I wanted to migrate my game from an old engine that no longer provides support to something that offers support and Unreal Engine, with its Blueprint development system that doesn’t require programming knowledge, seemed like a good choice for me. I don’t regret it because I’m having a lot of fun.
However, after releasing the upgraded version of my game, many people are having trouble launching it. I knew Unreal was overkill for a simple visual novel (with a few videos), but I thought, ‘better safe than sorry.’
Of course, I can’t do much for people who don’t bother to keep their drivers up to date, but what shocks me is that some claim to be able to run games like Skyrim but can’t run my game, which is something that could have been released on the Super NES.
I probably made a mistake by choosing the latest version of Unreal (5.3…), which naturally requires more effort for modest configurations. Now I would like to know if you could help me minimize everything Unreal has to offer so that it is as resource-efficient as possible.
My game only offers 2D renders (a lot of renders, currently over 3000) and videos in webm format (again, quite a few, close to a thousand).
The game launches on a looping video with an interface overlaid on top. Many people are encountering this error:
For a visual novel I would have gone with version 4.27. It stilk didn’t have such steep requirements.
You can try turning off lumen, nanite & virtual shadow maps to ease the performance issues.
You may be loading too much into memory for older systems. You could async load resources when needed.
Unreal 5.3.2 unfortunately has larger min requirements than 4. Check the requirements against your average potential customers machine and make a decision based on that.
Thank you for the quick response! Yes, it was a big mistake on my part to opt for the latest version. Do you think a migration is possible? I’ll try to see, I don’t think it should take too long (well, I hope so). I’m only using one plugin and it should be compatible.
You would definitely get a larger audience with lower minimum requirement. There do seem to be some plugins that are able to downgrade assets like: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/asset-downgrader
there are a few threads on the forum that mention other plugins. You can search for them on the forum if you need them.
Some blueprint internals can be straight up copy and pasted selecting the nodes and using ctrl+c => ctrl + v but if the node doesn’t exist in the older version it may show up blank.
Depending on the amount of logic code you have this might be an option.
