Mercenaries, a survival game focused on player interactions is coming together nicely, and it’s one of the biggest projects I’ve ever tackled. Two months before the end of our final development sprint I wanted to raise awareness of all the critical issues we are running into, hoping that by the time we are ready to release, some of them may be fixed as well. Currently, only two issues are close to blockers, and most of the others mean less content in v1 or less polishing.
At the end of this post, I made a little list of what we are missing to fully release a condensed scope and vision for Mercenaries (not reaching too far though).
- Global Memory spikes (20-30k observed) and 10k memory increase last update : some features may not make it into V1 in February, will observe as we are developing further. Not a big issue atm, but could potentially lock publishing and development towards January sprint. This is probably the biggest concern I have. We have gone to crazy lengths to optimize for memory in both art and mechanics, so anytime we see a spike that’s less content from v1 which will take away from initial impact of the game. Getting back 30% of memory for gamedev will be huge, so this issue is on top of my list atm.
EDIT: After running a mem calc test today, game has spiked from 66k at the largest memory cluster to 90k. This is now a genuine problem and a blocker because only 10k for mechanics seems impossible for the current scope (core engine logic is still missing, let alone the rest we want to do to polish). This is me adding like 20 devices, completely unjustified bump (on top of the two previous bumps I had 2 weeks ago).
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Guard and Creatures Navmesh causing massive server lag : For now, I am keeping both devices far away from each other and that seems to allow me to continue (not cause the 300 ping). Not a big issue as long as future regressions don’t cause it on a big scale regardless of distance (would love to use creatures and guards together ideally, but not the most important right now).
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Lack of in-game memory optimization tools : May cause around 5% of loss of content in project scale, because unoptimized level means no good use of those freed resources elsewhere.
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Players falling through geometry while World Streaming loads a new area : We might add failsafes so no big deal, but it takes away from the polish of the game if it happens on low-end platforms and character falls through geometry only to snap back to it (happens on both landscape and actors, old Creative use to freeze player in place until area was loaded, but not anymore). Will also take extra memory to add devices that track this bug in gameplay.
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Lag (losing frames) every 5 seconds upon starting the game : This one is the closest to a blocker that I have right now because I don’t know what causes it even though I accidentally fixed it in the past by duplicating the level (strangely). This one is strange and it’s stressing me out. 100% repro on all PCs we ve tried. You can see it at the end of this post, in the gameplay video I posted.
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Black snow particles when seen in front of the skybox, as a result of the physical material snow : I can’t fix that one (can’t edit physical material) but it doesn’t impact gameplay so I am leaving it in. We have to run our trailers when facing the mountain though cause it looks weird.
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Having an issue with limbs scaling when retargeting characters : I am constantly back and forth between UE and UEFN communities to figure out why and I think I am getting close to finding the issue. Worst case I’ll bake and export preview animations from UE5 so it’s not a blocker atm, just very time consuming.
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Level Sequences not working in sync when world streaming is enabled : Not a big deal, but it does increase the overall in-game memory because we have to set all animated assets to not stream, and that will prob add 5% more global memory. In combination with lock devices not working, it means that any unlockable door has to take global memory to animate, which adds to the memory fast, especially for large gates and animated scifi doors.
EDITOR (UEFN) :
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7-11 seconds of freezing every time there is a save action happening . Can still develop the game, but I lose 30% of my dev speed and paired with other waiting times, its a lot of wasted time. When URC is enabled, the lag is longer. Happens on projects with 40%+ project size and waiting time goes up based on it (another project has 40 secs of freezing per save action without URC counted for)Verse Explorer window seems to cause this I was told, closing it fixes it for me. -
HUD Scaling still applies to all of our Widgets : We asked 6 months ago to have HUD Scale option in Game Settings not scale the HUD elements with an anchor from the center of the screen, but individual anchors taken from each widget Canvas. Everyone would love to have this work in the way I am describing, I ve made detailed reports on that issue more than once, lmk if you need the tickets again. Atm this issue will cause polishing issues with HUD as we can’t control element position on any platform.
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Modal Widgets still have their bindings not work. Another one that was reported 6 months ago, both this one and the HUD scale are the highest priority HUD issues we have atm, along with controllers losing control on Verse buttons.
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Tracker persistence doesn’t work well with Verse : Still does with event binding so we have a failsafe, but given we only have one way to do persistence that involves numbers, this seems very risky for a regression to kill all persistence in a future update.
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HLOD Building adds an immense amount of loading to live edit : This is because level design heavily involves around editing the landscape and every time this happens, everything rebuilds so a +200mb min upload is added to the next time we push changes. Prevents me from enabling it and will make post-release maintenance problematic due to the immense waiting times (switching projects also causes the entire project to re-upload, so having +200mb of upload adds more than 20 mins of waiting to open the project initially in live edit).
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Day Sequence device trigger zone prevents live edit editing: Reported 6 months ago, but if Day Sequence Device has a trigger zone, it prevents other devices from working correctly (like teleporter) and in live edit, you cant select/edit/remove anything with the phone. Seems some sort of collision is included with that zone. Makes development harder in areas that have day sequence device zones.
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Lumen exposure manager device works as far as XL grid island goes : Mercenaries is much bigger than that and past a point, you see the device turning off and graphics switching to default settings. Want to use the device for better platform support, but I can’t. Also, this means that Lumen devices will play on a super bright version of the game because I can’t fix all platforms together atm cause the snow is white and lumen makes it glow.
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Instigated Sequences cannot play more than once at the same time : Needed for vendors and shops and currently have to add extra mechanics to lock interaction so it’s only per player. Not a biggie, but having the ability to play a sequence for more than one player at the same time will unlock a lot of polishing for shops.
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Verse tags stopped working with World streaming a few updates back : @LAMA can iterate on that more, but essentially it prevents fetching all containers at the start of the server and they slowly start working after some time (we are testing mechanics with verse to see if we can overcome that). On the contrary, verse tags are what allow us to create more content without using global memory, so it’s a massive feature that ties deeply into the engine that LAMA has made for the game.
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Memory calculation has gotten really slow in the last few updates : Used to be 1-2 mins long, now it takes at least 15 mins to complete. I think it might be me because I added more areas really far away from the center island, and my guess is that it’s either calculating the in-between, or some assets have really long draw distance and it causes memory to have to calculate in areas even where there is nothing.
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Desync of live edit after changing devices and multiselecting. Again not a big issue, but it causes me to have to wait 5 minutes after I multiselect and move actors, because it desyncs live edit (yellow arrow) and due to a new visual bug the status of live edit doesn’t match both editors anymore, so we don’t know when the UEFN is actually not in sync with live edit (meaning I have to push changes all the time now to be sure). Guard devices cause desync, day sequence device, any actor brought by “place actors” dropdown in UEFN, and any multiselection of actors in both UEFN and creative (for creative it needs to be many actors for it to happen).
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Components reset when actor is picked up in live edit Meaning that if I am making an interior area and I tweak the component light of a FN ceiling light, I can never use live edit to copy it because it ll reset its component settings when placed. This adds a lot of extra time as I am usually level designing in Live edit.
ASKS for future:
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Ability to control how global memory is controlled through devices. If one device can be derendered to save memory, it would be nice to have a setting to allow that so we can make fully global-memory independent areas and use verse/events when the player is close. Some visualization for rendering/derendering would help make logic clusters that work as their own little systems and dont need to be loaded at all times.
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Animations in Widget HUD : Wanted to animate HUD in the game and to a point I tried, but without the proper tools it feels like I am stressing the engine by making complex materials that can’t do complex screen animations anyway. Would love have Epic expose the animation tool in Widget HUD so we can polish our UI transitions.
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Guards having deadeye accuracy setting (like Tarkov), for making tough Boss fights (current AI is very easy even on max accuracy and poses no threat to a decent player, meaning no room for making areas that require player parties to clear)
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Ability to add animation additive layers to animations we import, and export the preview (like UE). Control rig is too much for me to learn atm, very steep learning curve, I just need a simple way of adding a character in game that has an breathing idle, pose them based on the environment and move on. Spent 3 days currently to do that, and result is very rough atm. This is a core element and it needs to be easy to do without losing motivation to build.
Posting a quick gameplay from our Alpha that showcases most issues from above, for reference:
(Onedrive link - video): https://1drv.ms/v/s!AkG5n8_vobVPvuA8k2vToGMW9QUjVA
Feel free to DM (for Epic only) if you want the project file to repro any of those issues, I d be happy to iterate more and help.