/v/ - Video Games

OP your benis bias is showing

No, it's firing all talent for diversity hires which leads them to use only the easiest tools available, which leads them to fucking up because they're diversity hires.

>>15982764

Can confirm.

HR hires for diversity Literally overheard him say he's pushing the resumé through because it's a woman developer and they're rare

White man hires for skill My team lead screened that bitch out in the first round

>>15982712

Yes and no. We've seen excellent games made with generic engines. Just look at Kicking Simulator, which is built on the Source Engine. Or Titanfall 2, which is some pretty fun game. It's all about the lack of talent and marketing/product teams having too big importance in companies. They push for casualization and because they're incompetent fucks calling the shots, most studios end up literally oppressing developers and designers.

Polite sage because we're already on page 1

Nothing necessarily wrong with the engines, but very few good games are made with them, which is the problem

Unity and Unreal are actually good Engines it's the people in charge are hacks.

God that lighting looks so gross.

>>15983317

Yeah it looks like a fucking Oblivion mod. People only pretended to care about this game because it was an exclusive.

Some modern game engines have produced acceptable results.

Metal Gear Solid 5 (Fox Engine)

Final Fantasy 15 (Luminous Studio)

However, we gotten to the point where only the richest devs can make proprietary engines that are up to our current 4K standards. Barely.

>>15986411

Cows make shitty tools and its a shitty joke.

>>15986416

What a world we'd be in if developers actually blamed anything but ebil nazi gamers and meaniehead corporations they trip over themselves to sell out to.

I wish the kenshi dev would just use unity instead of ORGE2.0 and a patchwork of other things.

>>15986438

Eh, roughly the same world. It's a multifaceted issue and really the ebil nazee thing is a scapegoat.

Remember before that it was that gamers aren't sophisticated enough for my high school software education class project

not really problem if the tools you use are lean and mean

but yeah these days seems a lot of engines are really fucking bloated

>>15986283

>Both games look the same but planescape loads instantly and require a fraction of machine power to render same picture

Yeah I do have to agree with you on that it is really retarded. All these "retro" games don't even look that much better then older games and yet require modern machines to run, makes no sense

>>15987107

Most of them actually look worse because the faux retro aesthetic only applies when they feel like it does so you'll get shit like low res sprites with 4000xwhatever character portraits and vector font. It's all over the place.

Unity games phone home by default and Unreal is linked to Tencent.

>>15982712

For me it's definitely a problem, yeah. As you read this post keep in mind I'm not a dev, just a casual player. It's difficult to explain objectively, but most games in Unity, UE4 or to a lesser scale Source engine have a definite certain "feel" to them in graphics and controls that I can tell which engine they're made even knowing nothing about the game and just sitting to play some random segment. And this goes even for games on different genres. And of course, this makes them feel more generic than if they used a custom engine.

I don't know why - if it's the textures, lighting, input lag, physics, something else, or a combination of those - but each engine has a definite "personality" to them that might make your game look and feel more generic. Just to give an example, for me it's relatively easy to notice a Source engine game due to the excessively sharp textures most of them use, even in newer games.

Most faggots in this thread are claiming it's the dev's fault who don't know how to program and optimize these engines properly when this happens, and maybe they're right.

Still, I also miss the days when more games used custom engines - I don't care even if that made some of them look worse, play worse and less optimized than using a canned engine, it definitely gave games more character and personality.

everyone should just use Bethesdas engine.

>u

>>16008935

>A shitty dev thus in effect operates as a parasite profiting off others' work and amounting to a net negative on the amount of work getting done

I think this applies to most things.

>>15982764

It's not until you see the reality of it that it sets in how clownworld it is. You get upper managers mandating working weekends in a corporate job, meanwhile developers leaving left right and center because everyone is sick of having managers playing politics around the place and putting the program at risk, then the few developers who have any domain knowledge and/or drive to try and keep the train on the rails gets fired or replaced by some useless roastie because they're not sycophants. This is your brain on "free markets". Whoever preaches this free market crap has obviously never had a bloody job.

>>15986411

The joke is the author thought it was something to publish. Nobody got it, and I'm pretty sure not even he did.

>>16008935

While there's a lot of amazing people wringing good things out of games (like OpenMW or AA2Mini) this is a lot less true when dealing with proprietary games. I shudder to think what OpenAA2 would be like.

>>15986283

>..both games look the same

jesus fucking christ no they do not

they play the same maybe, but.. look

shut the fuck up

>>15986411

I think even Larson was ambiguous about it, it was just supposed to be the introduction of a daft 'cow as Neanderthal/Amish' idea. What with all the anthropomorphism in his cartoons it wouldn't be a surprise to see him have them evolve but afaik he never developed the idea so it stands as a weird one off.

>>16009147

These people don't get where they are because of a free market. They're there by federal mandate.

>>15986411

Cow tools are worthless trash, and the cow can't even use them. I'm fucking crying over here.

Those generic engines are clay made to be molded to fit what you want. There have been numerous samey games made with those engines, yes, but there are others that are unique.

Most game developers are terrible, and will always produce a terrible product no matter the engine. If you forced them to make an engine by themselves chances are the result would somehow be even worse.

Not necessarily. Hollow Knight and Cuphead were both made on Unity but they are far from generic. Sure they may fall into a genre of gameplay like metroidvania or whatever but what game doesn't? What they make up for in the engine's limitations, they over compensate with the theme, art direction, and OST.

I will say this though: the games that do make their own engine sometimes indirectly distinguish a game's gameplay from others in a genre. Like in the case of StarCraft 1/BW. You could not make a similar RTS in unity/unreal unless you specifically limited yourself which defeats the purpose of making the engine because many of the 'errors' in the game actually made the game more interesting.

>>16009549

If you forced them to make their own engines they'd probably just quit and leave us with a net positive gain.

>>16009622

no games is worse than bad games

>>16009645

You aren't fooling anybody.

Why does this guy have 7 posts but barely anybody talking to him?

The problem with these engines is less the engines themselves and more that the studios licensing them think they don't need to think about optimization because the engine is "already optimized." For example when you read about the shit programmers had to do to figure out how games like Crash Bandicoot or Doom could run on contemporary hardware, you read about an entire stage of development that many studios don't even go through today. Getting into that mindset and process allows you to easily go further and design an engine for your game, from the ground up, holistically.

>>15986283

I don't get what the tools are for?

>>16008935

>be surrounded by junglechink devs

>have to fix their shit frequently

>essentially act as their proxy to google because they don't know how to google

>try to teach junglechinks to do stuff for themselves but they keep fucking that up

Send help.

>>15982712

Don't know about Unreal, but at least Unity is quite easily changed. You can also get access to the source code, so you can 100% modify it to what you need and want while having the more generic stuff already done for you.

It's just that most devs nowadays are too incompetent, they are barely capable of writing C++, but write a game in some babbys first scripting language and then wonder why the performance is shit.

>>15986283

>And its not like they have any reasons to make a worse engine than already avaible.

This is a retarded observation. Unreal and Unity are cookie cutter engines, they aren't capable of meeting every developers needs in an adequate manner. Look at open world games as an example. Can you make an open world game in those engines? Yes. Can you populate the world with life, quests, and items? No, the engine begins to fall apart. Certain games which have been made in Unity and Unreal actually would have been better optimized had they utilized an in-house engine. These engines are designed for "Go from point A to point B within this medium-large sized level and complete your quest, now load a new map, and repeat."

>>16011218

>Can you populate the world with life, quests, and items?

You can, you just need to cut corners.

>>15986342

> proprietary engines

These are getting very rare these days.

>>15982791

So we have to kill the immature CEOs, the managers, the HR, the inexperienced people the HR hires.

When do we start?

>>16011218

>>16011278

Or do the opposite, and spend time heavily scripting new game mechanics and behaviors into the engine. Engines have the same problem as High-Level Programming Languages do, just at a wider margin. Sure, if you hand-code the game in C++ you're going to be able to manage performance better, but it's harder to make the game more accessible due to the environment specifics C++ is build around. You can try and use a mangling library like Allegro to fix things up, but there will be special case examples you will have to account for, and then it may be for just one machine that some poor shmuck who bought your game has to deal with.

Engines, Libraries, Languages, they all have trade-offs at some level. Personally, I think the ideal level is at the Open-Source Game Engine Level. Blender might have been a good example for this, except for being written in Python and therefore not worth a shit as a gaming framework.(Starcraft is an exception, again because the engine is proprietary)

Like all things, it comes down to prefererence. So, with that in mind… take your pick.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines

>>16011379

It's pretty much standard for every RTS developer to code their own engine as most game engines are fundamentally incapable of being used for an RTS with multiplayer, I don't think it's an unreasonable practice to follow in other genres either.

>>16011423

I love it

>>16011421

They don't tend to work very well in singleplayer either whether it be because of rendering optimization, pathing or UI responsiveness. Unity in particular apparently has some really bad rendering problem where even 2d things are technically loaded in 3d no matter how simple they look leading to long ass load times no matter what you do.

>>16011456

True, but they just flat out don't work for multiplayer since RTS rely on communicating player input rather than transmitting entire game states. So they need to be completely deterministic, such that as long as everyone's game has all player inputs to apply, their states will all remain synchronized regardless of different machines. This is also why RTS games are lockstep and when you encounter lag in them, it manifests as the game pausing briefly rather than rubberbanding.

>>16011423

Well anon get his answer!

>>15982712

>have generic physics and suffer from BLOAT and other shit

Luckily unity has realized this, and is working to solve the problem.

They're segmenting the parts of the engine into "packages" and each is compartmentalized so you only use the "bloat" parts of the engine you want.

They'll be segmented/compartmentalized different core parts of the engine when they've finished implementing the ECS (entity component system) re-design of unity (basically, for nodevs, it makes shit efficient/speedy by default, and it allows for way easier multithreading; while allowing for easier compartmentalization of unity's features into packages).

They're also finishing up implementing the rendering pipelines, meaning, ease of use for switching up lighting styles dramatically, and designing your own lighting pipeline with their tools; thus avoiding the "generic" sameyness of the engine.

There's also the existence of PBR, and is probably why a lot of engines looks samey (as it's the de-facto most realistic lighting model atm for realtime applications).

>means their games are generic

That's what happens when developers use the default options for everything.

It's a thing, but that doesn't mean you can't, you know, not use the default options.

I do have to say though, when a game uses a custom engine it definitely gains its own intrinsic uniqueness, but that's not hard to do in a pre-baked engine with some elbow grease; it just requires the developer to realize this and to put effort into correcting it.

>>16011218

>they aren't capable of meeting every developers needs in an adequate manner

>uses the default shit provided

You're supposed to built on-top of the engine.

They're there to save you from having to do all the required low level shit to just like make game, and that's it.

Everything else is up to you.

Like building a framework to deal with open-world shit if your game is going to be OW.

>These engines are designed for "Go from point A to point B within this medium-large sized level and complete your quest, now load a new map, and repeat."

Don't use the default shit then.

Use some creativity, and build on-top of the engine.

For example, it'd be pretty easy to implement the basic capabilities of a system similar to the elder scrolls and their cell serialization system in either of those engines.

>>16011379

>the ideal level is at the Open-Source Game Engine Level

Godot and xenko are pretty promising.

All-purpose engines like UE4, Frostbite etc. are often a good fit for what a developer needs, reinventing the wheel is just not economical. AAA devs always have source access licenses for whatever engine they use, so nothing is off-limits in customizability.

>generic physics

Even a fully custom engine will generally not have a custom physics engine, and instead use Havok or PhysX.

>generic games

All-purpose engines impose a couple of limitations like the multiplayer network model, but other games do still get made, they just use custom engines.

>bloat

This is true, but it's not fundamentally impossible to trim down an all-purpose engine to the leanness of a custom one with source access, just that optimization is not prioritized as high. Embed related is the INSIDE devs talking about trimming down Unity.

>generic looks

Even in the time of microfacet lighting models ("PBR", >>16011525), there are a lot of parameters that can be tweaked, i'd actually say more than before, and this also goes for engines (Metallic/Roughness or Specular/Glossiness? GGX, Cook-Torrance or something else? Roughness mapping factors? Lambert or Oren-Nayar?). Deferred Lighting does impose a couple of limitations on material shaders but it might be on its way out, replaced by clustered forward.

>>15986283

>nowadays you cant do it without nvidia and radeon approval

This is bullshit

>>16011525

>Build on top of the engine

Building your house on a mountain of shit isn't a very good idea.

>>16011774

The chair is rocking backwards, towards the window.

>>16011379

Armory3d might be an open source engine that you like. It's currently in development. You code by using haxe (c# and javascript hybrid) or nodes. The best part is that you can use Blender's shaders to create good lighting. On the downside, it's missing features like networking and it's pretty buggy. Otherwise, it has potential

>>16011798

Close enough

The perspective makes it look like there's no way the kid can fall through the window though

>>16011593

>optimization via trimming

This doesn't fix the fundemantal flaw of these engines and their physics' engines being build around few cores and or single core proccessors. Ideally, for performance, they should be optimized to work with direct adressable memory ranges for the proccessor and extreme multi tasking with multiple i.e 64+ cores without a proccessor scheduler to fuck things up on systems without a MMU. All these engines let the proccessor baby the programmer with the out of order execution schedular and virtual memory bullshit that hurts peformance at the engine and proccessor design level.

Otherwise they work as generic templates to make a game quickly as you mentioned.

>>16011746

Don't the eye colors indicate the reason why the person is jumping?

>>16011818

I think so. Depression vs honor suicide since he can't keep his word or provide.

>>16011423

This is some fucking Pipe Strip, John Blyth Barrymore tier shit going on here.

>>16011774

>>16011798

>>16011809

This was already explained. The red creature is some kind of spirit of suicide, and it's eye color represents why the victim killed themselves. The green eye color means the victims killed themselves because of financial trouble. I forget what the other colors mean.

>>15982712

The engines are good, it's just the devs behind it that are responsible whether or not the game will feel shit/run shit

look at Ace combat 7, that game looks fucking gorgeous at it's on UE4.

look at insurgency Sandstorm, it's very washed out and unoptimized. Textures are low res and pop in is prevalent

I know they're two vastly different games but you get my point

>>16011914

Romantic problems. You can see that both the girl and the mother's demons have red eyes, they are jumping because they got dumped/rejected.

>>15982712

OP you're denser than bedrock. The reason why developers are moving to these engines is because they're available and aren't complete garbage. Back in the day you either made your own engine or you made an FPS Creator/RPG Maker type shitshow. You're also a retard for thinking that it'd lead to generic physics. Because you can modify physics in Unity/Unreal (or if you need something super specific, you can tell the engine physics to fuck off and learn how to vector).

And game engines are only going to continue to diversify. There are roughly half a dozen engines I can think of that various people/groups are developing. So if you're complaining about Unity and Unreal, the market is going to greatly expand within 10 years. I promise you that. Godot is going to eclipse Unity and it's gonna be great.

>>16012096

Actually the mother has brown eyes.

>>16012345

> showing diminishing returns of course

much less these days. Games like the new assassins creed are excellent CPU benchmarks because of how well distributed tasks are. They have to be for consoles high core low clock CPUs. Thanks to consoles pushing things forward in one way but falling back in another many devs have technology now built for those environments and now they are finding those environments back on PC.

>>16012408

I wouldn't say they are excellent benchmarks but yes, rendering made a big leap with DX12/Vulkan and command lists/buffers. Still, game logic is of course intrinsically sequential, that will never go away. If you want your 140Hz+, the single core speed will have to be sufficient, engines are not to blame for this.

>>15983317

>>15986318

The game is FFXIII tier in how embarassing it is when you look at it without soytendo bias

>>16012088

not to mention most devs remove the unity logo so most tards only see shit games with a splashscreen and scream OMG UNITY

>>15982764

This.

Bloated engines don't poorly design games - talentless developers do. Great games have and can be made with Unity, Game Maker, Unreal, and even RPG Maker. You could even fully 100% recreate your favorite SNES RPG in RPG Maker, if you were willing to spend your time for no monetary reward. Claiming an engine's poor performance with physics or lighting is the reason a game is not good is ridiculous and implies that the only thing you search for in a game is the presence of modern rendering and graphical design with no frame drops. There are hundreds of reasons for games to suck.

>>16020542

I don't think it's embarrassing, just really fucking ugly and overhyped.

>>16011774

Isn't the dad going to kill himself because he can't afford it?

Plenty of good games have been made under Unity.

Expedition Conquistador, Ultimate General series, Pathfinder: Kingmaker (yes).

I feel the devs should focus on making their games good instead of blaming the engine.

Pre-made engines are good for small teams, like unity whit just 2 devs, it's better to get things done rather that end up in development hell, if it's a bigger studio whit an art deparment, coding department and stuff, then using unity is not just laziness but incompetence.

>>16021020

Yeah, they can use Unreal 4.

But most bigger studio do not use Unity anyway.

>>16021031

>blizzard

>ubisoft

>valve

>not big studios

>>16025178

>one good game made in an engine means it has no problems

Jesus Christ you resetera cocksuckers are retarded.

>>16025178

It's a very capable engine it's just that 99% of the people that use it are complete retards.

>>15982791

I would have no problem giving a yes for a women dev. I have worked with plenty of women devs in the past and they always pull their weight. You're just a misogynist

lol