A first look at Unreal Engine 5

For sure, the physics once she starts rock climbing are horrific and super uncanny.

Forearms need to be parallel to the gravity vector almost all the time. Arms need to be kept straight almost all the time. The only exceptions for these are the actual top of a motion to move up to the next hold.

All stuff you would never notice if the graphics weren't amazing.

I think I'm so used to seeing unrealistic pony tails and clothes I don't even notice.

Other than Uncharted I don't recall playing games with climbing.. I've spent enough real world climbing time since then it's noticeable now.

Hair is nowhere near realism, yet.

This is masked by using hairstyles which are either not intended to move or which are intended to display limited movement.

Her hair isn't in a true ponytail, anyway. Even with more restricted movement of the hairstyle she has, it still doesn't look right at all.

I think it's the global illumination that really makes the difference. You can't get to realism just by drawing more polygons, but if light acts in believable ways (especially when the scene changes or lights move around) it really starts to look like real life.

Some of those are very valid concerns, others don't really seem like fiascos.

Paragon: Epic returned all purchases and made all the assets free on their marketplace. That seems like a pretty consumer friendly way to shutter a product that wasn't doing well.

Exclusives: Paid exclusivity made games like Satisfactory possible, and I believe that all the exclusives are timed? Making games is expensive and unpredictable, exclusives ensure devs can take more risks without worrying about going bankrupt.

Security is a serious concern for sure.

Acquisitions: As far as I can tell, Psyonix is the only game studio they've bought, and they haven't pulled their game from Steam? Are there others?

Tencent ownership: What's the actual concern here? There's a lot of sinophobia in gaming circles these days. There's plenty to be concerned about with the CCP and Tencent, but what's the specific worry about them having a minority stake in Epic?

Linux support (Rocket League, Editor, etc.). These are data driven decisions. Rocket League, for instance, had 0.3% playership across Mac and Linux combined. They were updating their game, and fixing bugs for that small of a community just doesn't make financial sense. They issued 100% refunds, which seems pretty reasonable?

> Anybody who buys into the UE4 or UE5 ecosystem is probably going to regret it

As someone who worked in the industry for years (but never for Epic), I highly doubt this. I've worked with UE, Unity, and CryEngine/Lumberyard and there's a huge difference in support and tooling between them.

To invoke the old "rule 5" of explaining things:

Until surprisingly recently, there was no built-in way to make a rectangular element on a webpage have rounded corners. People had to use all sorts of dirty hacks to make a final product that "looked like" it was a native, built-in feature. Usually in the old days it basically amounted to various forms of "putting a picture of a rounded corner" (often a gif) in each of the corners of the element you were putting on the page.

There were a lot of different ways to do that, but one of them was to use "tables" - tables these days are usually only used for what their genuine, semantic intent is: for drawing a literally spreadsheet-like table of data. But back in the earliest days of the web, they were the only controllable way to visually lay things out on any kind of grid, so despite the fact that they were "supposed" to have nothing to do with visual layout, they'd get used all the time for that - often getting used to do visual borders and stuff.

So to do rounded corners, you'd basically make a table that was a 3x3 grid. In the corner elements of the grid, you'd have tiny pictures of rounded corners; in the side elements of the grid you'd basically have nothing (they'd be really skinny elements, either very wide or tall). Then the middle element in the grid would be gigantic, and would hold your actual content.