[haydenlee]

We are a tiny dev team using Unity on a non-gaming project and we basically have to dedicate 2-4 weeks of the year to updating Unity and all the mess that it entails. But if you don't update then you have to spend even more time the next year catching up. Then we end up being too scared to use their new features cause they aren't supported well or cause bugs. Its lose-lose.

[cecilpl2]

I'm in game dev and have been responsible for doing Unreal Engine updates for medium-sized teams (50-150) on AAA games.

Our updates have taken one full-time engineer for 2 weeks plus an additional 2 weeks total of various people's time for each upgrade. It's worse if we skip a version.

We dedicate probably 3-4 person-months per year to staying updated, but it's well worth it. As an investment its ROI is easily 100x.

[pydave]

Do you make changes to Unreal's source? Or have middleware that makes changes (Havok and Fmod)?

Your effort estimates line up with mine, but I'm not sure about the ROI (but it's been a few years and I was pre-fortnite).

We made limited changes to Unreal source, but I think we made more changes than we had to. We had our middleware, we fixed bugs (none upstreamed via github due to company policy), but we also introduced new features varying from necessary for the project (instanced mesh rendering) to unnecessary (fancy logging). Every upgrade, I regretted most of the changes we made.

But also, it seems like every upgrade our data assets and blueprint script would get less stable and cause weird infrequent crashes in the blueprint/uscript interpreter.

Do you use bleeding edge features? I recall being wary of anything that hadn't been around for a few updates.

[pjmlp]

Last year's Unreal conference had a couple of talks related to engine migration and how teams managed to do them, which some mentioned they rather do it between projects than jeopardizing an ongoing game development cycle.

Middleware migration headaches are everywhere, regardless of the chosen stack.

[vvanders]

Honestly I've never seen this problem solved well for any game engine short of in-house engines(which obviously wouldn't break titles they were supporting).

It's been a while since I've been in the industry so maybe things have changed but last time I was there unit tests weren't even a thing. Smoke tests where if a set of levels loaded and didn't crash was considered success from an automation validation standpoint.

[seba_dos1]

Well, things haven't really changed...

[ReticentVole]

Just get to the LTS release and stay there.

[dahfizz]

The LTS is only supported for two years. That doesn't really solve this problem.