Halon huhutussa Unreal Engine 5 -kytkimessä on järkeä - mutta se on silti tragedia

Julkaissut Platon

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There's a new trend in video game development. Game studios, even large ones, are binning their own bespoke engines and moving to Unreal Engine instead. We've seen it with CDPR ja The Witcher, we've seen it with Crystal Dynamics ja Tomb Raider, and now it's happening to another huge franchise: Halo.

343 Industries, franchising-yhtiön umpikuja, kohtasi paljon kritiikkiä Halo Infiniten ensimmäisen julkistamisen yhteydessä, pitkälti sen grafiikan takia. Despite significant improvements up to and beyond the game's launch, it's clear that the game didn't live up to expectations and now the developer is 'kaikki paitsi alusta alkaen' on the next Halo game, with at least 95 developers fired and a switch to Unreal Engine 5 planned - according to a Bloomberg report.

It's this story that dominates this week's Digital Foundry Direct discussions, with John Linneman, Alex Battaglia and special guest Sam Machkovech expressing their views on the matter.

In my view, it's a tragedy, both for the developers involved and the Slipspace Engine that powered Halo Infinite. The demise of in-house engines necessarily means a loss in variety when it comes to rendering techniques, art styles and more, and even contributes to issues like the Stutter Struggle -epidemia - our term for the shader compilation stutters that plagued PC games, most frequently Unreal Engine 4 releases, over the past few years. It also puts a lot of power into the hands of Unreal Engine creators Epic, who have done well to push graphical rendering techniques forward over the years but (understandably) have their own preferences for how games ought to play, ought to look and ought to be developed.

Bespoke engines have the latitude to do something different, emphasise graphical techniques, features or development styles that better suit an individual team or specific player base, but it seems that they also represent an often unacceptable risk for developers and publishers who have to justify the extra time and money to create, maintain and train new hires on an in-house engine. It's the maintenance side of things that appears to often be the stumbling block, with the talented developers of games as disparate as Halo Infinite, Counter-Strike Global Offensive and Cyberpunk 2077 struggling to fix long-standing bugs or add much-requested features due to messy, spaghettified codebases, the legacy of years or even decades of in-house engine development.

In this sense, switching to Unreal Engine 5 allows for a clean break, a chance to get rid of the legacy cruft and start again from a sturdy foundation - I just hope that it doesn't stifle ambition or lead to a generation of bland, cookie-cutter game graphics. Hi-Fi Rush on loistava vastaesimerkki siitä, mitä voit tehdä horjuttaaksesi Unreal Engine -pelin ulkoasua ja päätyäksesi johonkin erityiseen, joten muut kehittäjät panevat merkille.

00:00:00 esittely
00:01:53 Uutiset 01: Halo-kehittäjä kärsii irtisanomisista, vaihtaa UE5:een?
00:17:37 Uutiset 02: Tärkeimmät live-palvelun pelit peruttu
00:27:11 Uutiset 03: DLSS 3 lisätty Cyberpunk 2077, Dying Light 2 -peliin
00:36:21 Uutiset 04: Witcher 3 saa RT-suorituskykyä
00:43:11 Uutiset 05: Goldeneye julkaistaan Xboxille, Switchille
00:53:56 Uutiset 06: PS5 beta -laiteohjelmisto lisää 1440p VRR -tuen
01:05:04 DF Supporter Q1: Sam, kutsuit RTX 4090:tä kaupaksi. Mitä muita tarjouksia suosittelette?
01:09:04 DF Supporter Kysymys 2: Oletko testannut Shader-välimuistin kopioimista tietokoneesta toiseen poistaaksesi varjostimen pätkinnän?
01:10:08 DF Supporter Q3: Voisiko Square Enix olla taloudellisissa vaikeuksissa Forspokenin huonon vastaanoton jälkeen?
01:13:51 DF Supporter Q4: Kun PS VR2:n ennakkotilausten kerrotaan olevan odotettua alhaisemmat, voisiko VR2 mennä Vitan tapaan?
01:18:58 DF Supporter Q5: Onko mielestäsi turvallista siirtyä Windows 11:een pelikoneella?

Elsewhere in the show, Alex, John and Sam discuss the recent cancellation of live service games - which seem destined to either make huge amounts of money or die off almost immediately - and in more positive news, the RT improvements to The Witcher 3 and the addition of DLSS 3 to Cyberpunk and Dying Light 2.

We've recently kattoi Goldeneye 007 Xbox- ja Switch-julkaisut kokonaan, so let's move onto the final news item this week: a new PS5 beta firmware that adds VRR to 1440p - it was previously only available at 1080p or 4K. This makes a ton of sense, given the number of gaming monitors that hit that 1440p 120Hz+ VRR spec. The update also adds Discord voice calls to PS5, ensuring you don't need to get a headset that supports simultaneous Bluetooth (to mobile Discord) and 2.4GHz (to PS5) to chat with friends cross-platform. There are some other changes discussed too, with the theme seemingly being quality of life improvements that don't radically change the experience but do bring the PS5 user experience closer to the high bar set by the final iteration of the PS4 OS.

We had some great supporter questions too, discussing PS VR2 pre-orders, testing copying the shader cache from one PC to another - a kind of manual Shader Butler?! - and how the RTX 4090 is a 'bargain' according to Sam. Moreover, is Windows 11 actually 'safe' for gaming these days - or is Windows 10 still the way to go?

I won't spoil the answers to these questions, but I will mention that you can submit your own questions for us to answer in the Direct by liittyminen DF Patreoniin. Se auttaa tukemaan tekemäämme työtä ja antaa sinulle pääsyn todella ihanaan samanmielisten ihmisten yhteisöön Discordissa. Joten: liity meihin!

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