31–40 of 117 posts
I don't understand why Unreal Engine 4 is in the title. It feels click-baity since you're expecting to read something about the "dark side" of UE4 or something.
The amazing thing to me is that now people can make games without a bunch of great engineers. Back in the day when we made Battlezone we had at least four really amazing engineers (one was a Masters in CS from MIT, one wrote early 3d workstation code, UCLA, Cal Tech CS degrees). In those days you needed people like that to just 3D to work in Windows. Direct X helped a lot. Unity and Unreal have made things we couldn'…
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Oh hi co-worker of my old friend Ken :)
OMG: Ken is one of the most amazing people I have ever worked with. You are lucky to count him as a friend.
I don't understand why Unreal Engine 4 is in the title. It feels click-baity since you're expecting to read something about the "dark side" of UE4 or something.
Second paragraph: "If a game company in Los Angeles is having an Unreal Engine 4 problem that no one can solve, I usually end up getting that call. I am writing this article to explain why I get that call, how one would prevent the need for that call, and what I normally do after getting that call."
So while a lot of these things are pretty useful strategies for any large project (we had asset naming conventions for parts of the Flash cartoons I was working on around the turn of the century), they are all common problems he's encountered in his career of being That Guy You Call When Your Big Unreal Project Is Broken.
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This is at least in part because hardware has advanced to the point that for many games it makes sense to optimize for development time over runtime performance. Unity and Unreal are still not as performant as a well optimized specialized engine could be in many situations but it would probably take too long and cost too much to build that specialized engine. There are also trade offs in flexibility that come with us…
I love the productivity Unity brings, but sometimes I feel like making a game in the engine requires extra polish as I need to make sure the game has character and not “a Unity game”.
https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/
at a former job i knew a team of devs who built and maintained a framework to help teams of researchers put together pipelines of simulation (often fluid simulation), animation, rendering, etc. This framework had its own blueprinting functionality.
One of the cute features they had was nested blueprints -- e.g. you could define some blueprint, and abstract it behind an interface as its own component, then re-use the component in another blueprint.
So i guess in a "blueprints from hell" scenario that lets you have "fractal blueprints from hell".
edit:
i'm also reminded of Chris Domas' defcon talk "Psychological Warfare in Reverse Engineering", where he sets out to construct binaries that cause despair when someone tries to reverse engineer them -- in particular he asks the question: "could i make a binary that draws a particular picture when someone views the binary's control flow graph in IDA"
The amazing thing to me is that now people can make games without a bunch of great engineers. Back in the day when we made Battlezone we had at least four really amazing engineers (one was a Masters in CS from MIT, one wrote early 3d workstation code, UCLA, Cal Tech CS degrees). In those days you needed people like that to just 3D to work in Windows. Direct X helped a lot. Unity and Unreal have made things we couldn'…
Was this the Pandemic Studios version of Battlezone (i.e. Battlezone II) or the first version of Battlezone for PC? If you had a hand in either, then I owe you a beer (or whatever you prefer) a bunch of times over because I loved both of those games so much. Endless hours of entertainment!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love the productivity Unity brings, but sometimes I feel like making a game in the engine requires extra polish as I need to make sure the game has character and not “a Unity game”.
I've found that the polish step is necessary no matter what engine you use, or even if you roll your own.
I don't understand why Unreal Engine 4 is in the title. It feels click-baity since you're expecting to read something about the "dark side" of UE4 or something.
First sentence of the article: "I have been working professionally with Unreal Engine for over 9 years." Second paragraph: "If a game company in Los Angeles is having an Unreal Engine 4 problem that no one can solve, I usually end up getting that call. I am writing this article to explain why I get that call, how one would prevent the need for that call, and what I normally do after getting that call." So while a lot…
I still read it as him trying to suggest what better practices you can adopt specifically pertaining to UE4 that would "prevent the need for that call"
I don't understand why Unreal Engine 4 is in the title. It feels click-baity since you're expecting to read something about the "dark side" of UE4 or something.
I think it is because UE4 (and Unity) make it possible to get 50-80% there on projects without solid engineering. So people think they can get by without having the skills on the team.