5 ms·

All of this is true and has been true for decades in the game industry. The other side of this seesaw is: Games are fundamentally in the novelty business. Play

All of this is true and has been true for decades in the game industry. The other side of this seesaw is: Games are fundamentally in the novelty business. Players like some amount of familiarity, but they want new experiences. 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. So using a widely used game engine can put you at a disadvantage if you're trying to make a game that doesn't go with that grain and offers players something different. As more studios consolidate on the same engine, more players will get tired of that sameness and reward other studios more. As more studios do their own thing, players will become saturated with novelty and the benefits of not using an engine will go down. There is no stable equilibrium.

markus_zhang 3mo ago
I think there is another benefit of a custom engine — you built it to fit your workflow, so you could be extremely productive with all kinds of tools built specifically for this workflow. UE or Unity do not consider your specific cases. The problem is that companies are not willing to groom new engineers to get familiar with the code.
- formerly_proven 3mo ago
  UE is also just not a good engine. If you reduce "what is a 3D game engine" really hard it is "framework for running an input-process-output loop while consistently rendering audio and video". UE fails at the latter (factually unfixable shadder stuttering issues). A pragmatist might consider the taxonomy and say UE is therefore not a game engine. Unreal seems to be a great framework for assembling and generating content, though. Maybe Unreal Free was the metaverse all along? Meanwhile idTech certainly had issues, mostly in regards to dynamic levels, especially in older iterations, but "consistently rendering audio and video" was certainly never among them. It is well above the industry mean when it comes to the core of what a game engine is.
  - vvillena 3mo ago
    Isn't the shader stuttering an issue with games refusing to compile shaders ahead of time?
    - Sleaker 3mo ago
      No, I think it's widely regarded as engine limitations even when people continually claim it's up to individual game devs to optimize their games. If that were the case then why do nearly all UE5 games suffer from the same engine stutter issues. And to OPs point, even if it can be optimized away, why isnt the engine in a state where the baseline performance for realtime rendering does not exhibit these stutter issues on the majority of games.
      - teamonkey 3mo ago
        Unreal’s limitation is that it doesn’t know how a shader will be used until it actually tries to render it on the target hardware. This is a trade-off to gain flexibility and rendering performance. The engine has to compile shaders on the fly when it is first used, which is fine if the shader is simple, but nowadays that usually is not the case. There are ways to make a player’s PC compile shaders before realtime play begins, but it takes some setup and smaller devs might not know how to do it. This is most likely the reason why stuttering happens. On fixed hardware targets (consoles, Steam Deck) you can ship precached shaders as you know everything about the target hardware.
        formerly_proven 3mo ago
        Console vs PC is a red herring since UE games still stutter on consoles, people just notice that less because most games run at 30 fps anyway. You can read Unreal's own blog posts on this and they'll actually explain that this is mostly down to their material system (and game logic/scripts reaching into it) being designed to create nearly infinite shader variations on the fly in response to arbitrary world/game states. This design choice separates engines which have shader stutters from those which do not. https://www.unrealengine.com/tech-blog/game-engines-and-shader-stuttering-unreal-engines-solution-to-the-problem https://www.unrealengine.com/tech-blog/game-engines-and-shad... https://medium.com/@GroundZer0/what-unreal-doesnt-tell-you-about-shader-permutations-ac4133bc5699 https://medium.com/@GroundZer0/what-unreal-doesnt-tell-you-a... https://therealmjp.github.io/posts/shader-permutations-part1/ https://therealmjp.github.io/posts/shader-permutations-part1...
Cpoll 3mo ago
> 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.
- npinsker 3mo ago
  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.
- hluska 3mo ago
  So it’s a myth but there’s a good reason to believe it happens?
- torginus 3mo ago
  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 3mo ago
    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.
solatic 3mo ago
You're right, but idTech is almost by definition that "novelty" kind of engine. And it did help id to sell more games. It's just apparently not enough.
- BikiniPrince 3mo ago
  Id made games to demo their engine. No one is going to buy an engine without any games. They don’t even sell idTech anymore. It’s used for their games which are not making any money. No game sales doesn’t support the reasoning they should keep the engine around.
  - kibwen 3mo ago
    Except that the obvious reason their recent games see lackluster sales is because they're on Gamepass, which precludes needing to buy the game to play it.
    - simonh 3mo ago
      They still get usage stats.
      - kibwen 3mo ago
        Yes, and those usage stats show that the overwhelming majority are playing the game without having bought it. One can't argue that these studios should be shut down for poor sales when Microsoft themselves are sabotaging the ability for these games to sell for full price.
        simonh 3mo ago
        The whole point of gamepass is that you don't buy the games. If enough people are playing it through gamepass that shows it supports the value of gamepass, if not sure that's a problem.
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
socalgal2 3mo ago
> 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"
- tranceylc 3mo ago
  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 3mo ago
    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.
    - tranceylc 3mo ago
      I don’t think anyone was claiming that it was impossible. Unreal is literally source-available so of course
    - throwaway17_17 3mo ago
      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.
- kibwen 3mo ago
slopinthebag 3mo ago
Yes I was just gonna comment something along these lines. We’ll see a consolidation towards UE5/6, and then a rebound effect away as gamers get tired of “unreal slop”.
elektronika 3mo ago
> Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel There's a degree of toupee fallacy to this. It's hard to tell what engine something is on just from gameplay if the team invested in custom rendering and gamefeel.
- protocolture 3mo ago
  I think it used to be more true than it is these days. I used to be able to pick graphics/physics engine by feel alone. PhysX and Havok used to feel very different. Quake 3/Half Life/Unreal used to feel very different. But that's all largely been paved over. Actually I think I can still spot Crytek tbh.
  - filoleg 3mo ago
    > Quake 3/Half Life/Unreal used to feel very different. Fair on the Unreal Engine part, but Quake 3 and Half-Life are basically built on sibling engines that share one direct common ancestor (though I fully agree with you that they felt different). Quake/Quake 2 used idTech2. idTech3 for Quake 3 was built on top of idTech2, and GoldSrc for Half-Life was built on top of idTech2 as well (it was a heavily customized and modified version of it).
- xnx 3mo ago
  Perfect term for it. We can all spot the UE games that look like UE games. Same goes for people who are confident about being able to spot AI.

markus_zhang 3mo ago

I think there is another benefit of a custom engine — you built it to fit your workflow, so you could be extremely productive with all kinds of tools built specifically for this workflow. UE or Unity do not consider your specific cases. The problem is that companies are not willing to groom new engineers to get familiar with the code.

formerly_proven 3mo ago
UE is also just not a good engine. If you reduce "what is a 3D game engine" really hard it is "framework for running an input-process-output loop while consistently rendering audio and video". UE fails at the latter (factually unfixable shadder stuttering issues). A pragmatist might consider the taxonomy and say UE is therefore not a game engine. Unreal seems to be a great framework for assembling and generating content, though. Maybe Unreal Free was the metaverse all along? Meanwhile idTech certainly had issues, mostly in regards to dynamic levels, especially in older iterations, but "consistently rendering audio and video" was certainly never among them. It is well above the industry mean when it comes to the core of what a game engine is.
- vvillena 3mo ago
  Isn't the shader stuttering an issue with games refusing to compile shaders ahead of time?
  - Sleaker 3mo ago
    No, I think it's widely regarded as engine limitations even when people continually claim it's up to individual game devs to optimize their games. If that were the case then why do nearly all UE5 games suffer from the same engine stutter issues. And to OPs point, even if it can be optimized away, why isnt the engine in a state where the baseline performance for realtime rendering does not exhibit these stutter issues on the majority of games.
    - teamonkey 3mo ago
      Unreal’s limitation is that it doesn’t know how a shader will be used until it actually tries to render it on the target hardware. This is a trade-off to gain flexibility and rendering performance. The engine has to compile shaders on the fly when it is first used, which is fine if the shader is simple, but nowadays that usually is not the case. There are ways to make a player’s PC compile shaders before realtime play begins, but it takes some setup and smaller devs might not know how to do it. This is most likely the reason why stuttering happens. On fixed hardware targets (consoles, Steam Deck) you can ship precached shaders as you know everything about the target hardware.
      - formerly_proven 3mo ago
        Console vs PC is a red herring since UE games still stutter on consoles, people just notice that less because most games run at 30 fps anyway. You can read Unreal's own blog posts on this and they'll actually explain that this is mostly down to their material system (and game logic/scripts reaching into it) being designed to create nearly infinite shader variations on the fly in response to arbitrary world/game states. This design choice separates engines which have shader stutters from those which do not. https://www.unrealengine.com/tech-blog/game-engines-and-shader-stuttering-unreal-engines-solution-to-the-problem https://www.unrealengine.com/tech-blog/game-engines-and-shad... https://medium.com/@GroundZer0/what-unreal-doesnt-tell-you-about-shader-permutations-ac4133bc5699 https://medium.com/@GroundZer0/what-unreal-doesnt-tell-you-a... https://therealmjp.github.io/posts/shader-permutations-part1/ https://therealmjp.github.io/posts/shader-permutations-part1...

Cpoll 3mo ago

> 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.

npinsker 3mo ago
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.
hluska 3mo ago
So it’s a myth but there’s a good reason to believe it happens?
torginus 3mo ago
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 3mo ago
  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.

solatic 3mo ago

You're right, but idTech is almost by definition that "novelty" kind of engine. And it did help id to sell more games. It's just apparently not enough.

BikiniPrince 3mo ago
Id made games to demo their engine. No one is going to buy an engine without any games. They don’t even sell idTech anymore. It’s used for their games which are not making any money. No game sales doesn’t support the reasoning they should keep the engine around.
- kibwen 3mo ago
  Except that the obvious reason their recent games see lackluster sales is because they're on Gamepass, which precludes needing to buy the game to play it.
  - simonh 3mo ago
    They still get usage stats.
    - kibwen 3mo ago
      Yes, and those usage stats show that the overwhelming majority are playing the game without having bought it. One can't argue that these studios should be shut down for poor sales when Microsoft themselves are sabotaging the ability for these games to sell for full price.
      - simonh 3mo ago
        The whole point of gamepass is that you don't buy the games. If enough people are playing it through gamepass that shows it supports the value of gamepass, if not sure that's a problem.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]

socalgal2 3mo ago

> 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"

tranceylc 3mo ago
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 3mo ago
  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.
  - tranceylc 3mo ago
    I don’t think anyone was claiming that it was impossible. Unreal is literally source-available so of course
  - throwaway17_17 3mo ago
    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.
kibwen 3mo ago

slopinthebag 3mo ago

Yes I was just gonna comment something along these lines. We’ll see a consolidation towards UE5/6, and then a rebound effect away as gamers get tired of “unreal slop”.

elektronika 3mo ago

> Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel There's a degree of toupee fallacy to this. It's hard to tell what engine something is on just from gameplay if the team invested in custom rendering and gamefeel.

protocolture 3mo ago
I think it used to be more true than it is these days. I used to be able to pick graphics/physics engine by feel alone. PhysX and Havok used to feel very different. Quake 3/Half Life/Unreal used to feel very different. But that's all largely been paved over. Actually I think I can still spot Crytek tbh.
- filoleg 3mo ago
  > Quake 3/Half Life/Unreal used to feel very different. Fair on the Unreal Engine part, but Quake 3 and Half-Life are basically built on sibling engines that share one direct common ancestor (though I fully agree with you that they felt different). Quake/Quake 2 used idTech2. idTech3 for Quake 3 was built on top of idTech2, and GoldSrc for Half-Life was built on top of idTech2 as well (it was a heavily customized and modified version of it).
xnx 3mo ago
Perfect term for it. We can all spot the UE games that look like UE games. Same goes for people who are confident about being able to spot AI.