One thing I’ve been very frustrated with recently (as I’m sure many have) is the absolute lack of documentation for important console variables.
E.g., today I was trying to fix a ghosting artifact caused by Lumen’s temporal filter. Unfortunately, there’s literally no documentation on any of the console variables. For the screenprobegather.temporal:
Notice that several of these have no description at all, those that do have sometimes very little information, and in all cases there is no clarification on what values mean or what acceptable defaults are.
I managed to resolve my issue by printing the default console variable to the screen using blueprints. This should NOT be necessary.
Low and behold, when consulting the documentation (Lumen Global Illumination and Reflections in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.0 Documentation) none of these console settings are listed or explained. Not only are there no default/acceptable values, no descriptions, etc…they aren’t even listed. Using the search function in the docs to scan for these commands returns no results.
How is it possible that the pinnacle feature of the new engine has NO documentation on any of these settings?
All I can see in UE5.1.1 is absolutely nothing, is this variable even used?
The documentation is usually a bit funny especially when seemingly simple methods go through 20 systems of spaghetti to return inconsistent results. Let’s hope that’s not the case for the new Lumen… Bad / no documentation simply makes a bad product if you have to waste time on figuring things out and redoing work with every discovery you make yourself. It still is the case with Slate too.
It is. At least in 5.1.0, the temporal filter is used to reduce Jitter/Flickering in Lumen. If you set it to 0 you’ll see a lot of flicker on objects, especially on Scala 2 with mid-range hardware. However with it left at default, you’ll get ghosting if you turn up the distance threshold.
You can read more about it in the Lumen technical they presented at Siggraph in 2022: https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2022/SIGGRAPH2022-Advances-Lumen-Wright%20et%20al.pdf
Skip to pg. 167 for Lumen temporal filtering.
Unfortunately though this isn’t just for this one setting. There are TONS of other commands that are simply not explained anywhere and aren’t even listed in the documentation at all. I shouldn’t need to go digging in a 200 page Siggraph deck to find out what Lumen’s settings do. Yet here we are.
That’s like having to watch about every EPIC video on youtube where a 3 second question and answer is 1.5 hours.
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This is so triggering lmao because we have ALL lived this experience
Like the recent GDC talks…the video was 7 hours long, and the thing I wanted to learn on Nanite trees about was 1 slide halfway through.
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