UE5 by default uses a lot of flashy tech that is supposed to improve performance, but a lot of it only does so in scenarios that are already extremely unoptimized. Using more traditional methods tends to achieve the same fidelity at a fraction of the performance cost. But there’s no time for optimization, and these fancy options “just work”, so there ya go.
The end result is a poorly running blurry mess of a game, but at least it’s out on schedule I guess.
UE5 can run well, but all the defaults that Epic suggests devs use are really quite bad for performance. They improve performance on horribly unoptimized scenes, but actually optimizing the scene would allow a 10x performance improvement at no reduction in visual fidelity. But devs don’t tend to optimize much anymore because those Epic-suggested defaults “take care of optimization”.
Machine learning doesn’t necessarily require a centralized cluster. Usually running those kinds of models is pretty cheap, it’s not an LLM basically. They usually do better than human moderators as well, able to pick up on very minute ‘tells’ these cheats have.
I understand your point about edge cases, but that’s not something the average player cares about much. E-sports is a pretty niche part of any game, especially the higher ranks. You just want to filter out the hackers shooting everyone each game that truly ruin the enjoyment. Someone cheating to rank gold instead of silver or whatever isn’t ruining game experiences; they’re usually detectable too, but if you get a false negative on that it’s not the end of the world. A smurf account of a very highly ranked player probably has a bigger impact on players’ enjoyment.
These tricks may make it indistinguishable to a human moderator, but machine learning is actually really good at detecting that. But most companies don’t have the expertise, resources or training data to build a proper model for it.
Those are the references to where the assets are located in the original ROM (that’s the data inside those json files). There’s no actual asset in there.