Painting layers on landscape

Development World Creation
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How come… that when i paint something like a little patch of dry grass on top of my default texture takes such a huge performance impact.
I drop on my material… shader complex = green… i draw this small patch of dry grass… BAM!!.. dark red… 1 stroke?

This engine is really starting to annoy me… there is a way to much penalty to do stuff… infact… if you dont do anything… it runs best.
Optimizing it is a huge drama… and never works… trees look like garbage. the TAA is just horrible. cant paint layers cause you get punished for it… add some water like a ocean shader and your shader complex is almost pink.

No wonder we mostly see games with low poly stuff… thats all the engine can really carry at real time…

with all honesty… you make this engine not any better… it gets worse every version… you focus on the wrong things…
The majority of gamer’s out there cant play real time ray-traced games… or photoscanned landscapes which your own demo cant even run on a decent FPS

You make us believe its a hell of an game engine… but it can only show pictures of super quality… or rendered videos… realtime the whole engine falls apart.

World composition… yeah in your dreams… try building something like GTA… and the whole engine will just catch fire and burns to the ground… aint gonna happen… never.

So no big AAA company’s will ever choose for Unreal…
the best thing you will get is cinematic stuff… which will be obsolete in a few years… cause they re-create your creation for their needs without your engine… they will use your engine to test all that stuff…

Pls focus on games again… plp cant even get a decent 60FPS when they put stuff in their game…

I know the unreal devs will never do anything regarding to really optimizing it… cause they somehow think that this will work… wait till the hype is gone…

Show me one big AAA game title… like Assassins Creed or GTA… that is made in Unreal… with those gfx… not the artistic black and white silhouette and Borderlands cartoon stuff…

You think Ashes of creation will pull if off?.. i dont think it will… huge respect to them… but ppl are going to have major problems playing it…or the promised features will not be in, cause they couldnt do it…

Unreal engine and games?.. forget it. go Disney.

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@WorldCreator I’m sensing some hostility here… :slight_smile: Is your material an instance?..

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Chances are that your materials are unoptimized and contain large instruction counts in branches for things like your grass material. It sounds like you’re probably just using a bunch of premade materials for things, plunking them inside your landscape shader graph all willy-nilly, hooking them in for the various layer blend slots and expecting them to work perfectly.

Show me a screenshot of the instruction count to your landscape shader (you don’t have to include any of the graph). Also, what are the texture resolutions for everything? If you’re using a bunch of 4k textures, for every single input of every single layer, don’t expect it to perform well. Are there any layers using heavy effects like POM? If so, are the POM settings optimized? You’re leaving out a lot of important information here…

When it comes to making landscape materials, you need to really preplan your “must haves and nice to haves” for each layer, and go from there. Design the absolute core features first, for all the layers, then run some worst case scenario tests where every bit of the landscape has an equal blend of all the layers on it (thus requiring the full load of shader instructions from the material). See how it performs, make sure it’s within your frame budget, and tweak the material accordingly. If you have more wiggle room, start adding in some fancier code for prominent layers that are really going to stand out a lot.

As for comments about using some water shader, same as above… Realistic water/ocean shaders tend to be very complex and are typically a very early decision that you have to make when designing a game.

Again, it sounds like you’re not doing enough preplanning. You need to plan out things like: “Okay, this game is going to run at 60fps, so that means I have ~16.7ms of frame budget to work with” and from there, you need to start chopping up that frame time into portions for all the various things a game needs. Once you know your various budgets, then you start working to fill them. If you work THIS way, you won’t perpetually run into problems like you’re describing.

**When you draw a picture, you don’t start out with tertiary forms first… **This is a problem I’ve seen time and time again on here, when people complain about performance issues. Not sure if this is the problem, in your case, but people will take a bunch of high quality market assets, throw them into a level and then cry when it performs horribly. This is because a lot of the assets out there are designed in a vacuum and are usually designed to be as photogenic as possible to attract customers into purchasing them. The creators will sometimes make claims that they are “optimized” or “game ready” etc etc, which half the time are lies. Those terms are extremely relative. I could make a 10mil poly tree, with 8k textures and nice material effects, and call it “game ready” because if I designed a game where it just loads a black background and puts a single tree in the middle of the screen, it could technically run at 60fps lol…

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It sounds like you got frustrated because of your unoptimized landscape material and think it’s the engine’s fault. If you’re painting a small patch of dry grass and the material complexity goes straight to red, then you’re doing something wrong.

Then you’re not doing it right.

That means your tree models look like garbage. Not the engine’s fault.

That’s where your wrong, pal

Rendered videos in UE4 are realtime, dude.

It’s completely doable with enough time, talent, energy, and manpower. GTA has all of that and more.

I think after 20 years of engine development and licensing, the hype isn’t dying anytime soon. And it does work. Just look at all the games that have used it.

Constructive criticism is okay and necessary. If you feel like the engine should perform better in your situation, then post in the engine feedback forum with screenshots and maybe a copy of your project.
What I take issue with is your tone. You come off incredibly shrewd, standoffish, and overall rude and abrasive.

Also here’s some advice. Don’t ever tell a billion dollar 20+ year old company what they should and shouldn’t focus on. You don’t know better than them and you need to realize that.