So I tried… Posted a long detailed message only to see that I had to sign up… That account is not connected to the answers account… Ummm no… signing up every second of every day just means don’t use it -_-… Funny how every site out there wants my email account.
AnswerHub is a customer service 'BugTracker" website used by Epic to track bugs and answer questions, there is no reason you can’t use your same username/password over there. The forums here are a community resource where we can help each other with questions on how to do something, but there is no guarantee Epic staff will answer a question here (although they usually will as well). When you create a new on AnswerHub, it is assigned a ticket # and get’s tracked to completion, is the reason bug reports should be sent there.
There are no other websites you need to create an account for. I’ll leave it up to you, but I highly recommend that you use AnswerHub for issues like crashes or tools not working correctly, if Epic isn’t informed about issues it is possible they may not be fixed in a timely manner.
Previously UE4 Lightmass never used 100% cpu 4.5 uses 100 and is hella slow, also random crash PC previously stable.
You do if you are painting your terrain or moving lights, or moving lights that have baked on a object or… or… or…
Personally I would rather just have the unlit option mean (DON’T SHOW LIGHTING, DON’T COMPILE WHAT YOU CAN’T SEE ie. Shadows) even when I turn off view realtime (which likes to turn itself on now and then) it still compiles the shaders…
Unless there is a setting I don’t know about well ya…
If you mean the editor is building the lights automatically every time you make a change then there is a problem there and it shouldnt be happening. As a temporary solution you can enable Force No Precomputed Lighting in World Settings if you dont want to be bothered with lighting warnings.
I must of reported 20 - 30 Bugs so far via crash reports and Answerhub. Don’t worry I’m doing my part… I get the feeling that me and my team are part of a smaller case scenario, I don’t think large openworld RPG’s is UE4’s normal use case although I believe it’s getting closer every month. I’ll give props to the Epic guys, they are doing well and it’s the only other engine bar CryEngine that has a hope of getting it right.
But that being said, there is a lot of work needed. Also it’s work on my part as well, I’ve used Unity / CE and Frostbite but never Unreal before 4 months ago (Well I used UE3 for 2 weeks or something) but apart from that I’m a N00B to Unreal so some aspects I’d expect to work like other engines don’t. Some of it I’m stilly trying to wrap my head around.
I do think by far the biggest issues are with the terrain system, I’ve hardly had that many issues with anything else.
Shadow, i have a feeling that engine is constantly changing even at point with more things added to learn and so on. However there is a need of heavy polishing in a few areas. I’ve run across some limitations as well on how to use some stuff.
The accounts are the same but you have to sign in to the sites individually. Being logged in on the forums does not log you in on AnswerHub automatically. If you can’t sign in with the same username and password you use on the forums, please let us know. That should not be the case.
I agree, I don’t want the devs to get disheartened because they have done a bang up job and if there’s faith in any engine to get it right it’s Unreal… But I don’t think I could release a commercial game anytime soon.
So at the moment:
Performance as a whole is pretty poor in open world games, even with OC Volumes, LODs etc. Reasons:
Overdraw for foliage rendering models, which I’m sure Epic are well aware of. SpeedTree seems to really want to crush a GPU’s spirit, we really need some sort of multi-pass DTR especially for transparency, our senior engineers and myself are looking into a solution. Now isn’t all about performance, foliage and water is pretty ugly as well… 
Ok, terrain system which I keep harping on about… I found a solution in the end, the best way to approach texturing terrains in openworld games and that was to use a splatmap to heightmap converter in WM to export the weightmaps into Unreal adding a Gaussian blur , trying to use Heightblend even with an Alpha blend for splats doesn’t work as soon as you try and paint it will convert the quad into whatever texture layer you paint.
But maybe someone can answer ? There doesn’t seem a correct way to use splats without a LOT of work another thing is the sheer amount of polys on something like a 2X2 quad 2017 it’s something around 8 Million and people are telling others to save a couple of hundred tris on foliage models, it really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme. I mentioned before a 1009X1009 terrain is best on a 1X1 quad = 350,000 polys… Then you can’t detail paint or the tools go weird… (Weird as in you paint massive blocks) it’s because of the vertex painting method, see here guy who suggested a perfectly viable solution to : Terrain Layer Painting Improvement - Feedback & Requests - Epic Developer Community Forums
Also add offsets to base pixel error and map distortions to try and cut down the weight / impact of a terrain, not sure what I’m talking about? Here: Unity - Manual: Terrain settings
One of the main factors of performance is down to shadows and lighting / material complexity more than anything (foliage *cough), if you have a TOD system in short you’re up the river without a paddle. Even with one Skylight and DL, you can cut the FPS in half with a couple of hundred trees and a ton of rock meshes say goodbye to your precious 780’s performance. Even with Cull volumes, Lod’s / Terrain LOD’s with simplygon best thing to do is bake, which in a 20KM + scene split is going to require a render farm and the only advantage to baking is performance.
Set your scene to static for directional and skylight and bake, watch the performance jump back up… Not that Photon mapping actually adds anything to the actual terrain or anything, it doesn’t look better for it (Well the meshes do in instances) in all fairness Skylight and Dynamic lighting looks just fine anyway. After baking it will restore the performance and stop pounding your GPU, LPV does nothing but add additional latency… Solution?
Well I’m scratching my head on one… I think you have two options, turn to expensive middleware (which I’m not keen on) or tweak the engine to be able to handle it… Or dare I say it? Baked Occlusion, yes that old nutshell like Umbra with includes a shadow caster occluder and it’s far quicker than any lightmapping process, but it occludes and makes things run well… I know what you might say? It’s been released for UE4 with the IPP, well I’ve sent off for a quotation and I get the feeling it’s going to get expensive. I wonder what other engine has Umbra, Enlighten and PowerVR all viable solutions to tackle these sort of issues in-built I wonder? 
Engine scalability seems to have near enough no effect maybe 5 / 10 FPS bonus if you’re lucky, you guys have done a great job with the post they sure are lightweight I’m actually unsure bar shadows what the scalability settings are for, all they do is make things look uglier and let you slip through the terrain at weird angles… Maybe make things look extra blurry with the screen resolution.
Static batching is really a necessity especially if you’re wanting to tackle mobile section (I make openworld games and I could still do with it), yes I understand there is memory trade off. Just add a bool to switch it on and off if the user requires it or not, but it’s a necessity…
is the base stuff, even before I get to the actual crashing. Get all sorted out and UE4 will be a dream come true for everyone…
I can’t actually believe , but you’re lagging behind Unity in some cases?? One option and please look hard into that, could you discuss with your IPP about doing a package on a per seat basis? Umbra and Enlighten sort a lot of these issues out, maybe a $1500.00 or even $2000.00 price tag for a bundled Unreal might be an option. Because Unreal looses it’s edge when it costs 50K+ 5% for everything, plus the time to make sure it’s all integrated correctly and then support contracts etc.
Or roll your own, whatever you guys at Epic fancy.
Ive submitted tons of reports some get traction but most just end up being ignored. I have one with the exact steps to repeat and I have even followed it up with no response. Look at answerhub it is FULL of unacknowledge issues.
Then you can blame yorself, for bug report not being reported and looked at. Quit whining, and post bug with reproduction steps.
In general I agree. But there is hope!
On trello:
There is new section for open world support.
One of the biggest performance hitters in open world are shadows map. Try reducing distance of shadows map to something small like 1500, and instead use ray traced shadows.
Shadow maps have more or less fixed vertex cost, while performance of ray traced shadow is in pixel. The further the shadow is the less space it takes ergo it cost less.
Also trryto disable early z-pre pass. It could save you 2 or 3ms. (r.EarlyZPass=0).
I do not really have good know-how about rendering but looking at end results similarly complex scenes in both UE4 and CryEngine 3, the CryEngine 3 seems to perform like 100% better. And to be perfectly honest it still looks better in terms of shading and lighting. Not much, but there is still edge to CE3.
For example in UE4 my not so complex scene (there is not even foliage in it!) have about 40fps. And there nothing that would justify that performance. I tried to look trough various stat commands and biggest offender seemed (after dynamic lighting or even slightly higher) occlusion culling. Of course disabling OC, increases cost of rendering, which doesn’t give any performance gains.
Similiar scene in CE3 have about 80fps.
Edit:
Of course I’m talking about dynamic lighting. I refuse to lightmaps on anything bigger than house interior. Lightmaps in open enviroment only adds time, add memory usage (big!), doesn’t really any quality benefits.
I’m all for some precomputed solution. As long as it doesn’t require lightmaps and allow for real-time lighting changes.
Thanks, I’m going to try 4.5 week and try the RT instead of CSM shadows… Really appreciate it, at point I’ll take anything I can get :)…
And I 100% agree, CryEngine for outdoor scenes generally runs about 60 - 80% faster and looks better for it… Not by a lot but still, I’d be happy just with the performance part. Such a shame about CE it really is…
Hi everyone,
A few users have mentioned crashes on here, but we can only truly investigate these crashes if you provide us with detailed reports on the AnswerHub Bug Reports section: https://answers.unrealengine.com/spaces/11/bugs-and-crashes.html
More information for how to submit detailed Bug Reports can be found here: How do I report a bug? - Programming & Scripting - Epic Developer Community Forums
If you have already submitted an AnswerHub bug report for the you mentioned, we’d appreciate if you could provide the link to the post here. can help us to make the connection between the two.
Thank you for the help! Our goal is to get UE4 as stable as possible, but we can’t do it alone.
Hi Stephen, I appreciate the response and I believe we are all interested in making UE4 as stable as possible. I know many users have reported answers not ever getting responses and seem to be forgotten. Also some issues, particularly ones I have encountered with 4.5, I don’t have the steps to reproduce them as I am just doing general work and they don’t seem to happen at reproducible points. I have always provided information in the crash report about what I was doing before the crash but I don’t know of any way to track those or see if there has been any work in that regard.
I do really appreciate your hard work and one of the reasons for moving to UE4 over other engines was that you actually do response to support requests and fix thing however many issues just seem forgotten on the answerhub.
One I have noticed that never got a response was one I submitted: For loop with custom event and format string - internal compiler error - Programming & Scripting - Epic Developer Community Forums one isn’t a huge as you can work around it with a bit of work and avoiding said situations but I went to the trouble of minimizing the to the smallest set I could and submit it and haven’t received any followup.
I tried using the answerhub but no one replies i paid today for i am more accustomed to UE3 and i am having a very unique problem which i cannot solve. The graphics used in level creation are either perfect which only occurs when using a sample game or terrible on some sample games and when creating a new level.
As stated in your other thread, you need to be patient, you only submitted to Answerhub an hour ago, and in fact since then I have responded. Again as has stated, more information is required.
I think I can answer one landscape question:
sounds like you’re using weight-blended layers when your layers aren’t always adding up to 100%. When painting a weight-blended layer it renormalizes all layers to total 100%. If there was previously nothing painted at that location at all then it ends up setting the layer you’re painting to 100% in the whole square bounds around the brush.
The fix is to use non-weight-blended layer-infos (which makes the layer painting independent of each other), or to use one more layer to act as the “base” layer.
Hi BlueByLiquid,
Epic’s engineers and support staff do spend a large percentage of their time reviewing the AnswerHub and the Forums and making an effort to answer many user questions; however due to the sheer volume of questions and discussions, we are not able to guarantee a response for everything, nor can we reasonably attempt to. Epic does focus on investigating all bug reports, and assisting users with their installation and setup issues, as these can help identify issues with the engine and lead to improvements for all. For questions about usability, we rely on members of the community to share their knowledge and expertise and grow the rest of the community with them. We also treat every question as an opportunity to expand upon our own documentation and tutorials so that the answers can be found more readily, and encourage our users to share their knowledge on the Wiki. Additionally, we are working on improvements to the AnswerHub to help improve the visibility of questions that pertain to users’ interests, and encourage other users to help answer questions.
Cheers
4.5 constantly is crashing on me. 99.5% of the time it’s when I’m using Cascade.
I feel you. I’ve been reporting every single crash though, hoping that it would help.