MisterChedda

@SoftEngineer TW4 demo wasn't GPU though, character animations in it were purely a CPU scaling story of rearchitecting UE's default anim blueprint evaluation into batched, parallelisable work that can run on worker threads

Depends on what you mean. A character with 66 bones and 4 weights is already quite heavy. Animating 100 characters with 16 bones each and 2 blend weights is easy. On the other hand, animating more than a few dozen fully rigged characters is hard. When you play a game, and you see a ton of characters on screen - they are typically LoDs, like maybe 20 are full rigs, and the rest are drastically simplified skeletons and skins, running at reduced animation tick rate. The reason is quite simple, if you have 100 bones to animate, that's 400 animation curves to sample, at least, 4 curves per quaternion of a bone, and that's just for rotation. If you have some kind of displacement going on, such as for hips, shoulders, face etc - that would be more curves. Then, we need to update node graph for bone hierarchies, that's a bunch of 4x4 matrix multiplications. Now, if we have animation blending - you have to multiply the previous work by the number of animations you're blending. Then we also have bounds calculation, because graphics engines need to know the space bounds that a mesh occupies. Very quickly the memory footprint explodes, and there's a ton of ALU as well. You can get far by carefully packing animation and transform data in memory, but it's inherently a problem with a massive amount of data. I was recently playing Cyberpunk 2077, and wherever you look - there are typically no more than ~16 animated characters on screen at the same time. Why "on screen" matters? - because a smart animation system can take advantage of that and pause animation if the character is not on screen. GPU-driven animation and skinning system are not really new, we've been moving in that direction in an ad-hoc way. Recent notable examples would be: 1. CDPR's Witcher 4 demo 2. Remedy's Alan Wake 2, where vegetation is driven through skinned animation 3. Warhammer 40k Space Marine 2, uses the same idea as Alan Wake 2 for animating huge number of Xenos

Most of the Witcher 4 demo discourse was either "are the visuals real" or "we've heard these NPC promises before" The interesting part was underneath: Unreal's new animation framework. So I rebuilt the Matrix Awakens demo on it to see if it works youtube.com/watch?v=O_FPum…

@leejihoondd @CodeRed_dev wrote some thoughts here, Source 2 itself is not open source only the tooling which s&box provides around the engine is

@CodeRed_dev MIT for a full game engine is rare. what's the catch?

Is this Roblox for adults?

@skx_doom love SSFS!

I cannot prove it yet, but seems like my "Screen Space Fog Scattering" plugin is involved here. Finally... the two things that are born to be together.

i wonder if they are going to keep it as experimental till UE6 but i hope not. i'm on 5.6 and I already see the perf gains from here. the tooling is evolving (and Im sure CDPR is helping them a lot here) but very promising stuff

you can use MM with UAF ofcourse. UAF is a beautiful rewrite of unreal's animation system from the groundup. throwing away a lot of the prev system's closeness to blueprint / UObject stuff (and the game thread)

Unreal's new animation framework (literally called "Unreal Animation Framework") is very performant. In some quick benchmarking it frees up the game thread a lot vs ABPs when you have a ton of them

its also a classic "does nothing, wins" opportunity for valve because the downside for valve is basically nothing but the upside is s&box creates roblox 2 and the distribution is entirely on steam

plus you cannot publish outside of Steam (maybe doesn't matter much for PC only games but you're ruling out any console or mobile ports)

i can't yet take s&box seriously as a game engine because it basically rests on Valve to continue to be chill with Facepunch - we don't really know what the terms of facepunch<>Valve are for Source 2 licensing or if they are revocable

@UBadler @ChubbyPixel everything is a hook, visuals are the first one though

Dear gamedev community, what do you think about this take from @ChubbyPixel? #gamedev #indiegamedev

@MR3Dev i dont know why people are worried about Fortnite, thatd be like killing the golden goose. Paywalling UE would be the first "obvious" move to maximise shareholder value 🤡

If this ever comes to pass I think we can bid farewell to us indies using Unreal

@LocoDev7701 so good! are you using the new UAF (from the Witcher4 demo) or is this all classic ABP blending?

Obstacle Avoidance System on UE5 #ue5 #devlog

@steelsoulshaper looks so good!

🍸It's not VA-11 Hall-A 🖥️It's not PC Building Simulator ☕It's not Coffee Talk But if my indie game reminds you of them… I'm probably doing something right. #indiegame #gamedev

@Butler__71 @LandfallGames

We are in Fortnite!

@jogamedev so true - even something like a 10% cut on your first $100k in lifetime revenue would be massive for first-time devs trying to go full-time

There's no question that Valve earns their 30% cut; however, I think they'd make even more money in the long term if they took a smaller cut from indie devs. Here's why: Many super talented devs are struggling to create their games in their free time - on nights and weekends. An extra 20% could make a huge difference. If you turn a part-time indie into a full-time indie, the chances that they'll make significantly more money and finish their games faster is obviously much higher. So this is my message to @Steam: for your own benefit, consider giving smaller devs a bigger cut. More full-time indies means more money for you in the long run. Be in the business of making part-timers full-timers and it'll play out in everyone's favor.

@jogamedev @Human_yo_yo so very good, thanks for sharing!

It's super important for gamedevs to understand why some games innately perform better on social media than others. I explored this concept deeper with my friend @Human_yo_yo and he brought up some important points so I'm sharing the entire convo here:

so true