Robin van Ee

Game developer, longtime Unity user.

[Robin van Ee @robin_van_ee]

@AidenMux @digitalfoundry @oliemack Hot take but games should be optimized for hardware people have. It shouldn't be necessary to buy a €900 console to avoid resolutions that were appropriate in 2004.

[Robin van Ee @robin_van_ee]

@FalconeerDev @gordlittle @willgoldstone Aren’t they all? I started on 2023.1 beta to avoid this kinda thing. It’s been a ride.

[Robin van Ee @robin_van_ee]

@FalconeerDev @hybridherbst The editor has switched to UITK by default but the old IMGUI inspector is still (automatically) used when needed.

Not sure what issue you encountered because it’s not gone.

[Robin van Ee @robin_van_ee]

@Cyber_Bleed @Dachsjaeger @astaranx PS5 and Series X versions are usually near-identical anyway. If you’re comparing against PC you don’t need to compare both.
DF usually does a console review separately.

[Robin van Ee @robin_van_ee]

@timsoret @TheRealEricHu That said I think Unity should set themselves more ambitious performance targets.

They released that HDRP landscape demo a few years back which could absolutely *murder* a mid-range GPU. I imagine this would run at 20FPS on a PS5 given the relative performance. Who is this for?

[Robin van Ee @robin_van_ee]

@timsoret @TheRealEricHu I wonder what the results are in a build. Running the game in-editor always about halves my performance.

[Robin van Ee @robin_van_ee]

My Tweets barely get impressions anymore. Not even a quarter of what it was just months ago.
Even my timeline only seems to be a handful of accounts.

Guess I’ll just follow the crowd.

[Robin van Ee @robin_van_ee]

@LooperVFX @sebify @xoofx @gamefromscratch Yep. That’s the gist of it. It’ll become faster overall too.

[Robin van Ee @robin_van_ee]

@guycalledfrank @noio_games And if a solution for that arrives that I can buy, I'll be sure to evaluate it.

Until then I'll use the engine I have with the options it provides. Plus some manually placed sky occluders because that was an easy feature to add.

[Robin van Ee @robin_van_ee]

@guycalledfrank @noio_games CD Projekt, Bethesda, Nintendo, etc. use no light baking for their open world games. CDPR has optional ray tracing just like me. Bethesda and Nintendo use a cubemapping method I've evaluated but don't really like.

[Robin van Ee @robin_van_ee]

@guycalledfrank @noio_games Yes, but these are major companies with big in-house engine teams, and presumably render farms to perform these massive bakes in reasonable timeframes.

I'm a solo developer.

[Robin van Ee @robin_van_ee]

@guycalledfrank @noio_games In a 27km² game world with dynamic time of day and weather? Yeah, a lightmapper wouldn't work here.
The only baked solutions I evaluated were Enlighten and Adaptive Probe Volumes.

I settled on two options, no GI, or ray tracing.

[Robin van Ee @robin_van_ee]

@_kzr Is that VFX graph?

[Robin van Ee @robin_van_ee]

@Rezuaq @Shaialabeef Yes, without ray tracing it's always going to be inaccurate. But it offers a bit of depth in scenes that would otherwise look flat.

Most games do offer a way to turn it off though, which also saves a good chunk of performance. Especially at high resolutions it's quite expensive

[Robin van Ee @robin_van_ee]

We should not worship technologies, and try to push it with no regards to their limitations. Instead recognize the diversity of tech to serve different game designs.
It's always chosen for a reason.

[Robin van Ee @robin_van_ee]

Been seeing some worship of baked lighting in here. It often ignores the fact that it's limited to certain genres.

Here are some games that do not use any form of baked lighting. Sometimes rolling with no form of indirect lighting at all. Sometimes opting for different options.

[Robin van Ee @robin_van_ee]

@guycalledfrank @noio_games Yeah let me just call Ubisoft and ask if they'll let me borrow their open world engine + render farm.

There's no baked lighting solution that would work for me.

[Robin van Ee @robin_van_ee]

@robcupisz Ending sentences with "at 30fps on a 4090" is not reassuring.

If you ship without a competent 60FPS mode on consoles these days you're not selling.