Mercenaries is not sustainable with the current UEFN engine

General Feedback & Requests
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We can’t keep up with the issues that are presented from all sides every time. For a year now I ve asked Epic to go in the project together, show them all the issues that happen when you scale a UEFN project, then report them in an effort to fix them. But nothing, the same issues remain, HLODs still cause 600mb edits on a single actor transform, Switch crashes with verse construction, Mem calc exponentially increases when you move actors away from the center of the map, URC adds around 4 times the wait time on any action, Creatures and Guards cause server lag, BP actors past 19k actors lag servers past 11 players, 150m derenders any player, their weapon fire and audio (only in Creative maps, BR is fine), and so so much more.

Wait times have worsened as well, now with the verification step taking extra 2 mins on live edit, HLOD generation is now 7 times longer due to URC checking each chunk as it gets generated, and our wait time is still at 1hr 36 mins to do mem calc, which rarely can fail due to the 4hr server ending.

I 've also added a second PC to my workflow to simply do mem calc since they take so long, but now FN can’t run on it at all, even if I turn off my antivirus. All these issues just stack and eventually make me want to move on and simply make mini-games.

I can’t keep up with this, the Mercenaries team is a team of two. We can’t rebuild the game at this scale when so many things can go wrong at the same time. It took me 4 hours yesterday only to start mem calc, and I didn’t manage to do it. On my alt PC, live edit doesn’t even load, or URC can’t even sync changes.

I am just forced to give up now, and the game only took a week to go from 9k to 100 players again, even with all the marketing pushes that Epic did. We can’t sustain it with this state of the engine, and unless Epic sits down with us and we collaborate/fix those issues together, all future projects will run into the same issues.

And it’s unfair because when Epic encounters these, I am sure they ll either use a UE5 workaround, or fix the issue and we have to revive the game again till another issue kills it.

I don’t even know what to say anymore, I am just incredibly frustrated that I don’t have control over these issues and Epic has only gone more distant in helping address memory and perf issues.

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@Wertandrew Thank you for your feedback. While I cannot guarantee a response, I can confirm that this has been forwarded to the appropriate team.

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Defnietely can confirm alot of these issues as well in my projects

  • Memory calculation on bigger maps can take extremely long to a point that the 4 hour mark of the server is not even enough for calculation as well as memory calculation being inconsistent on devices. There are a lot of people now cheating the system by simply calculating on other devices
    => The memory calculation needs to be in UEFN and not ingame via teleorting. Memory calculation right now is absolutely fine on smaller projects but on bigger projects you literally need another device or you can not work for hours

  • Open world maps with many actors in general seem to be fine on my end since my maps are not as complex as werts but still as a certain threshold of actors is exceeded having more than 12 players causes huge lags. It seems that is has gotten a bit better but the fix for now is limiting the players to 16 or 12 which makes open world specific maps that are not just empty maps with cars and all weapons to feel extremely empty compared to their size

  • 150 m render distance is also a thing also for my non combat focused maps its less of an issue but is def a thing in combat focused maps that need the render distance. A while back I made a collab map with an influencer which was a completely new zonewars experience but with big maps and map voting but players that were far away were basically invisible

My biggest wish would be improved memory calculation as not having a second PC ready this makes me wait for 3-4 hours without being able to do anything :slight_smile:

Nonetheless I am still really happy on all the new featuers that epic is developing and hope this issues will get fixed at some point :slight_smile:

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Server time is not displayed anywhere in live edit, even though its crucial for lengthy tasks such as mem calc, and half of the memory optimization tools that Creative has, UEFN doesn’t which makes it really hard for large scale maps to optimize content.

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I feal your pain! We’ve been working on our project for 8 months and as we near the end of the project there are major issues Epic needs to work on but I also might have some tips for you.
URC - Oh how I hate URC, after having our project scrambled with mysterious transforms being reset to 0,0,0 inside blueprints and destroying weeks of work I had to get my hands dirty on the very very undocumented command line features. Epic needs to add extensive documentation to this or enable these features in the GUI, like restoring a deleted file, not alone a bunch of them is an exercise in frustration. I’ve been a server security admin for 20+ years and Linux for 30 so command line is not something I’m afraid of, but undocumented features on source control is not acceptable.
After dealing with said URC issue we finally gave up and moved to perforce helix (it’s free for teams under 5). I put it on a sever here in our studio (you could run it on the same or second pc you’re using) and let me say after a fairly decent learning curve and some performance tweaks it’s worlds better!
Slow everything - Boy so true, all our systems are already pretty high spec, 64gb ram, AMD Ryzen 7 7090x, RTX 3080’s and SSD and we were stil running into delays. Just upgraded the main system to Ryzen 9 9950x, with a 4090 and 192gb of ram and 4tb PCI5 NVME corsair storage and UE5 flies, UEFN, just maybe 10% faster. If anything give your systems the most ram they will take, doens’t even have to be fast, older DDR4 is fine just buy the max as UEFN will use it and it will help.

Which brings me to my next tip, use UE5 for everything you can, use tools (or write them, you can execute python to do mass things like merging materials or setting parameters in bulk). You can build your map or building in UE5, migrate the map over, copy everything over and paste to your main map or put it inside a BP Actor. We can’t do level instances (yet) and scene graph is getting there so it’s a decent work around. UE5 really speeds things up but obviously this depends on your gameplay and what you’re doing, we’re not using any of Fornite’s materials, props, assets, etc.

Anyway we’re a two person team as well so I can understand the overwhelming amount of work and with the big move to bringing in more players for revenue it’s going to make it even harder for small bootstrapped studios to get going. Hopefully they address this soon, Helene made me cancel my trip to Unreal Fest but I’ll be at the next one. Cheers!