[socalgal2]

> Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel. The flat-ish shading and floaty physics of Unity is a particularly visible example of this.

Ridiculous and provably false.

It's like saying "every novel written with a typewriter tends to produce stories with a certain theme and dialog"

[kibwen]

> It's like saying "every novel written with a typewriter tends to produce stories with a certain theme and dialog"

Rather, it's like saying that every academic paper typeset in Latex using the stock Computer Modern font face gives off the same sort of vibe. That doesn't mean that every paper typeset in Latex has identical value, but academic papers aren't trying to sell themselves based on first impressions, whereas games are.

[tranceylc]

It isn’t like that, and it is true. Lots of games in a specific engine share common traits. From physics, to rendering, to more specific engine stuff (think of using the full suite of lumen/nanite/ue5 rendering whatever).

Even the character actor can sometimes feel similar. Visuals are by far the most indicative thing of an engine. Don’t forget about unreal’s awful shader stutters.

calling that ridiculous is extremely strange. Feel free to prove it false I guess?

[Jepacor]

Hi-Fi Rush and Guilty Gear Strive are both Unreal Engine games and they look nothing like a "standard Unreal look" being both highly stylised.

[throwaway17_17]

Guilty Gear and Hi-Fi Rush are both Unreal 4 games and a lot of the comments in this thread are about the Lumen+Nanite ‘grain’ that seems very present in Unreal 5.

I certainly think there is was inflection point for Unreal’s inherent complexity moving to 5 that made it exponentially more difficult to customize when compared to 4 as far as implementing highly customized renderers (in particular) and overall customization in general.

[tranceylc]

I don’t think anyone was claiming that it was impossible. Unreal is literally source-available so of course

[munificent]

When you buy a book, it doesn't include the typewriter it was written with.

[SepiaSapient]

Not to start a linguistic rabbit hole but the correct analogy would be "a certain language and social dialect tend to produce stories with a certain theme and dialog".

>Ridiculous and provably false.

If you prefer a counterexample, a couple of years ago I noticed that Apex Legends was a Source engine game without external info, and that Source version is heavily modified. Of course one can modify the provided defaults to a point that even the most no-life individual couldn't guess the engine.

I watched a cool video about the whole "engine grain" thing recently with more examples. https://youtu.be/SOwYqwsEdXc