5 ms·

> 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

by 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.
  - maccard 3mo ago
    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 3mo ago
      A unique look is 99% art direction.
superxpro12 3mo ago
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 3mo ago
  Can you pick it out of films and TV shows? (Not being snarky - legit question)
  - maxsilver 3mo ago
    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/360000579527-Cameras-Image-Capture-Requirements-and-Best-Practices https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360... https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a61878509/netflix-shows-look-alike-why/ 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpWYtXtmEFQ )
    - wisty 3mo ago
      I think they mean the use of UE5 in movies.
      - tmtvl 3mo ago
        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.
      - slopinthebag 3mo ago
        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.
zetanor 3mo ago
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 3mo ago
  AAA dev here - movemen, physics UI frameworks are infinitely customisable in Unreal. It’s all about how much time you spend on them.
  - andyfilms1 3mo ago
    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 3mo ago
      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 3mo ago
beAbU 3mo ago
Game engines most certainly have a stank to them that makes it easy(ish) to identity.
NooneAtAll3 3mo ago
> 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
- jdnfmfmfm 3mo ago
  [dead]
willis936 3mo ago
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.
- WillPostForFood 3mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_6#Games_using_id_Tech_6 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 3mo ago
    "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.
- danbolt 3mo ago
  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 3mo ago
    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.
gjvc 3mo ago
you are talking absolute shit
AussieWog93 3mo ago
If anyone wants a concrete example of this, Pikmin 4 uses Unreal!
- expedition32 3mo ago
  So does Ace Combat 7. Not exactly an FPS.
pdpi 3mo ago
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.

by Cpoll 3mo ago

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.
- maccard 3mo ago
  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 3mo ago
    A unique look is 99% art direction.

superxpro12 3mo ago

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 3mo ago
Can you pick it out of films and TV shows? (Not being snarky - legit question)
- maxsilver 3mo ago
  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/360000579527-Cameras-Image-Capture-Requirements-and-Best-Practices https://partnerhelp.netflixstudios.com/hc/en-us/articles/360... https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a61878509/netflix-shows-look-alike-why/ 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpWYtXtmEFQ )
  - wisty 3mo ago
    I think they mean the use of UE5 in movies.
    - tmtvl 3mo ago
      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.
    - slopinthebag 3mo ago
      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.

zetanor 3mo ago

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 3mo ago
AAA dev here - movemen, physics UI frameworks are infinitely customisable in Unreal. It’s all about how much time you spend on them.
- andyfilms1 3mo ago
  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 3mo ago
    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 3mo ago

beAbU 3mo ago

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

NooneAtAll3 3mo ago

> 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

jdnfmfmfm 3mo ago
[dead]

willis936 3mo ago

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.

WillPostForFood 3mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_6#Games_using_id_Tech_6 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 3mo ago
  "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.
danbolt 3mo ago
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 3mo ago
  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.

gjvc 3mo ago

you are talking absolute shit

AussieWog93 3mo ago

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

expedition32 3mo ago
So does Ace Combat 7. Not exactly an FPS.

pdpi 3mo ago

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.