Yes, and no.. Unreal does have lots of features that can bring the thing down, and its very easy to shoot yourself in foot with it. But you can also make a 2D game with it, without any bells and whistles, and it will run just fine even if you used blueprints. Depends on the dev like BIL said.Lander wrote: ↑Mon Jan 08, 2024 7:28 pmIn theory they should be as good at baseline, if not better, on account of being native code that doesn't have to spend CPU time passing through an emulation layer.
In practice... Few modern studios have the technical craft of M2, or of the OG developers whose games they port. Easy-to-use-hard-to-master engines have lowered the barrier to entry without meaningfully raising the average on tech-savviness, so there are more games, but they're not necessarily better-made.
You'd hope that modern engines would eventually refine themselves to the point where it's more difficult to make mistakes, and 'just work' on whatever hardware without the user having to learn a bunch of quirks and best practices; programming languages have started moving in that direction, adding extra machinery to say "don't do this it will be slow and rubbish and / or crash" long before the code is run.
Unfortunately, engines are complex things, so much of what's out there is well behind the technical curve. Unreal is probably the worst for it - beautiful cutting edge graphics tech balancing on top of a rickety decades-old framework. And the more things you balance on top, the harder it becomes to fix the foundation without binning the entire thing and starting fresh. Easier and more profitable to employ a bunch of tech support staff and offer them as a premium service.
Which is a very long winded way of reiterating BIL's point: It depends
I havent played too many modern shmups so I dont know how offensive they get with inout lag, but I think old arcade games are provided largely by emulation so modern engines would be out of question anyway.. at least I HOPE no one would so dumb that they tried to deliver emulation with Unity or Unreal..!