Others Unreal Engine Choosing a game engine for a 3D/2D game, what kind of systems are you guys running?

[Hard Bone Games]

Hi guys,

Currently, I'm developing a game that combines a 3D overworld with 2D cutscenes, similar to "Summer Memories." I've already started using Unreal Engine and have most systems in place, but I'm considering changing the engine because I'm not sure about optimizing it for very low-end PCs.

I'm curious about the systems you guys are using. My goal is to potentially optimize the game for Android in the future, though that's further down the development line. If there's a chance to switch to Godot now, I'm considering it.

By the way I am only using Unreal because the sex animation on the overworld will feel a lot better with dynamic animations, I am not sure on how to do this in Godot so I will cut that part if I decided to change engine.

This is my pre-alpha footage.


Thanks,
x

 

[TheExordick]

Optimization is a big task independently from the engine you are using. UE has some fancy systems that are taxing on the performance (lumen for example) but it is possible to have great performance on low end machines with UE as well.

Also UE gives you a lot of tools and profilers to optimize your game. I personally don't know about Godot but i doubt you can get the same level of insight.

The common pitfall of performance generally are:
- too many triangles in the scene, not enough LODs on the meshes
- too many draw calls ( draw calls comes from everything that needs to be rendered, different shaders, different meshes, transparencies, lights, shadows, reflections and so on)
- too many events on tick (logics and aniamtions)
- heavy particle effects
- Too many AIs
- dynamic lights

and the problem is the same with any game engine. Probably your perception is that Godot is running faster because there are no "fancy systems" to activate while on unreal engine everything is put to max quality at project creation. If you start to turn off nice and fancy system and optimize the scenes you can get very good results.
And last but not least baked lights can boost the performance tremendously. (i could never get good results though)

 

[Hard Bone Games]

Optimization is a big task independently from the engine you are using. UE has some fancy systems that are taxing on the performance (lumen for example) but it is possible to have great performance on low end machines with UE as well.

Also UE gives you a lot of tools and profilers to optimize your game. I personally don't know about Godot but i doubt you can get the same level of insight.

The common pitfall of performance generally are:
- too many triangles in the scene, not enough LODs on the meshes
- too many draw calls ( draw calls comes from everything that needs to be rendered, different shaders, different meshes, transparencies, lights, shadows, reflections and so on)
- too many events on tick (logics and aniamtions)
- heavy particle effects
- Too many AIs
- dynamic lights

and the problem is the same with any game engine. Probably your perception is that Godot is running faster because there are no "fancy systems" to activate while on unreal engine everything is put to max quality at project creation. If you start to turn off nice and fancy system and optimize the scenes you can get very good results.
And last but not least baked lights can boost the performance tremendously. (i could never get good results though)

The reason I think Godot is good for low end systems is because it is so barebones that I start with almost nothing and activate the things I need when I need them, unlike unreal a lot of things are already activated at the start and I am not sure which things I could turn off safely without breaking things.

As for the pitfalls I mostly take those things into account while developing and even when I am making the models and textures, I have a lot of knowledge and experience in optimizing models, textures and materials so this is not a problem. The only thing I am not sure about is the tick events, I mostly use 1 time ticks since this is just a adventure rpg game I don't need to have events that's active all the time, but even so I am not sure about that.

As for optimization in the future I was thinking of grouping a lot of expensive things like dynamic lights, transparency and reflection and have them under "Fancy Features" for the player to turn off if they have a low end system or if it's taxing their system.

by the way, thanks for the reply.