When discussing performance issues in games, how much blame should be put on the game engine that a developer is using? A while back, Unity had somewhat of a bad reputation among people online due to its wide use in a lot of low quality mobile games. However, game developers were quick to point out that that was less of an issue of Unity itself and more about how people were using Unity. Does the same idea apply to UE5? Or are there legitimate issues with the engine that hurts the end product?
The real answer here is the practical approach - you do what you can with what you've got. It is entirely possible to reach out to the engine developers and make requests, but they have their own priorities and not beholden to each licensor for quick turnaround on bug fixes and feature requests, so it is up to the individual dev teams to recognize what they can and can't do within the time they have. When this is the case, developers must pivot to working within the areas that they can work - our own code, our own assets, our own resource usage - in order to bring things back to the needed performance levels.
I actually found a bug with one of UE5's systems a while back. It was a broken system that couldn't be used the way it was. I reported it to Epic via their Unreal Developer Network and they acknowledged the bug and said it had been prioritized for a fix, but that it would likely not make it to a public engine release for at least two version updates. That put the coming fix several months away, which was too far away for our needs - we couldn't table development for several months to wait for their fix. Instead, we had to come up with a different solution that would work within our time frame, which we did.
If we can't fix the engine, we must work within the framework it provides and do what we can. Players aren't going to accept unperformant gameplay and accept the nuance of engine issues, they'll stop playing the game out of frustration and the game will likely not do well. It behooves us as practical developers to work around the issues as best we can and produce the best game we can within our circumstances. Every engine is a big batch of tradeoffs - they are really good at some things and not so good at others - this is why we evaluate what kind of game we're trying to make, what kind of technology we need to make it, and what kind of engine would best suit our needs. We have only so many development resources and development time, so it is up to our leadership to make judicious decisions when determining where and how to spend our developer resources.
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