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Cake day: July 30th, 2023

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  • The problem with Unreal Engine is (and always has been) that Epic makes the engine to make the game they’re currently working on. So right now it is a Fortnite engine. Previously it was a Gears of War engine. (Maybe throw Paragon in between.) It started out as the engine for Unreal Tournament.

    So if you want to take that engine and start making a different type of game, it’s not necessarily going to have the tools you need. It’s not necessarily even going to do what you need it to do at the base engine level. Not that it couldn’t, but Epic doesn’t give a shit. So they give you all the source code and support for building your own version of the engine so you can add the features you need.

    You want to make a vast, persistent, open world with vast dungeons you can enter and explore? Yeah you’re going to have to build support for that in the engine yourself. You want to do it without loading screens? Better get deep into that engine code. You want to have vehicles or mounts? NPCs, companions, AI enemies? When they hadn’t added them to Fortnite yet, totally up to you to figure out, and probably through modifying the engine. Need to make major rendering improvements? Better dig in. Problems with the art pipeline lacking features you need

    Every time you touch engine code, that’s new tech debt. If a new version of the engine comes out, you have to integrate the changes. The longer the project goes on, the harder that becomes. Then Epic finally comes out with the feature you built yourself (say vehicles) but its only partly the way you did it. Now you’re fucked and you have to decide right there: strip out your changes, switch to theirs and redo most of your work, or, stop taking engine upgrades and integrate new features piecemeal. Now you’re in tech debt hell.

    Almost every developer starts off with saying, “we’ll use the engine as is, no engine changes allowed!” Three months later the cynical director is having a high level meeting about allowing a major feature get implemented in engine code. But it will be alright, they tell themselves. 3-5 years later they’re up to their eyeballs in tech debt of engine changes, and realizing Amazing Game 2 either needs to be built using the old version of the engine they’re stuck on from 2-4 years ago, or built from the ground up on a new version of the engine.

    I’d be thinking long and hard before switching to UE5 if I were Bethesda. And they have the advantage of having access to some of the best Unreal Engine developers in the world (Obsidian, The Coalition) now that they’re part of Microsoft. They’re also probably getting a bunch of pressure to make the change as the studios create a corps of experts.

    If I were them I would be very tempted to make the necessary changes to Creation Engine, and stay far, far away from Unreal. Sacrifice a year or two and your top engine devs to overhaul the pain points of Creation Engine, keep full control of your pipelines and versioning, and make the game you want to make, not the one Epic wants you to make. You can even make awesome DLC or a smaller sequel game on the old branched engine while the overhaul takes place, and just have a small core team working out the kinks on the new system.

    I guess my point is, tech debt is not the point, because there will always be tech debt. It’s a much bigger decision than that.







  • As a woman, I look at “Body Type A or Body Type B” and think “Well, I’m a woman, not a Body Type B, and isn’t it kinda misogynistic that the secondary option is the female one? Like A+ for Men, B- for Women?”

    This really pissed me off, I have to say. Why are you calling the “secondary” option “the female one”? To me that seems a bit presumptuous.

    If I have body type B with he/him pronouns, are you saying something about my body? Is it too “feminine” for you?

    Honestly, you seem to be looking for something to complain about. The developers have taken an extra step to try to be accommodating and inclusive and your complaining about the order the choices are listed in… Smh


  • I left a lot of options open for improving the article from my original comment, but if you want some more details:

    1. Describe the issue and what forms it comes in to clarify the issue.
    2. Do a thorough analysis of posts and comments on Reddit (and maybe some other forums, just a thought) to try to get some numbers to indicate how often it happens and what the different causes are.
    3. Maybe create a survey to try to ascertain some numbers. Reach out to a statistician for some help on how to do that.
    4. This is a “Senior Editor” at Android Central and they don’t have a single connection to an expert in phone technology. They exhausted all the possible experts out there and didn’t get any responses? Honestly, this means they either don’t know how to write a letter to get an answer from experts, don’t have any compelling data to interest an expert enough to expend their time, or didn’t actually try very hard, or all of the above.

    ¯_(ツ)_/¯ indeed.


  • This article is not very helpful. It doesn’t clarify what is meant by the term “green line of death”. Does it brick the phone? Does it make the phone unusable? Is it just annoying? Does it include red lines? Blue lines, black lines, rainbows?

    It presents anectdotal evidence of it having happened a lot, but doesn’t give any real numbers. There’s no analysis of the information they do have to say if it’s more often a hardware issue, a software bug, or caused by damage. There’s no indication if there was an attempt to ascertain how often it happens within the warranty period, or if occurrences increase with phone age.

    Interviewing a couple friends and a “quick reddit search” is not investigative journalism. The writer didn’t hear back from manufacturers or industry experts, and gave up. So they interviewed a couple more “nerd” friends. Ouch.



  • Usually, when it’s a one-off like this, the video game gets “paid” to put the stuff in their game. That payment may be in-kind advertising campaigns, etc.

    For something like Need for Speed, Forza, etc, the game will be licensing the likeness of the vehicles and the company logos in the game. I don’t know the costs, but the fact that it’s also advertising will factor in.

    In this case, there are a few likely scenarios:

    1. The game director or art director or someone high up at Epic has a hard-on for the Cybertruck and really wanted it in the game. So they pursued Tesla and made a deal.
    2. Epic wanted to add vehicles to the game and decided to go with licensed vehicles. Their merchandising people reached out to merchandising people at all the auto companies and then figured out some deals.
    3. Someone high up at Tesla (maybe even Musk) loves, or has a kid who loves, Fortnite and decided they want the Cybertruck in the game. So they pursued Epic to make a deal.

    Number 2 is most likely, but I don’t know the game well enough to know the vehicle situation in it.

    For all of them, you have to factor in a bunch of details to figure out who is paying who:

    • who wants it more (/ power imbalance)
    • how much money is it going to cost to make the models, animations, etc
    • how much is it going to cost players to get the item
    • are there aspects that either company finds undesirable (E.g. sometimes car companies don’t like their cars shown with damage)
    • who will be doing the bulk of the marketing, and who has the marketing budget to spend on the venture
    • probably a lot more

    So, it’s hard to say without more inside info. Games I’ve worked on have had 1 and 2, but not 3 as far as I know. I think it was pretty much an in-kind deal for the 1 situation though (like we got the likenesses, they got advertising through the game, ostensibly we sold more games with the likenesses, but I think it just stroked someone’s ego…) All of the 2 situations were done to bring in money for the game’s marketing budget / or were in-kind marketing deals, possibly bringing money directly to the bottom line, but I don’t know.