Loosing my mind and thinking about quitting / going nuclear. Opinions / experiences please

TLDR

- Currently leading a T&M engagement as a part of a multi-supplier delivery for a business critical client programme

- It's horribly delayed and client sponsors have had their jobs threatened after multiple poor decisions by them

- Our partner has been asked to deliver 24 months of work (estimated by our team) in 9 months under Fixed Price to save their jobs

- They're basically going to say yes, with penalty clauses and it will be a horrible experience for me and the team

- All warnings ignored. Management are getting frustrated we're not enthusiastic or helpful. We're frustrated they are setting us up for misery

- They don't have a credible plan, just poorly formatted slides with AI and generic delivery models, with a zero margin price

At the end of the day, it's not my decision and I won't loose my job if this delivery doesn't work. But it's going to be ungodly unpleasant and I am already openly defiant and unhappy.

- Should I just shut up and do my job and watch the ship sink?

- Should I ask to leave the project / account?

- Should I get my CV ready and start applying elsewhere?

Currently highly respected with a good delivery track record. This will kill it.

Curious what other's experiences are of this.

Inside or outside. I know there are plenty of "no moonlighting" clauses, but I'm not convinced even if they found out there would be any serious repercussions.

Recently sold a house and looking to rent whilst hunting for the next one. My god, it's really unpleasant.

Made an offer which was accepted and now they are asking for all sorts of really intrusive things. I can already prove my savings / payslips / income easily cover the payments. They want to also contact my employer, which I find to be a red line. I'm happy to loose out on the house if they want to be so adamant about it.

Question is; is this legal? Is this common? What is reasonable to provide? I want to limit data harvesting firms getting their greasy fingers involved.

If every agent is going to ask for this; I might as well just start looking for a new house to buy. Less agro!

I'm romantically in love with the idea of buying at auction. I'm very hands-on DIY minded and the previous house was a real project so I'm not shy to take something that needs love and hopefully keep a bit of profit in doing so.

But I'm completely naive to the full experience. I know the basics I've read a lot online but I'll be really interested to hear other redditors views and experiences of going down the auction route.

Sold my old place and currently renting so I feel like I'm the perfect auction buying candidate. However I've heard horror stories that unless you're in the construction business or if you have a business yourself, don't bother, no value to be had when professionals are in full time jobs scouting for potential flips.

Hey, just working on optimising my demo using Unreal Insights. Revisiting the question I had in my mind on Animation performance, "new" Motion Matching vs. "old" State Machines & Blendspaces. Sharing my findings below for anyone else that was interested in that question.

Context

I profiled a traditional state machine animation blueprint (our game, BGP) against UE 5.7's GASP sample using motion matching via Unreal Insights single-frame timer analysis. Both traces had full stat named events enabled.

The Key Numbers

	State Machine (BGP)	Motion Matching (GASP)
Worker thread eval per character	~0.43 ms	0.50 ms
Locomotion selection cost per character	0.008 ms	~0.25 ms
Game thread anim cost per character	~0.07 ms	~0.14 ms
Debug cost (strippable)	0.003 ms/char	0.016 ms

What This Means

• Motion matching locomotion selection is ~31x more expensive than state machine evaluation (0.25 ms vs 0.008 ms per character)
• BUT overall worker thread cost per character is surprisingly comparable (~0.43 vs 0.50 ms) because each system spends its budget differently:
  • BGP fills its worker budget with PoseDriver (0.21 ms/char) and ControlRig (0.08 ms/char) — procedural corrections that would remain regardless of locomotion approach
  • GASP fills its worker budget with motion matching pipeline (0.25 ms/char) — pose search, trajectory, choosers, BlendStack
• Both test scenarios were GPU-bound, meaning worker thread animation had headroom and did not bottleneck the frame
• If BGP adopted motion matching while keeping PoseDriver/ControlRig, net per-character worker cost would increase by ~0.24 ms (from ~0.43 to ~0.67 ms)
• At 19 ticking characters, that's ~4.6 ms additional aggregate worker thread time (parallel, not blocking game thread), reducible via URO

The Biggest Single Cost in Either System

PoseDriver in BGP at 3.94 ms total (0.21 ms/char, 210 calls across 19 characters). This is not related to state machines or motion matching — it's a procedural correction system that would exist in either architecture. It is the single most expensive animation timer in our entire trace.

Test Methodology

Environment

• Engine: Unreal Engine 5.7
• Profiling tool: Unreal Insights, single-frame timer list export with stat named events enabled
• Hardware: Same machine for both captures

BGP Tutorial Area (State Machine)

• Rich game world with environment, NPCs, lighting, particles
• 19 animation-ticking skeletal meshes (leader components running ABPs)
• 426 total skeletal mesh component ticks (modular character system — each character has multiple body part meshes following a leader pose)
• Animation blueprint uses traditional state machine with blendspaces, plus IK (LegIK, ControlRig), PoseDriver nodes, layered blending, montage slots
• Game thread frame: ~9.3 ms
• Parallel animation evaluation enabled (28 worker tasks)

GASP Motion Matching Sample

• Simple scene, single controllable character
• 1 animation-ticking skeletal mesh
• Animation blueprint uses motion matching (PoseSearch), Chooser Tables, BlendStack, orientation warping, steering, foot placement
• No PoseDriver, no ControlRig (for animation)
• Game thread frame: ~5.0 ms (3.2 ms idle/GPU-wait)
• Parallel animation evaluation enabled (1 worker task)

Normalization Approach

BGP costs are divided by character count (19 for most timers) to produce per-character estimates. GASP costs are taken directly (1 character). Worker thread aggregate times represent total CPU time across all workers, not wall-clock game thread impact.

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Game Reference Link - The FreeBlades (Searchable on Steam, Mods please confirm if I can post a link here)