When listening to the dev commentary of Valve games, they talk about how much work goes into level design planning even just for the sake of optimization, like clearly delineating barriers between major regions (doorways) so the engine can unload objects from other areas.
I get the impression the “First step easy” setup from UE5 may have made it so that more people can give us unoptimized messes, but still only a few rare devs understand proper optimization at all levels of development.
odelik@lemmy.today 9 hours ago
UE5 performance is fine these days if the game developer actually utilizes the tooling in place to catch problematic assets, sequences, blueprints, and more. Now, those tools may not be the easiest to use, but they do exist, and, with official documentation. It’s got challenges, but the tooling exists. In 5.6 there was even an expirmental plugin released that’s supposed to help with the burden of integrating this work, so it’s obvious there’s effort being put into providing tools for developers to make performant games
The problem is that takes additional time in a production pipeline, and is uaully pushed off to the side til the end of a game’s dev cycle instead of the beginning, if it’s done at all. And due to the way that many game studios are funded and operate, it’s not uncommon for product quality to follow the model of delivering features first to meet funding milestones instead of focusing on making sure the work that’s being introduced is also performant.