Unreal Engine games feel slow/sluggish/laggy

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

I feel like a fair amount of games created with Unreal Engine 4 feel sluggish or delayed when making quick adjustments to your aim.
Paragon is a third person moba-ish game so it doesn’t affect gameplay much, but changing camera orientation feels a bit delayed to when I move my mouse. Same for PUBG; anytime I make a quick change in aim, it feels slow compared to how quickly I moved my mouse.

In my mind, I compare these games to something like Call of Duty, where the aim speed and mouse movement feels like a solid 1:1 ratio; it feels precise and quick.
In comparison, Battlefield games have some weight to the weapon movements so the aim feels slower than that of a CoD game.

Are the games I’ve been playing (Paragon, PUBG) designed to be slower/weighty, or is it just how Unreal Engine deals with camera movements?

2

Its only how programmers do their job… it really doesnt matter which engine you use, all engines are basically same softwares, with only different features and tools. In ue4 with source code you can fo anything you can imagine.

3

What kind of hardware are you using?

Try setting your FOV higher. AT the stock setting of 90 the feel will feel slow and sluggish.

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About 110 makes a huge difference.

4

In the case of PUBG it is poorly optimized

5

It’s just about your mouse sensitivity to me.

Also if you’re experiencing loss of framerate, your mouse be looking stuttering. That might be it as well.

6

It’s probably because the default player controller settings for Pitch/Yaw input are not 1:1 and people quickly overlook them. Been 2 years into development and only noticed those options now.

7

Care to elaborate a little?

8

The default input settings in the player controller class are not 1:1. I’m not talking about input scale but values in the actual player controller. Pretty sure these values are applied if you enable controller rotation in your pawn.

9

Really? I can name several UE4 games that don’t feel “sluggish”. Squad being a fine example.

It all comes down to how the game is made not which engine is used. Yes you need a high spec PC to run the Unreal Engine Editor optimally but that doesn’t effect the game.

10

This! Well done, sir!

I think the contrast between Squad and PUBG/ARK/Conan Exiles is the best example there is on the impact of the way you code over the end-result. Squad easily reaches 120 FPS on my end with (almost) the highest settings, while all the other mentions struggle to keep a constant 25 at the same settings. It’s ironic how Squad can work so well, yet PUBG ended up being the fun one (until you realize getting furious at its bugs isn’t worth your time and just abandon them both).

11

Also, you have to take into account the kind of first person shooter.
There’s obviously a different feedback from true first person shooters like PUBG and Old School Shooter like CoD that are using a camera between 2 flying arms holding a gun.
Either way, performance wise you can achieve incredible performance with Unreal Engine.

Just a little history lesson, Unreal Engine was built for the FPS ‘Unreal’ which then became the first ‘Unreal Tournament’. Of course it can delivers stellar performance with shooters, it’s just a matter of the developer experience.

12

Please, don’t misinform, I can only guess people saying “the engine doesn’t add delay, it’s only you and how you code your game” didn’t ship a game that needed to be lighting fast on the response, but even with that excuse, almost any kind of game can feel better if you don’t ignore the engine side.
http://shoryuken.com/2017/10/08/new-update-to-unreal-engine-4-will-reduce-input-latency-for-games-like-tekken-7-and-street-fighter-v/

Remember, Unreal is made by programmers like you, they aren’t perfect, so don’t fall sleep expecting them to make the perfect engine. Yes, the engine matters for the input lag, if you look at great examples like Titanfall 2 and you read a bit about it you’ll see what kind of hard roads they took to, basically, reduce as much as possible the actual render pipeline on the engine in order to reduce a few more frames of input latency.

13

Actually, “it’s always up to programmers” is not completely true. Epic has some part in this problem as well, as they encourage decisions leading to poorly responsive gameplay by poorly set up defaults.

The problem is that there are quite a few programmers who are really just programmers, without any passion for games, so when they actually playtest their creation, they don’t even realize that their input responsiveness is not up to standards, because they don’t play games themselves, so they consider it to be normal.

Epic’s part in this problem is that the mouse smoothing, smooth framerate and Vsync are enabled by default for any new UE4 project. These 3 features combined have devastating effect on the input responsiveness. Since all these are on by default, as long as the game is not playtested by someone with real gaming experience, who can actually evaluate and feel the responsiveness of the input, these wrong decisions often make it into the final product.

14

Really? I find Squad to be a very sluggish and poorly optimized game. So much that I deleted it again, because it is unplayable when you get into action. For example I was driving in a Humvee, we see another humvee in front and we start firing at each other. Goodbye framerates… and I am not the only one having these issues.