[maccard]

AAA dev here - movemen, physics UI frameworks are infinitely customisable in Unreal. It’s all about how much time you spend on them.

[klik99]

Also AAA dev, this is true but also the original comment about “engine feel” still holds, since the whole point is studios are trying to spend less time engine wrangling, and keep to more “the Unreal way”. I’ve noticed over the last 15 years AAA studios do less custom c++ and have converted legacy home built systems to use unreal built ins more and more. It happened slowly so I didn’t notice it but in retrospect it’s really obvious.

[maccard]

There’s definitely some hallmarks (right click on a text box in any unreal game and I’d say there’s a 90% chance of you getting a raw slate paste action menu) - but I don’t think that defines the engine.

I think working around shader compiles is really tough in Unreal and you’ll struggle to get rid of the stutters even if you do everything you can there. But two games using chaos, UMG, niagara, GAS, and Mover can look and feel night and day different as long as that effort is put in. But it’s easy to not put that in.

> I’ve noticed AAA studios do less custom c++

Yeah - and I do think this is sad. You can take your custom C++ libraries and bolt them onto unreal quite easily, and it’s not an awful amount of work to expose an Unreal friendly API to it. 13 years ago I was tasked with replacing physx in Unreal, I can’t see (m)any studios wanting to spend 6 months on that endeavour these days.

[andyfilms1]

And therein lies the rub. Unreal 5 is massive and complex, and there comes a point where it takes longer to understand how to layer on your own customizations than just to start from scratch. Especially for indie developers.

I wanted to make a little editor utility (the UE editor is built in UE) that changed the way viewport selection was handled. I think I got to 5 layers of abstraction before I gave up. 5 layers, for a left-click object select.

[maccard]

I mean, it is and it isn’t. You picked hard mode, and Unreal’s abstractions are not always great - some things are abstracted to hell and back, others are literally hard coded and impossible to modify (hello CMC). But changing the character movement using CMC (or mover if you want), is very doable with a 30 minute YouTube video. It’s also going to be way, way less work than throwing everything out and starting from scratch. There’s always the option of implementing your own movement on the character instead of using Unreal’s.

[midnightclubbed]

This 100x.

People like to complain about the time it takes to ship AAA games and how huge the budgets have gotten... and then complain that the UE5 games all look the same. You either use some amount of systems 'out of the box' or customize/rewrite everything and burn $$$.

[zetanor]

It's plainly ridiculous that tens of millions of dollars can flow into a game project without anyone in charge ever caring about questions like "does it feel good to walk around in?", "does it default to having a nauseating motion blur filter straight out of Overgrowth (2010)?", "does it run at 40 FPS with minimum graphical settings on a $2000 PC if I turn DLSS off?" or even just "is this fun? challenging? interesting in any other way?"

I open Microsoft Office on the web and the page reloads three times before showing me a list of files, then I open a document and it loads for 5 or 10 seconds, constantly reflowing, before eventually the entire page reloads again and eventually stabilizes, finally allowing me to browse and edit. After all of this, everything besides collaboration manages to function worse than what we had in Office 2003 two decades ago. This happened to all of software, not just Office. It happened to games, too. Delayed, over budget, underdelivered. No thanks.

[maccard]

> It's plainly ridiculous that tens of millions of dollars can flow into a game project without anyone in charge ever caring about questions like

You ask fair questions, but they're clearly loaded. Games are like any other project, and the desired scope for games has gotten enormous. If you don’t like those games there’s more indie and AA titles being released these days than there were AAA titles 25 years ago. An awful lot of that is down to Unity and Unreal.

> does it feel good to walk around in?

This isn’t a priority for every game. A bunch of the most beloved games have absolutely awful movement mechanics. It’s very often a deliberate choice to _not_ make player movement feel like either Titanfall or TLOU (partially because it’s an incredible amount of work to do that). Some really good examples are Witcher 3, RDR2, shadow of the colossus, the entire fromsoft collection. (And notice none of those are Unreal!)

> does it default to having a nauseating motion blur filter

Motion blur is super divisive. Anecdotally what I’ve seen is that most people just don’t care and there’s a very vocal minority who disable it. We had telemetry on a previous game and the number of people who opted out was minuscule. We gave an option for on/off on first launch of the game. It helps when frame rates are teetering on the edge of our budget which is often why we enable it.

> does it run at 40 FPS with minimum graphical settings on a $2000

What games do you have in mind there?

> even just "is this fun? challenging? interesting in any other way?"

This isn’t fair. Any game I’ve worked on has had the majority of the team playing every week, and the gameplay and design teams playing more often than that. You may not like the game, and that’s fine, and some games might be more vanilla than your liking, but those games are wildly popular. Personally - I think the praise Nintendo get for a simple platformer (which has excellent controls, admittedly) is way overblown, and people are willing to overlook that they’ve been shipping the same game for 20 years and charging more than most AAA games during that time frame. I also think BOTW and TOTK are wildly overrated - they’re padded out, clunky, with some of the worst mechanics in games (weapon stamina) on undercooked hardware.

But that doesn’t mean that other people can’t enjoy them.

[flohofwoe]

The whole point of using an off-the-shelf engine is to not spend time on such things though ;)

[maccard]

Well no, it’s to not have to write asset import pipeline, renderer,UI toolkit, input handling, memory management, serialization, physics, ai, networking, streaming, etc etc.

[torginus]

Yeah but afair UE5 Nanite + Lumen + Megalights + whatever is meant to work together, you can't just replace or turn off one of them without it affecting the others.

So your choices are to tweak the defaults (which are not bad, but generic and the same as everybody else's), or rebuild the whole renderer (like ARC raiders did for example)

[teamonkey]

You can mix and match to some extent, though Nanite, Lumen and Megalights are intended to work together. Megalights really needs Lumen, and Lumen works best with Nanite.

There’s the whole forward renderer path you can use instead, which works well on lighter hardware. Or you can use baked lighting instead of Lumen, and some people have created other realtime GI systems as plugins.

You can’t really change the material-shader pipeline though without overhauling the entire engine.

There are also a ton of parameters and configuration options you can change. These can be quite obscure and this is where small studios struggle.

[maccard]

You don’t need to flat out replace the render pipeline to get a wildly different look, a single new native render pass is very achievable (and if you have the skills to write your own renderer you absolutely have the skills to modify Unreal’s)

[teamonkey]

A unique look is 99% art direction.

[npinsker]

Also, studios with their own engine may release one or two fresh-feeling games, but across repeated releases, a custom engine is going to become strangling and repetitive way faster than any off-the-shelf option.

[beAbU]

Game engines most certainly have a stank to them that makes it easy(ish) to identity.

[pdpi]

In the photography world, there's a similar story around the colour you get from straight-out-of-camera jpegs.

Unless you shoot Fuji (where their absolutely incredible film emulation engine is one of the big differentiators), most serious-ish photographers shoot raw rather than jpeg, and do their own processing after, so the sooc jpeg look is largely irrelevant.

[AussieWog93]

If anyone wants a concrete example of this, Pikmin 4 uses Unreal!

[expedition32]

So does Ace Combat 7. Not exactly an FPS.

[hluska]

So it’s a myth but there’s a good reason to believe it happens?

[gjvc]

you are talking absolute shit