Dev-Com #3 Upcoming patch and Unreal Engine 5.

Greetings members of the Accord.

This report will be cut into two pieces, the first will be about the upcoming patch, and the second part will be about our experimentations done on Unreal Engine 5.

In 3 days we will be releasing a small patch to Penkura, it will contain fixes, code performance improvements, widget (3D interfaces) performance improvements, a lot of quality-of-life additions, new music, new sound effects, and minor content additions. This will most likely be the last patch we will release on Unreal Engine 4.27.2.

Now, let's move on to the next part of the report. Unreal Engine 5 experimentation and transfer.

For the last 5 months, we have been experimenting with the Unreal Engine 5, but unfortunately our project "AS IS" was losing around 60-80% of its performance when moved to the newer engine.
We of course consider this an unacceptable loss, and we didn't want our community to lose so much performance.

We are looking to move to Unreal Engine 5, not only is it a high-end engine capable of doing incredible things, but we wanted to be up to date with the tech and use some of the tools that can be only found in engine 5.0+. Those tools will greatly speed up our workflow, and who knows what else Epic Games will add to the Engine that could possibly help us with the development of the game.

This is the screenshot of Penkura on our test machine within our Custom Unreal Engine 4.27.2.


In the heaviest part of the game to render with all settings on max we were getting a stable 105+ fps.

In Unreal Engine 5.0 with the project "as is", we were getting roughly 35+ fps in the same area.



This does not mean that Unreal Engine 5 is incapable of getting the same performance as Unreal Engine 4. It just means that we would need to do a lot of work to get that performance. We will not move to Unreal Engine 5 until we are sure that our community will get a similar performance at the very least.

To provide players with better performance we created our own in-house tools and systems that not only boost performance but also simulate certain high-end features at the lowest cost possible.

Those systems are:

• LionsMat (our octahedral mesh painting system)
  
• LionsNav (Long-range navigation system for NPC, Bots)
  
• LionsLight (our non-ray trace Light and shadow system that allowed us to create pitch-black rooms and caves even when the outside of the entire level is fully lit by the sun).
  
• LionsHide (our occlusion system for 3d widgets, shadow quality switch based on hidden objects)
  

and dozens of other minor systems that each improve performance by 0.5 to 1% but add up to a bigger effect when working simultaneously.

We knew that all of these systems needed to be moved to Unreal Engine 5 in order to get better performance.

After reading the documentation and testing out our project with various solutions, we are now certain that we WON'T be using the Unreal Lumen system, Nanite system, or Virtual Shadowing system. No matter how amazing they are (even though we have to admit it is one of the best techs we have seen). The reason is very simple, people with graphics cards lower than RTX GeForce 20 series will just suffer.

We are happy to report that we were able to move the LionsMat system, LionsNav system, and LionsHide system without major issues (as only a few systems were changed in Unreal Engine 5).
Unfortunately, the LionsLight system was almost completely broken. It took us some time and heavy coding to fix this system to an "acceptable" rate.

After all the experimenting on Unreal Engine 5, we are happy to showcase the performance improvement we have been able to make since the first transfer.



We still need to fix many minor issues but already we can see that it not only got to the level of Unreal Engine 4, but we actually achieved a little bit better performance! We got to roughly 110+ FPS.

Because of this, we want to inform everybody that we will spend the next month not only moving the entire project to Unreal Engine 5, but we will also clean and streamline a lot of background code. Which will make our work A LOT easier going forward. All of the code has remained untouched because any major code that we wanted to make to assets could potentially break the saves files of the player.

After all of this, we need to talk about the negative side. We want to inform all of you that it is very likely this will be the last patch where your current saves will work. We spent over a week creating a system that would allow us to smoothly transfer saves from the 4.27 to 5.3 engine, but the metadata difference between files made on Unreal Engine 4.27 and 5.3 are very different. This means the current saves would be unreadable on the new version of the game.

We will use this opportunity to change and most of all improve the entire code in the game that needed to be improved a long time ago. Since we were able to prepare for this for quite some time, we expect to complete this in a single month.

Lastly, because of the request made by some players, we will start to place our Dev-Coms on Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/Penkura/ Steam and of course Discord. We were also requested to make a classic-style forum on our website, but since our community is still very small, and we have a lot on our plate already, we will do our best to improve our Discord by adding forum-style channels.

Till the next Dev-Com over and out.