Pretty sure it says “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

It’s hard to understand without the associated hand gestures though.

(Edit to add in seriousness: yes, the first part says it can’t pop up the integrated flash, second part says try restarting the camera, I think)

In terms of the overall point, I was talking about Unreal specifically. If it makes you understand better that all engines are geared toward specific game features, great, read it that way. However, you still don’t seem to understand that UE5 isn’t the right engine out-of-the-box for every game. So even if I buried that, and now it’s clear, you’re still in denial.

You keep saying it, but at the scale of games Bethesda makes it isn’t simply a fact that switching engines will be faster or easier. Even switching a code base from UE3 to UE4, or UE4 to UE5 wasn’t/isn’t a simple task (I’ve done it, I know.) Completely switching engines means you’re losing almost everything. You simply don’t seem to understand the scale of work entailed with moving major features from one engine to another. Or for maintaining features in an engine you don’t have full control of. I’ve done that too.

You’ve already said that you can’t be convinced otherwise though, so clearly you think you’re smarter than them, despite their deep knowledge of what they’re making.

I’m not saying they made all the best choices (or that they will going forward), but being flippant about the obviousness of the choice, and saying it is simply faster to switch engines demonstrates serious lack of knowledge and experience in the matter.

Yes. AA/AAA dev with UE3, UE4, UE5 and several proprietary engines. I’ve even contributed to Unreal Engine code with bug fixes.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is built on the Divinity Engine.

They don’t make the engine to make that game.

They shouldn’t, if they’re going to be an engine company. But anything that isn’t for keeping Fortnite pulling in billions of dollars is secondary.

It has gained features over a long period of time that would fit common use cases from other developers, regardless of what Epic has built.

Gained and lost. Very basic things necessary to make all the new features work with anything “not Fortnite” were missing when UE5 was released. It absolutely released as an engine for making Fortnite type games and everything else was/is an afterthought. You either had to make atrocious work arounds, engine changes, or wait for stuff to be fixed/added, delaying your project.

Meanwhile, nothing will convince me that Bethesda’s tech stack is worth keeping.

Do you have inside knowledge? UE5 isn’t the be-all end-all of game engines. Not everyone should switch to it. And frankly, as gamers and devs, we desperately need a good competitor to show up soon. Epic is gaining way too much control over our experiences.

The problem with Unreal Engine is (and always has been) that Epic makes the engine to make the game they’re currently working on. So right now it is a Fortnite engine. Previously it was a Gears of War engine. (Maybe throw Paragon in between.) It started out as the engine for Unreal Tournament.

So if you want to take that engine and start making a different type of game, it’s not necessarily going to have the tools you need. It’s not necessarily even going to do what you need it to do at the base engine level. Not that it couldn’t, but Epic doesn’t give a shit. So they give you all the source code and support for building your own version of the engine so you can add the features you need.

You want to make a vast, persistent, open world with vast dungeons you can enter and explore? Yeah you’re going to have to build support for that in the engine yourself. You want to do it without loading screens? Better get deep into that engine code. You want to have vehicles or mounts? NPCs, companions, AI enemies? When they hadn’t added them to Fortnite yet, totally up to you to figure out, and probably through modifying the engine. Need to make major rendering improvements? Better dig in. Problems with the art pipeline lacking features you need

Every time you touch engine code, that’s new tech debt. If a new version of the engine comes out, you have to integrate the changes. The longer the project goes on, the harder that becomes. Then Epic finally comes out with the feature you built yourself (say vehicles) but its only partly the way you did it. Now you’re fucked and you have to decide right there: strip out your changes, switch to theirs and redo most of your work, or, stop taking engine upgrades and integrate new features piecemeal. Now you’re in tech debt hell.

Almost every developer starts off with saying, “we’ll use the engine as is, no engine changes allowed!” Three months later the cynical director is having a high level meeting about allowing a major feature get implemented in engine code. But it will be alright, they tell themselves. 3-5 years later they’re up to their eyeballs in tech debt of engine changes, and realizing Amazing Game 2 either needs to be built using the old version of the engine they’re stuck on from 2-4 years ago, or built from the ground up on a new version of the engine.

I’d be thinking long and hard before switching to UE5 if I were Bethesda. And they have the advantage of having access to some of the best Unreal Engine developers in the world (Obsidian, The Coalition) now that they’re part of Microsoft. They’re also probably getting a bunch of pressure to make the change as the studios create a corps of experts.

If I were them I would be very tempted to make the necessary changes to Creation Engine, and stay far, far away from Unreal. Sacrifice a year or two and your top engine devs to overhaul the pain points of Creation Engine, keep full control of your pipelines and versioning, and make the game you want to make, not the one Epic wants you to make. You can even make awesome DLC or a smaller sequel game on the old branched engine while the overhaul takes place, and just have a small core team working out the kinks on the new system.

I guess my point is, tech debt is not the point, because there will always be tech debt. It’s a much bigger decision than that.

will stay a solid gaming rig for 4-5 years, longer if you like indies

Indies are often worse because they don’t have the time to spend on optimization. Especially those made to be first-person 3D.

Sticking to 2D/light-3D games, older games (try !patientgamers@lemmy.ml or !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works ) and games made PC first (not console first) are my tips as someone with a not-quite-gaming laptop. The last one is the hardest, but as someone who optimized games for consoles for years I can tell you optimization for PC was always the last thing on our minds: get it to run, and raise the required specs.

Not free? Says $1 USD.

Yeah, I went by the examples in the text, not the title :)

I think that’s what OP did mean given the examples.

I can keep you busy for a while in Canada…

Dildo, Newfoundland
Blow me Down (park), Newfoundland
Come by Chance, Newfoundland
Spread Eagle Bay, Newfoundland
Conception Bay, Newfoundland
Balls Creek, Nova Scotia
Lower Sackville, Nova Scotia
Ecum Secum, Nova Scotia
Meat Cove, Nova Scotia
Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia
Balls Falls, Ontario
Crotch Lake, Ontario
Old Cummer (train station in Ontario)
Opeepeesway Lake, Ontario
Bummer’s Roost, Ontario
Hooker Lake, Ontario
Redditt, Ontario
Big Woody, Manitoba
Climax, Saskatchewan
Big Beaver, Saskatchewan
Balzac, Alberta
Smuts Creek, Alberta
Stoner, British Columbia
Spuzzum, British Columbia
Skookumchuck, British Columbia
Nipple Mountain, British Columbia
Knipple Lake, British Columbia
Yoho (park), British Columbia
Snafu Lake, Yukon

There are many additional funny ones, but I mostly tried to keep with a theme above.

So, along the way back you can check out Salmon Arm, Vulcan, Eyebrow, Moose Jaw, Flin Flon, Punkydoodles Corners, Swastika, Emo, Utopia, Saint-Louis-du-Ha!-Ha!, Asbestos, Peakaboo Corner, Sober Island, Crapaud, Jerrys Nose, Witless Bay, Goobies, and many, many more.

It should say “porn” on the drive.