Coded Artist @coded_artist@gameliberty.club

@Nesano @rasterman @nerthos
Unity isn't shit, the people who use it are.
Unity lowered the bar for game development, so lots of chinks and pajeets published a ton of garbage.
As for when did Unreal become shit: that's since Unreal 5.

Unreal was the engine of choice because it had the most polish.
Unity was way behind, and Unigine kept to military simulators, technician training programs, and VR, it cost an arm and a leg, and comes with no proper UI system to this day.

Unity got a lot better.
Unigine now has the same monetization as everyone else (thanks to Unity breaking the market).
Godot entered the market in earnest with Godot 4, and Unity's hiring of former EA CEO and antichrist lover John Riccitiello.
While many moved to Unreal following Unity shooting itself in the foot, they really failed to seize the moment of Unity's slip up.

Unreal 5 over promised and under delivered with their new systems: Lumin, and Nanite.
And what's worse, they did what Unity had before them: lowered a bar.

Lumin and Nanite were advertised as single check-box solutions for lighting and LOD, they work well enough... if you have a beast of a PC.
Many developers take this to mean they don't need to optimize anything, incentivized to be lazy, and just assume these new systems will take care of everything, they don't.

Lumin isn't doing anything you couldn't do before with a little elbow grease.
And Nanite inflates projects in size, and is only really useful for very detailed static objects, for which other techniques could be used.

All this tech COULD be used to make games look better, but it's overused by lazy devs in place of actual work.

The Arkham series was made in Unreal 3, very little comes close to that in terms of graphical fidelity, and it was hard work that made it happen, more so than the tools used.
And like it or hate it Genshin came out 2020, using Unity, and had such impressive graphics and view distance that the the fact it worked on mobile blew people's mind at the time.
Genshin's render distance remains impressive, the techniques used to achieve it aren't too complex in theory, but the work required is immense.
Which is why it takes 100~200 million dollars per year to continue development.

@rasterman You also see your thighs when you slide, like The Mighty Foot™ in Duke Nukem 3D.

@icedquinn Now that is a good term to be aware of, thanks!
Kinda hard to find materials on this topic, so that could help me quite a bit.