Agree, Cry Engine - aka Star Engine, went a long way. I'm still waiting to see how it handles a large crowd of relative complex AI ran locally and not in the cloud, but is a very good example - I was thinking the same. Still, the 1 billion mark is for practically 2 games, along side building teams and acquiring property and building studios, not one rewritten engine. Another one that runs well is the ID from Indiana Jones, at least in terms of scaling on the CPU.
To compare to other games engines, for instance Kingdom Come Deliverance 1, ran poorly in the major city or big crowds as well, due to AI I'm guessing. Stalker 2 also tends to have the GPU usage drop and run poorly in the same settings (Immortals of Aveum has a similar issue). Stalker 2 and KCD, both have relative complex AI, not just your simple pedestrian AI that aimlessly goes around like in other games. Sure, AC Unity and Hitman can have large crowds, but they're simulated at a very simplistic level.
Anyway, just as Star Engine evolved over the years, so does UE5. There is no game to see how it handles its latest version. Plus, some "good practices" perhaps are ignored - like I've posted above, to avoid overdraw just either use old techniques or use go for high quality models with Nanite, don't combine...
Other issues that he talks about, like the texture streaming... never had any issues. I hope people are not still thinking to run games from old HDDs?
Yeah... i'm not saying UE is bad, (i know you don't think that) i'm a huge fan of it, so far as i'm concerned it does some impressive things, but it does have flaws, as does Star Engine. Another thing that i agree with about UE is that for as good as it looks the different materials types do blend together, it all has the same plastic quality to the surfaces appearance.
And yes there are some other very good engines out there.
Texture Streaming / Traversal Streaming, if you use high res texture, 4K or have a lot of independent textures in the scene UE does have issues, i know that from experience, they can load in blurry, it is one of its problems, it doesn't deal well with very high resolution textures, if you have it scatter a bunch of the free Nordic Coast assets in, you will see what i mean, they use 4K and 8K textures, just a few assets with those textures and it all becomes a blurry mess.
Star Citizen AI / NPC's. Given its an MMO everyone else needs to see what you're seeing, if you're running NPC's and their AI locally on your machine there are serval stages your actions need to go through before other clients see what you did, this is problematic not least because everyone's internet and client performance is different, if the server is handling all that its streamed to everyone at the same time.
It does create a problem, Infamously in Star Citizen if the servers are overloaded the NPC's don't work well, Server Meshing should solve that problem and
early days of Server Meshing being in now that looks like it might be true, while still not perfect they are 90% better, they no longer stand around looking lost or take 10 seconds to react when you shoot at them, now sometimes they are a little too keen shooting back, chasing you shouting profanities at you, need's more work but infinitely better and fun.
Having 600 players per shard is also a bonus even if there are now 2 systems with the new one, Pyro, being 2X the size of Stanton. its feels a lot more alive than it did with a 100 player cap,
not really an MMO, you're always seeing people out and about now, that's with a 10 server shard mesh, i can't wait for them to scale it up to dozens. But for now with 2 systems 600 players per shard seems fine, you don't want too much people going on.
