Everyone should just keep in mind the first look at Unreal Engine 4 all those years ago before getting too too excited. Big step forward, absolutely, but it won't be as seen here.
I'm not sure whether your comment was about a time delay before release of the engine, or whether you're implying that computer hardware won't be fast enough anytime soon.
In the video they said it was running on a PlayStation 5. There was a section in the demo where they had interactive gamepad controls so it appears it might have actually been running real-time on a PS5?
I never thought I would be saying this but storage might actually end up being a bigger issue than CPU/GPU performance. The new MS Flight Simulator has to stream the world over the internet because the entire map is 10 petabytes. In the UE5 video they said the demo scene was 13 or 16 billion triangles... I imagine that will take up a huge amount of disk space.
Modern AAA games are already 50-150 gigabytes each, and this is only going to grow as models and scenes become increasingly detailed.
Edit: finding holes in their demo - this may be a video compression artifact, but the big open scene at the end appeared to be of much lower quality. This is something current AMD GPUs can do where if you move around it dynamically lowers the resolution to prevent FPS from decreasing. Perhaps they also dynamically lower resolution in the big open areas? IDK how much of a benefit that would make, but you can never trust these marketing videos...
This is a demo. You can easily see that it's structured in a way that allows to easily mask loading of the new scenes and that there's not a lot of interaction going on - pretty much the only interactive thing they shown was dynamic illumination (which is something they were promising since early UE4 demos, and I believe that's what GP mostly meant) and particle system.
You can be sure that demos like that (especially early ones) make tons of compromises that are neatly hidden on the video but that usually wouldn't be viable in context of a regular video game - at least without severely limiting your game design choices.
The Tomb Raider-esque parts where the character is jumping and climbing didn't look right. She's missing some kind of "weight" or something in her animation that makes it look like she's not really doing those things. Lara Croft's animations are much more convincing.
This isn't supposed to be a real game but a tech demo of engine capabilities. Expecting them to spend as much money on getting climbing animations as good as a AAA game is kind of crazy.
When it comes to animation the interesting stuff were the "automated" hand/foot placement animations like the hand on the door they mentioned.
I think the comment above was about the fact that U4 demos where also very realistic, and also real time. Still, how many U4 based games can you name that look nearly as good as those demos? I can name zero.
I remember the first UE4 thing I saw was Fortnite, which didn't seem that impressive...that might have just been the first UE4 game though, and not the first UE4 footage, I can't remember.
(Just a reminder, this was back when Fortnite was not a Battle Royale game, and nobody in the world knew about the it. That game was in development / early access for ages before it became the biggest thing in the world.)
Games built on Unreal 4 in the last couple of years look way better than that 2012 UE4 demo. The first few years of games on UE5 might not look like the UE5 demo today, but in a few years they will catch up.
buried lede, perhaps: retroactive to Jan. 1, "Unreal Engine royalties waived on first $1 million in game revenue"
> Unreal Engine End User License Agreement for Publishing: This license is free to use and incurs 5% royalties when you monetize your game or other interactive off-the-shelf product and your lifetime gross revenues from that product exceed $1,000,000 USD.
This is a huge jump from the previous $3000 per quarter being royalty-free when they initially made UE4 free. It will be interesting to see if it helps them capture more of the indie studios from Unity.
Yeah I would personally use this instead of Unity because I don’t want to pay royalties on a tiny indie video game that I’m barely making any money on. My games aren’t ever going to gross a million dollars. The licensing model at Unity is vague regarding whether tech workers need to pay for Unity Plus if it’s a side thing for them also (I recall there being a 100k cap).
Well, it's worth noting Unity doesn't have royalties - you just pay per seat on a monthly cost, and it's free indefinitely* if you make/raise less than $100k a year.
* (this also means no official support and a few missing features, not sure if UE4 offers everything for free)
It is unclear whether you have to pay the monthly fee if you don’t have a registered business and are working on something in your free time, and have a day job making 100k+. I don’t like how the motivations are out of whack here . Unity makes more money if I don’t finish my game .
> if you are an individual using the Unity Software, but not providing services to a third party, your Total Finances are the amount generated in connection with your use of the Unity Software. In this case, your Total Finances would not include amounts you generate from other work (for example, if your day job is as a zookeeper).
UE offers everything free and now they started providing some in game services (such as accounts, statistics) for free too. Only way to pay to use Unreal Engine is to earn more than 1.000.000 usd which for most people means everything is completely free. I’d say unreal has a much better value proposition in here.
i know games with $3 million dollar budgets that chose Unity over Unreal because with Unreal that would have cost them $150k where as with their 10 person team Unity cost them $45k for 3 years.
It may have changed, but back when we were looking into Engines to use, Unity had a completely free license until you hit $100,00 in sales or wanted to remove the unity splash screen on app launch which costed a then flat $1500 licensing fee for the "Professional Edition".
I think this has the potential to be a huge shift if enough developers build games targeting Fortnite players. There's an ecosystem right there to be tapped into, and Epic just happens to be giving you the tools to do it.
And developers who launch on the Epic Store get much better placement than the average Steam listing, and free promotion by Epic's social accounts. At least right now, even before the financial incentives, there's a lot of perks for a new developer to become "heard of" from Epic.
I'm not following this comment. Is it because the intersectionality of players includes lower-income people, children, and those struggling with addiction?
My comment was in relation to a highly engaged, key target demographic audience who have an Epic account and they've just handed indie devs around the world much easier access to that audience.
No idea what point you're making, though it seems loaded against Fortnite?
I can see the platform being a shared space between developers as a great benefit to indies.
I wouldn't describe Fortnite players as engaged any more than I would describe a gambling den habitant as engaged. In this case the latter is less predatory. It's my prerogative that any time Fortnite is mentioned, it should be reminded that while it is a great profit model, it is also a depressing moral failure.
I’d be really curious to see what a talented programmer or two could do with the engine by themselves, without bringing an artist on board. Is the Unreal engine flexible enough to do low fidelity, 2D games or are you just better off coding up your own engine at that point?
The only reason to use Unreal for a 2d game is if you want easy cross platform support and an asset pipeline, otherwise you would probably just make your own or use one of the existing 2d engines.
To be honest 2D games are more art heavy than 3D games. At least in 3D games you can get a long way with shaders, textures, geometric shapes and store-bought meshes. In 2D games everything is custom art.
In the past, I have always looked at Demos from Games and thought this is very good and getting close to movie quality. But that "close to" remained "close to" for quite some time. Even though It is improving every year but you can still tell it is gaming graphics. Even if some of the shots are not real time and pre rendered, they are still gaming like.
That Unreal 5 Demo was the first time ever I thought this is Hollywood Movie quality GFX ..... ( Apart from the Character ). IT IS STUNNING! And this is done Real time on PS5!
Edit: I am sorry for the tone and block capitals.... I am seriously geeking out.
Well, I may be wrong, but I was under the impression that the Unreal Engine will also work on the next XBOX (and any PC) and that the PS5 was less powerfull than the next XBOX.
It remains to be seen how the PS5 and the new XBox compare in terms of performance.
The specs of the new XBox are slightly higher on paper, but the PS5 is doing some really interesting things in terms of optimization. Basically the XBox is going for high constant clock speeds, and the PS5 is shifting priority between the CPU and GPU components of the SOC so each gets boosted performance when it's most relevant.
Both consoles are doing very interesting things with asset streaming and decompression of assets directly from the SSD to video memory which are going to open up new opportunities not only in visual quality, but in terms of how flexibly game worlds can be designed.
Probably we will have to wait and see how all of this plays out in terms of real-world performance.
Highly dangerous of the PS people to build non-deterministic performance into their console. Developers who try to push every ounce of power out of it will hate it.
edit: Maybe deterministic isn't the correct word. What I mean is that you can design a physics system that you can ensure runs on the PS5 CPU. But then the graphics boys make an upgrade and suddenly some power is diverted to the graphics and the physics system is no longer working correctly. This is still deterministic. But a nightmare to work with when optimizing for hard-real time requirements. The only way this can be done sanely is if the developers can fix this power budget and thus restore "determinism".
If the developer can control the balance then it's fine. If this balance cannot be controlled by the developers then it's a nightmare. It's not clear to me this is developer controlled.
Mark Cerny's tech talk emphasised that performance is determistic:
'So how does boost work in this case? Put simply, the PlayStation 5 is given a set power budget tied to the thermal limits of the cooling assembly. "It's a completely different paradigm," says Cerny. "Rather than running at constant frequency and letting the power vary based on the workload, we run at essentially constant power and let the frequency vary based on the workload."'
It's clear from the presentation that it's not possible to run the CPU at full power and the GPU at full power at once. This means the CPU will be stealing performance from the GPU or vice versa when the system is pushed to it's limits. This means the things you can graphically do are directly connected to how much the CPU is loaded. This will be very hard to optimize for. Since seemingly unconnected physical pieces of hardware are influencing eachother.
The only way I can see this going well if this balance is fixed by the developer. E.g. the developer specifies I want 60% of the power budget to go to the GPU and 40% to the CPU. If this is handled dynamically by the PS5... oh boy.
> the CPU will be stealing performance from the GPU or vice versa
Another way to think about it is that very few games are using 100% CPU capacity and 100% CPU capacity at the same time. This model gives the developer a combined compute budget, which can be allocated as required for the task.
> Another way to think about it is that very few games are using 100% CPU capacity and 100% CPU capacity at the same time.
Right, but to the GP's point, for those games which do aim to max out both at the same time (or at least get as close to that as possible), this could be a development pain point unless the developer has control over which gets prioritized. Once upon a time this sort of maximization was a common goal for console game development, though I don't know how true that holds nowadays.
So then you would tune your game to use 50% CPU and 50% GPU if the requirements are equal on both sides.
But I think this style of hardware also changes the way you make optimization decisions. I.e. in a world where you have a fixed CPU/GPU budget, you might try to think of ways too move work to the CPU if for instance your GPU is saturated. But if the relative capacity is variable, you can just do things in the most efficient way overall, and you just have to make sure you don't exceed your overall budget.
The PS still sells itself heavily based on console exclusives (Uncharted, The Last of Us, Horizon Zero Dawn) that are ostensibly well-tuned to the hardware. Guess we'll have to wait until HZD's makes it to PCs to see how easily it's ported.
I don't know to what degree it is deterministic or controlled by the developer. It might be interesting if, for instance, graphically heavy games can essentially trade CPU performance they're not using for additional GPU headroom in an intentional, explicit way.
"As for Microsoft’s Xbox Series X, Sweeney isn’t saying the new Xbox won’t be able to achieve something similar; both are using custom SSDs that promise blazing speeds. But he says Epic’s strong relationship with Sony means the company is working more closely with the PlayStation creator than it does with Microsoft on this specific area."
I think with every engine- or console generation people will go "this is photorealistic!", but in practice / real games it doesn't look / feel that way, or (maybe more likely) you get used to it until you run into the next best thing.
That said, The Mandalorian has used the Unreal engine to render real-time backgrounds for scenes, so it's good enough for that at least.
And in films they don't need to do real-time, they can take their time to render a scene.
In this demo I thought it "didn't feel that way" more due to the camera positioning and character than anything else, though. The environment seemed quite indistinguishable from pre-rendered CGI.
A highly scripted tech demo is also not such an accurate representation of what real-world results are going to look like.
Yes they can render it in-engine, but they can use bespoke character animations which don't have any blending artifacts, and they can put the camera on a rail and tune the assets and particle effects until they are certain every single frame can be rendered in under 16ms. They can hide billboards and other rendering tricks and be certain the camera is never going to hit them at an angle which gives them away.
Real-world game play scenarios are much more unpredictable, and the results are likely to fall well shy of this mark.
It definitely wasn't indistinguishable from pre-rendered CGI, there are a lot of shadow artifacts for one thing. It looks great but we get this ever few years from the real time people - they're amazing at picking off the low hanging fruit of offline rendering and finding a quality compromised solution that can work in realtime, but they're chasing a moving target.
It's definitely impressive but kind of obviously not pre-rendered still. There is quite some aliasing in smaller details of the more complex objects and the edges of shadows aren't soft. The water effects looked quite bad still.
Also, the character model's hands+feet commonly clipped the walls slightly, and sometimes had that odd sliding motion in which the overall limb seems approximately stationary with respect to the surface they're touching, but the actual edge does not, it slides about a little.
I mean... that lighting was really, really good, and I think this is the first triangle-based demo where the surfaces really don't look oddly angular almost anywhere (maybe with exception of the stalactites). But it's a far cry from the hand-tuned look of something prerendered.
Often there are choices made to support a larger range of devices that require comprises on graphic quality. It doesn't make a lot of sense to build a game only 5% of your customers can afford to run.
Next-gen consoles will have to become more ubiquitous before the previous gen consoles are left out of game releases.
Unreal is now starting to be used in place of green screens in some movies. (there's a lot more that goes into it, but essentially it seems like unreal is one of the core software pieces)
The Mandalorian filmed a lot of scenes with UE4 doing real-time rendering onto large LED screens like in that demo. Looked pretty good! Probably more fun and easier for the actors too.
If you're interested, this was a good article going into details of what's happening behind the scene for the real time rendering: https://ascmag.com/articles/the-mandalorian
If you can afford to put one or more GPU's per LED screen, there is little limit what you can render real-time, especially when the camera is so far away.
> If you can afford to put one or more GPU's per LED screen, there is little limit what you can render real-time
Umm, Ray tracing would love to have a word :P
In all seriousness, typical animated frames for big budget films easily take hours or longer _per frame_. It really depends on what looks you're trying to achieve. Game engines have come a long way in terms of realistic graphics with realtime rendering, but it's worth noting that it's still not the same quality as a fully ray traced scene (whether that matters depends on the content I guess)
Yes, of course. But fully animated CGI traces everything back to camera and single screen in movie quality. This setup has 1,326 individual screens, 123,904 px/m² filmed from several meters away for 180 degree view. None of those screens were rendered even close to movie quality.
btw. Only about 50% of the scenes were made with this setup. rest was traditional ray-tracing.
A lot of what/why they are doing it this way, is realistic lighting and reflections. Im not sure the difference between a realtime game engine and ray tracing matters that much when you are using it as faux ambient light.
After it is filmed, they can still go back and touchup the backgrounds. Someday with ray tracing they can do real time finished products, but for now the tech works great at what its intended to do.
If a scene has been filmed in this setup, how easy is it to separate the physical foreground from the background screen if they want to re-composite the foreground with a more detailed rey traced background?
I imagine with the advancements in consumer level tech with portrait mode in cameras and zoom backgrounds that the tech ILM has could make easy work of this.
The system allows you to insert a dynamic greenscreen around a foreground element (while also retaining the option to preview how things will look after everything). So you can retain most of the virtual set for reflections and lighting, while still having a greenscreen.
It used four synchronized PCs with a total cost of ~$20,000 to render three 4K panels, which is pocket change for a large production. The LED walls or a single lens costs more than that!
This goes into way more technical details: https://ascmag.com/articles/the-Mandalorian Particularly interesting is how the system had ~10 frames of latency, so excessively fast camera turns would show lower quality renders.
(paraphrased) "it was designed to both light the actors and be a background that we can photograph, so that we end up with real-time live pixels in-camera"
Also from the article you linked:
> If the content was created in advance of the shoot, then photographing actors, props and set pieces in front of this wall could create final in-camera visual effects — or “near” finals, with only technical fixes required, and with complete creative confidence in the composition and look of the shots.
I'm not an expert in film terminology but it does not sound by any stretch that this was primarily about lighting.
I hadn't seen that video. I wonder how much was just left as the background screens (out of focus backgrounds in closeup shots seem likely). It does make it clear that the ceiling screens were mostly just for lighting, as they don't photograph well from the low angles.
It was for was shot composition as well; the cinematographer could see how it would end up while shooting. The screens updated to match the camera position in real time (e.g. to show the rest of a spaceship whose door was a physical prop).
As mentioned a few times in this comment section, this article covers the subject pretty well: https://ascmag.com/articles/the-mandalorian. All in all, it looks like many shots were truly captured at or near final, without significant post-production modifications.
Yes, I posted that myself :-) It was 2-3 months ago that I read it fully though. Favreau says "A majority of the shots were done completely in camera". However, any shot that included the ceiling screens needed VFX work to cover them, and that alone must have been a lot of shots.
This is really cool, looks like HDR environments in real life. Makes me wonder if this could be used in conjunction with cameras and some clever image processing algorithms as a camouflage method.
For movies industry, a lot of the cost are actors and time involved. Having everything filmed with pre made scenes saves you lots of time comparing to green screen back and forth with VFX. Real world location also means lots of travelling.
Traveling with lots of heavy, expensive equipment, setting up, tearing down, then all the unpredictability of outdoor anything (weather, etc).
Also one amazing thing was the guy talking about "shooting a 10-hour dawn" – I can imagine a lot of time is wasted trying to recreate a certain time of day. With this, you don't waste that time. You can do as many takes as you need. The sun stays right where it is.
> Also one amazing thing was the guy talking about "shooting a 10-hour dawn"
I watched the whole video on the MAnchurian example, and it sold it obviously for me, but I was only initially thinking of the first demo.
Clearly its hugely beneficial.
What I find interesting is, naughty dog had a bit of a staff turnover for designers and hired film animators (in this case it was a crunch), cgi etc.. Funny how they're now almost cross skillset now. Have to admit, makes me feel older every day.
I wonder if this has anything to do with my wife's complaint (and I agree with her on this) that modern productions are beginning to look more and more like computer games.
She's been watching the third season of westworld, and it's kinda scary to me how almost every episode feels more like a game trailer than an actual story...
We actually binge watched game of thrones for the first time while we were both on mat leave. Hadn't seen a single episode before then.
The difficulty there is that I think everyone universally acknowledges (?) GOT just fell apart like a car crash in slow motion in the later seasons. It's hard to separate that from the knowledge that they started to depart from the books and were clearly undergoing irreparable problems/pressures by the end of season 5. Don't think we can blame that solely on tech... And it's hard to think about the cgi specifically when the rest is falling apart...
Triangles that are just one pixel in the screen, dynamic lightning and overall rendering this close to photorealism, it's the all the other aspects of the games that limit the experience.
Physics engine, character movement, etc. could still be improved.
The quality of the graphics make the lack of realism in the animations more jarring for me. When the character touches a surface it just doesn't look in the slightest. It's quite frustrating actually. My brain seems ready to see realistic contact but instead sees a body moving around unnaturally near a surface that its supposed to be in contact with.
Keep in mind it's contending with YouTube compression too. A lot of the artifacts you see around the character and other moving objects are likely compression artifacts.
the water effects just after the four minute mark looked odd. while the fixed assets like the statues and such later on looked great. however I kept going back to the water and questioning some of the lighting effects too.
don't get me wrong, the fixed assets look amazing and I look forward to seeing more done with this system
It didn’t seem to reflect well the way cloth moves when sliding across another piece of cloth. When she was climbing, I’d expect the scarf to sort of wrinkle/bunch up, then fall to her side, not just cleanly slide off.
However I could see them adjusting the physics for the demo to ensure the cloth actually fell by her side so we could see it swaying as she climbed.
Really? To me it felt like it was in the uncanny valley for cloth. When climbing it seemed to cling to at certain distance from the body at all times, like it had a certain range it could swing to/from the body but could not exceed.
Bingo. Look at the way her tied hair bounces when she is climbing. Totally unnatural. Also, the body movements - the speed of turning is too uniform/fluid; there are variations of speed within a single turn we do.
Though I was totally blown away by the detail of the rock texture and very realistic lighting.
From what I've seen the look of water is usually not provided by the engine itself. Water is really hard to make look good and a lot of it depends on the specific needs of a game.
It's not so much that the water looked off (which it did compared to the rock), it's that the character was completely unencumbered by the water. If you're walking through ankle-deep water, your feet are going to slow down as they drag through the water and go faster through air, and the character's stride didn't account for the increased drag. It'd be the same as if you put that super-realistic character in a stylized game like Hollow Knight without adapting her animation to 15fps like the rest of the characters are.
The animation was great, but the graphics were much better, and one can't help but notice the quality difference even though both are awesome works of art.
That and the climbing scene. As a climber there's no way to do that in those boots! Or, given the apparent story context, to do it that fast: nearly speed-climbing for an on-sight just doesn't look right. And her body movement for it was all wrong.
Yes but isn't that obvious? Based on the quick talk at the start I didn't go into this video expecting literally everything to be photo realistic. The developers were quite clear that the two big things they wanted to demo were:
1. Better real-time global illumination
2. Ultra high poly models
Then they also briefly focused on a few other features, mostly ones that they already shipped. The Lara Croft adventure scenario was an excellent choice to let them show their new work off in a context with many sudden lighting changes, naturalistic assets, arbitrary changes in scene geometry, huge changes in horizon distance and other things that have historically been difficult for real time engines due to their reliance on very CPU intensive pre-processing passes to build static data structures.
The water actually seemed to be acting like a smaller amount of water would, as if the character were six inches tall and walking through a tiny puddle or something.
It's strange that the character wasn't more photorealistic in this demo. If you Google Image search you can find more photorealistic characters from previous versions of the Unreal Engine. I wonder if there might be some trade-off being made between photorealistic character and lifelike character movement.
I assumed the same. If you also make the character more realistic you run into the risk of making the demo eve more unbelievable. Now there are some hints that underline their claim that it runs on a PS5, like some videogame like animation transitions, character movements and the character model itself.
the problem isn't that her design is a bit stylized; it's that her face looks kind of... not-face-like in closeups. (missing some shininess & subsurface scattering imo).
it's different from e.g. Moana, where skin is kind of marzipan-y, but still recognizably skin-like
This is the best way to do graphics IMO. Instead of pushing the tech to its limits and landing in the uncanny valley, it's better to back off a bit from the limits of the tech and perfectly execute a more stylized result.
At the risk of sounding a bit negative I personally find that graphics have plateaued since about the PS3. Sure, there are more polys, sure, there are higher res textures, sure, there are more complex and dynamic lights. But you don't really have the kind of gap we used to have between, say, the PS1 and PS2 for instance. Diminishing returns and all that. The problem is that, in my experience, this eye candy only matters for about 10 minutes when you get into a game, then you stop really paying attention to how it looks and you focus on the gameplay and story etc...
Meanwhile all the dynamic stuff is still fairly primitive IMO. At around 4 minute in the video they briefly mention the water effects. They don't really spend a lot of time on them and for a good reason, they don't look particularly good.
When I was a kid in the 90s I definitely expected future games to look a lot better, but I also expect gameplay and world interaction to progress massively. Fully interactive environments you can interact with like in the real world. You could destroy everything, dig holes, build things, have advanced physics, great AI for NPCs etc...
It saddens me that the AAA video game industry is almost entirely focused on eye candy first and foremost. That being said I concede that I'm clearly in the minority, after all the Uncharted games are generally considered to be good games when I find them incredibly boring.
I hope that now that we can reach near-photorealism in games they'll have to come up with something new to keep pushing the envelope.
Maybe it's just because I am old enough to remember playing Super Mario on a CRT, but that attitude sometimes astounds me. Like I have read many assessments that the latest Doom game's incredible framerates are nothing to be impressed by, because the game is "visually underwhelming". I think a lot of people don't understand how difficult real-time computer graphics are to implement, and I have difficulty viewing the world through their eyes.
You can appreciate the technology behind it, but once the graphics in a game (which you play to escape real life) begin to mimic real life, it can feel underwhelming.
For instance, a game like Okami on PS2 is far more impressive to me than some 4K tech demo. When it comes down to actually playing a game, I don't give a shit about the polygon count, I give a shit if it's fun to play.
I love some pretty gfx as well, but I have the same feeling. Lately I’ve been finding the simplistic gfx of minecraft and terraria just fine especially given the mechanics are rather deep and enjoyable (for me at least). The simple graphics even add a bit of charm
Same here! Minecraft captured the hearts and minds of nearly every demographic, even with "rudimentary" blocky graphics. Never would have happened it went for realism.
Lately I've been playing this great mountain biking game called Lonely Mountains: Downhill that uses this gorgeous minimalist aesthetic. I'm also playing Trails in the Sky on the PSP. Those graphics just age beautifully.
I'm old enough to remember playing games on a CRT with a 32x24 screen resolution (ZX80, ZX81) and whilst I am thoroughly impressed with graphics technologies of today, I do have to echo the feeling that AAA games have slumped to a local minimum of effort in gameplay and story.
But on the flipside, there's literally thousands of indie games with innovative, interesting gameplay, if not sparkling graphics.
Or maybe it takes thoughtfulness to read that comment for what it is: an opinion about priorities of game studios.
And it resonates with me. I like eye candy like almost everyone and can appreciate technological marvels in CGI (and currently working with UE4 after hours, creating my own assets, I can appreciate how much work goes into modern game graphics). At the same time, I do feel many games these days try to use high-resolution textures and pretty shaders to paper over incoherent storylines and lack of gameplay depth. I think it's an entirely valid point to make.
I must have expressed myself poorly, my point was not that I don't think it looks good, my point is that I feel like all this effort is focused on a single metric, making stuff look good in trailers.
Remember when HL2 was announced you had this super fancy physics engine? How objects would bounce and realistic react with each other, how you could stack things and come up with puzzles that would just use the physics engine without hardcoded scripts? HL2 was gorgeous looking but it was more than bump-mapping and complicated light models. You couldn't port HL2 to goldsrc and have it play the same.
Meanwhile almost 2 decades later we're back to fully scripted puzzles, mostly non-interactive environments and AI that's generally limited to a glorified A* algorithm.
This tech demo doesn't look decent, it looks really good, there's no arguing about it.
I will even go farther and say that I feel like I have now been playing the same game for 25 years. The FPS genre gets some new tricks, but it's still the same basic game with a few new mechanics and tricks- I can pick up a game I have never played before and generally be reasonably competent at it within a few minutes- a stark contrast to when I picked up tribes for the first time and was completely useless in online play for at least a week. Graphics increases have been both incremental and with diminishing returns in recent generations.
I think part of that is that the UI and control system has standardized on a mostly similar set of features with somewhat standardized mechanics. They've iterated over the last twenty years towards what is likely the peak (or at least a local maxima) of what you can do with a mouse/keyboard or controller (and controllers are generally normalizing as well, except for small differentiators). I.e. there's only so much control over your physical space you can have with a mouse and keyboard while still allowing good character movement, so there are limitations on what can easily be done.
On the other hand, VR based games are wildly experimenting and iterating because the control interface is so different (while at the same time fairly intuitive in that it maps to our reality better). Superhot in VR (which I have on the Quest) definitely doesn't feel like the same game from the last 25 years. Half-Life Alyx is supposed to be an amazing experience (I haven't had a chance to try it yet, and I won't for a long time likely), but that's not supposed to be because it looks so much better, but because it offers a wildly different and new experience.
So, if you're tired of feeling like you're playing the same old games, try VR. The Quest is probably the cheapest way into this space, but it's not actually cheap at $400, and it will gate you from a lot of the premier experiences available if you have a powerful PC with a good graphics card and VR headset that can interact with it (which the Quest can also do with a cable, so you aren't locked to Quest games, although maybe not at quite the visual quality of some other headsets).
I guess I just feel there is a real lack of creativity in gaming these days- There used to be a rich variety of games- puzzle/adventure games, RTSes, Simulation games, Flight/Space games of all kinds, and now its just kind of condensed down to FPSes, repeated sports franchises, and a few outliers- KSP, Minecraft, to name a few.
Interestingly, I won an Occulus Go at a meetup about 9 months ago. I almost gave it away, I didn't really know what I had won, I thought it was going to be an upgraded google cardboard.
But man I was surprised at how cool it was. And yeah- everything feels really raw and unpolished and experimental, kind of like the early days of the internet. My biggest gripe is that the games are all kind of vapid and on rails, there are no games where you can kind of go and explore, but still its all quite interesting and has me interested in buying a "proper" VR setup.
> My biggest gripe is that the games are all kind of vapid and on rails, there are no games where you can kind of go and explore
Some titles on the Quest are a bit better in that respect, but you still have to research the game to know. I think that's also a factor of how new the space is. It's much harder to allow users to roam where they want and still have the polish allowing them to interact how they want with the environment, it took quite a few years for that to happen in the traditional game space, both because of the effort required to craft that world, and because the engines were still working on abstractions that made it easy to fill those worlds with things that could be interacted with without too much programmer/artist work.
A good example of this is all the ways people have found for break Half-Life Alyx by working around the game expectations. People have found a way to hoard items, which would normally be hard to do because you have to actually hold them, but throwing them in buckets and bringing the bucket with you (for example, hauling around a bucket with 20 grenades in it, when normally you don't have a way to carry them all). If you put too many items in a bucket and pick it up, the physics system slows to a crawl and can crash the came. They designed the game so there weren't too many interactable objects in any one scene (because that makes sense), but the wholly new paradigm means that people were able to easily do crazy stuff to break it.
I've been meaning to pick up Arizona Sunshine for Quest, and that might be along the lines of what you're looking for (but not for Go). The Walking dead game is supposed to come to Quest eventually to (but again, the Go is unlikely), and the reviews of that looks pretty open for movement and exploration.
I kinda agree with you, but I think it's expected: demos are just ads for technical people. So in a way you know that it's too good to be true.
Plus they don't actually explain how it works, how the demo was made and what's the limits of their technology. They only show the good side, so people naturally wants to know the not-so-good side as well.
I think raytracing has the potential to be a big leap forward. Real-time lighting and shadows are still incredibly limited, and most games are only able handle dynamic shadows from a hand-full of light-sources at a time. I think we don't see the difference yet because baked lighting gets a really good result, but I think after we live for a while in a world where every flickering candle, and every emissive texture in a game is a fully-fleged, shadow-casting, dymamic light source, then we are going to look back at current gen games and see how static and artificial the lighting is.
But I do agree with you in general that more advanced simulation is a huge, largely untouched opportunity in games.
Raytracing with anything resembling real environments with very large amount of details is not for tomorrow. Maybe 10-20 years down the road. So far most tech demos for current Raytracing happen with low-polygon use-cases.
That's funny you bring up the PS3, because my first reaction to the parent commenter and the OP video was how I remember thinking things couldn't get much better than the PS3 demos [0] – which now look comparatively primitive – but I've had that same feeling with PS4 and now PS5. But PS5 really does seem to be getting close to real-time interactive realism.
But I agree with you that I expected games to be much "better" by 2020, back when I was a kid playing 7th Guest. I guess I couldn't understand back then how much manual, hard-to-scale labor and budget would have to go into story, dialogue, art, acting (plus salaries of A-list movie stars), mo-cap, etc. I expected in-depth scripted NPC behavior, like in 1992's Ultima VII [1], to be extremely commonplace and basic by now, but I obviously didn't understand back then what actual AI and emergent simulation requires (versus manual scripting, and testing of that scripting)
The Killzone 2 trailer was completely fake (i.e. not running on actual PS3 hardware) at the time it was released, and the real-time version of it running on PS3 later unveiled looked much, much worse. This was debunked at the time.
I agree that Story telling and Game Play is still the top priorities. Look at Nintendo! I enjoy Zelda,( not exactly the best graphics looking game ) more so than most "photorealistic" game in recent years. ( I will also admit I am now a lot older and dont have time for serious gaming )
But still, the graphics in UE5 is stunning. The last time I was stunned by 3D Graphics was Crysis, and that was I think over 10 years ago.
The Zelda games (and Nintendo in general) are the perfect proof that great graphics are about way more than more sophisticated or technically advanced graphics.
Many games on the Switch look way better than generic AAA games on PS4 and Xbox. Granted the Switch games are still somewhat held back by limited hardware.
Personally I'd take Breath of the Wild over some generic UE4 game any day.
The UE5 demo show realtime GI. Current systems often rely on baking. So this feature really allows games to have more dynamic environments at the same visual quality as last gen. That's surely a win for gameplay.
I think there's just an obvious law of diminishing returns on certain things.
If you double the number of triangles, it doesn't take long to get to a clean looking circle - the next time you double it, it doesn't look that much better unless you're zooming way in on it.
So there's two things here, I think:
* There are tons of other improvements, like dynamic lighting. This turns into more of an immersion/ realism thing, and less of a "detail" thing. It's weird when your characters shadow doesn't move the way you expect with the light sources, it's weird when one part of the room is totally dark because a block is just slightly in the way of a light source, and the light isn't bouncing around it.
* With VR, this will all matter way more. You're going to have people taking objects in the game and putting them right up to their face - suddenly the difference between X triangles and 2X triangles is really noticeable again, relative to a 3rd person view on a monitor that's at least a foot or two away from you, where objects are always at a distance. Immersion is an extremely important factor for VR, so optimizing there makes a lot of sense.
So while todays mediums may not demonstrate these wins, they open up possibilities for new mediums.
However I see the new features in this particular demo as a game changer in many practical ways other than just eyecandy:
- Realtime dynamic GI makes baking lights unnecessary, increasing iteration time for environment artists.
- Also using this dynamic GI it is possible to create new gameplay mechanics based on dynamic lighting (for example in the demo the roof of the cave falls down and the area becomes lit, making more things visible)
- The new animation system makes developers able to create natural motions that automatically adjust to the environment, which would also save a lot of developer time.
- The demo explanation video mentions that the statue model assets are imported directly from ZBrush without any postprocessing (with the original triangle count, without baking any normal maps/LODs), which also saves time for artists importing their work to Unreal (although the file size costs might probably be a bit high to practically use this in every scenario)
> They don't really spend a lot of time on them and for a good reason, they don't look particularly good.
Even CGI water looks typically very fake (except from afar), because we don't really have very good models for water/liquids. That's certainly not the priority for games either.
I agree. Many projects seem to spend so much resources on graphics, which are getting quite impressive (not photoreal, though who cares), but game mechanics aren't getting better. Netcode has improved, allowing for more variety in multiplayer experiences, but other than that I get a sense of a game-mechanics winter.
> there are more polys, sure, there are higher res textures, sure, there are more complex and dynamic lights
What I'm noticing is there's too much focus on fancy lights, over-the-top postprocessing effects with annoying crap like ambient occlusion, screen space reflections that hog a lot of performance for just reflecting your character in water puddles placed everywhere just to show the effect off, and so on.
And not enough focus on good old textures and polygons. Approaching spherical objects closely still makes the polygons very very obvious. Staring directly at walls still shows how low res textures are.
> You could destroy everything, dig holes, build things
I think it's the global illumination that really makes the difference. You can't get to realism just by drawing more polygons, but if light acts in believable ways (especially when the scene changes or lights move around) it really starts to look like real life.
The graphics are better, but camera and animations are a dead giveaway. It was fine when the camera was relatively static and far away, but shots with more movement became really noticeable. (Watch carefully, you can see the character's hand go through the rock in some places, or not make full contact in others. Once you notice it's hard to un-see.)
I'm sure this is all fixable, but some part of me wonders how much larger game budgets will have to become (or correspondingly, how much less content will be offered) in order to achieve the new standard in production qualities.
I've got the default VR scene running on my Quest. It works pretty well - there's just a slight bug with the teleport texture.
The Unreal Editor was not as easy to use as I thought it might be, but it isn't too bad. I wish it didn't take an hour to recompile shaders all the time though.
It included teleporting and picking up objects, full hand tracking and finger positioning.
Overall, it seemed like a decent foundation but clearly needed a LOT of work to be ready for a full game. The skillset and toolset is very different than what web/app devs and backend devs use.
Looks impressive, especially the reduced friction for artists. The demo hints at several shortcomings of the engine, though, especially the nanite componet. Stepping through the feature highlight (whatever the youtube compression lets through), during dense scenes geometry often gets washed out, looking less detailed then an authored model would probably look. Hard edges often appear fuzzy, and the fuzziness is not temporally stable.
I am always skeptical of tech demos like this, but if Epic has truly created a way to show full quality assets at runtime without manual LOD / optimization, then this is going to be a huge process improvement for game development. Same goes for this lighting. Baking lights is such a burden, if they can simply do all of this at runtime then making beautiful games just became that much easier.
They also bought Quixel, which gives all of these photo realistic assets to any Unreal Engine developer (even if you're some kid building a game for free). Not sure how Unity can keep up with this.
I'm normally skeptical of tech demos, but normally they don't actually talk about the tech. Assuming the actual promises aren't misleading, this is extremely impressive.
> Not sure how Unity can keep up with this.
Unity still has a big edge on usability. Unreal is very much a AAA tool: you have to use C++, all the built-in systems have a much steeper learning curve, etc. Even as a professional dev who's tried a few times to get into it for fun, it's just too much headache for my level of project. Whereas I can whip something together in Unity really easily. All that said, this definitely widens the gap for actual studios. If you have the time and know-how to use Unreal, you have even less reason to consider Unity now.
For a non-programmer getting into games, C++ isn't that much larger leap than C#. Also, as others said, you have blueprints. They're not bad - though hopefully there will be some investments made into ergonomics of their use.
Which kind? Most of the memory problems (in particular leaks and null pointers) happen just as much in managed languages, so you'll have your fair share of those bugs in C# games as well.
Trying to find a GC-related crash on a stale pointer that is only reproducible in a Shipping build on a single platform is fun (depending on your definition of fun)
(Shipping in UE4 means release mode with full optimization enabled, most logging & profiling stripped out, etc)
That's not entirelly true, there are for instance Python bindings, and I think some work exists on bindings for other languages. I just think they don't always have a lot of support until a case exists where it ends up being really valuable. Film studios in the case of Python.
Unreal's Python integration is incredible. I made some modifications to it at work to run a version of WinPython (both for loose scripts outside the engine and pip access)
It's great for complex asset pipelines and quick one-off editor scripts, at least in my experience.
The only thing that felt a bit wonky to me was attempting to use bitflag enums.
I looked at unity and unreal 4 before starting to learn an engine. Unreal is great, but the massive amount of tutorials and documentation is why I started with unity. I really hope unreal 5 can do something similar in the distant future. Before unreal 6 is released.
I think it remains to be seen. Unity's big upcoming feature seems to what they call the Data Oriented Technology Stack. Essentially, this supposedly allows you to put far more non-static objects onto the screen than is usually available in a game engine. I do agree though that what Epic's doing here is a huge deal.
That's the big question, isn't it? Obviously every mobile game is going to benefit from it, because it will save battery life. The greatest question related to this for me is how many games that couldn't be easily made before are now doable? I imagine that Total War style games will be much easier to make with Unity.
As far as I know, Quixel still requires a subscription, and the assets can still be used in Unity. But the dynamic LOD optimization is definitely a killer feature.
Don't you still need to do some of that just for file size and data transfer, if nothing else? In the demo they said it had hundreds of billions of triangles. Google tells me you can get down to 18 bytes or so per triangle, but even if we assume a lower bound of just three bytes per triangle (amortized storage of 1 vertex per triangle of an x,y,z point), we're talking about on the order of terabytes to just store that scene, right?
I'm pretty sure the virtual word here refers to the geometry being in a virtualized form, meaning that the renderer refers to it but the GPU does not have all of it in RAM but instead is paged in on demand.
This paper about geometry images[0] was mentioned on Twitter from an old post by the programmer who implemented the functionality in UE5. Geometry images encode geometry in rectangular 2D textures that can be reconstructed later (the paper is kinda old for this, but i guess it can be done on a computer shader nowadays). If those images are stored as virtual textures, which are supported by the GPUs nowadays, they could be essentially using sparse textures/resources to store geometry.
This would be awesome tech if everyone had gigabit fiber. You could just stream all the assets during loading time or if possible during gameplay. On second thought, 125MB per second probably wouldn't be fast enough. A 30 second load time would only result in 3750mb of assets at best. 4k on a Google Stadia doesn't sound bad if the latency is good.
That's assuming 6 bytes per vertex, 3 vertices per triangle? Most assets use triangle strips, which averages closer to 1 vertex per triangle. They also said the souce mesh is in billions of triangles, but their Nanite pairs that down to 10's of millions. At ~1 vert/tri * 6bytes * 100mil tri, that's 600MB of meshes. Keep in mind this is just a demo, so they can pack what would normally be an entire level into one room. A whole game might end up be equivalent to a couple of demos after they manually optimize even more.
> Thus, when vertices are shared, the total amortized storage required per triangle will be 12 bytes of memory for the offsets (at 4 bytes for three 32-bit integer offsets) plus half of the storage for one vertex—6 bytes, assuming three 4-byte floats are used to store the vertex position—for a total of 18 bytes per triangle.
And I they said hundreds of billions of triangle, not just billions (timestamp 6:29), but another commenter made a point that's obvious in retrospect that it's a ton of reused assets, not hundreds of billions of totally independent triangles.
I edited it to clarify I meant that as a lower bound. Even if it were somehow achievable, 3 bytes per triangle times hundreds (plural, so at least 200) of billions of triangles is at least 600 billion bytes: 600 gigabytes.
You can use delta compression, you can even use lossy compression. It doesn't matter if a vertex is at x=1.001 or x=0.998 if it looks good enough.
That said, yes, of course, assets are getting enormous - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare - 175.2GB on PS4.
There was a post about the new MS Flight Simulator and how it'll stream high-def textures from the "cloud" during gameplay, because it has petabytes of textures.
Maybe, but some assets could have smaller sizes; instead of distributing a mesh with 500k vertex in LOD0 and various other LODs with less, you could distribute a single mesh with 50k vertex, then do some passes of catmull-clark subdivision on it during loading. Wouldn't work the statues and rocks seen in the demo, but good for weapons, cars etc.
It's great to see that graphics continue to improve, but I think the pipelining of reproducing physical space characteristics is most interesting to me. One of the things they mention in the video is using tools to measure how real spaces echo and then reproducing those echo characteristics in virtual spaces. Techniques like that have enormous potential for allowing us to use virtual space and actual space collaboratively. We'll always have games, but I'm excited to see how, in the next twenty or thirty years, technology that started in games starts to allow us to interact and socialize in new ways.
This has been done for ages in the audio production space, it's called "convolution reverb". It's quite nice, but it doesn't allow you to tune it very much, besides basic filtering and stretching/cutting.
Yah, they said "convolution reverb," so I think they expected audience to know what it was. Often it's not about creating new technology, but making existing technology accessible to new audiences and new creators.
Honestly, convolution reverb is already highly accessible. It’s a feature in $50 (and probably free) reverb plug-ins for anybody that does audio. They’re relatively easy to implement and have probably been around for a decade+. As the OP said, the audio things they mentioned aren’t new or adding any accessibility imo
As a high-end builder, I would love to integrate a wall like this into a project. The ability (as shown with the Mandelorian video) the screens have to produce light would be incredible in interior living spaces.
Ah, convolution reverb. We've had it for a long time in DSP. Basically what you do is pop a balloon (create an "impulse" -- you can also clap your hands or use an electric arc) and record the echo. This gives you what's called the "impulse response" of the space.
Reverb is really just thousands of echoes, and echoes are just the original sound delayed back to you. So what you can do is use the impulse response in a FIR filter, convolve it with the original signal, and you've recreated the same reverb with a different sound.
This technique has been quite accessible to audio engineers (and mechanical engineers) for a few decades now. But you really only go out and sample impulse responses when you really need a very accurate model of the reverb. In most cases someone will just use a precanned impulse response.
This is one area where hardware accelerated ray-tracing has me excited. I like the idea of walking sound sources to the observer. Unlike light, you need to account for the speed of sound through mediums, which adds an extra layer of cool imo. You also don't need to update at the audio sample rate, since most objects will not be moving very fast (unless you want trans sonic simulations, which would be exotic and cool).
Forget all of the little hacks. Sound processing is cheap. In 2020 it is unnecessary to select from a set of pre-baked filters and applying them to some predefined volume (ie this room is echoey, this room is absorbant, etc.)
This is one area where software has regressed then stagnated [0]. It doesn't make any sense, other than it wasn't prioritized. I think it's only a matter of time before engines go back and finally complete the audio simulation problem.
I suppose it's a matter of acceptable approximations and cost. If only 2% of players have a high quality surround sound system, and only half of those have a good ear, then you really only have 1% of users who can tell the difference between raytraced audio and the heuristic "hacks" that sound engineers have spent decades developing. So I don't know if audio raytracing will become mainstream in games anytime soon. But I also suppose that if one engine does it, others will follow suit.
Same thing with this Unreal 5 demo. Most users would not be able to tell the difference between rendering 16B vs 8B triangles per frame.
You don't need a high quality sound system or a good ear to tell the difference though. You just need a pair of headphones and to be a human with hearing. Evolution has been at work for eons. Every human born is a powerful audio processing machine. I can't give you a rigorous proof or hand you a double blind test to try for yourself, so you'll have to accept an impasse or start going down a rabbit hole consisting of studies on pre-baked ray-traced FIR filters of known geometries and the audibility of group delay.
I am convinced every human can hear the difference. Computation is cheap. There's no reason not to solve the problem.
There's still some weirdness - I found the water movement (around 4:10) a bit odd, and the lightball in the cave seemed to be directional even though it was a ball. But my god, that's beautiful.
The end scene with the flying reminded me of the (fully rendered) Avatar ride at Disney World. I stood in line for two hours for that.
Watch the characters' hand. When she first reveals the ball, it glows in every direction. Then she moves her hand position to "focus" the light forward.
For a while we pretty much only had UDK (Unreal 3). Unity sort of invented the idea of an omni-platform game engine that's affordable and accessible for indies. Then Unreal slightly shifted its strategy to compete with that rising market, and Crytek... jumped in too.
I think Unity is too valuable to low-medium end indies to go anywhere (you really don't need most of these new features if you aren't going for a photorealistic look anyway), but we could see a partitioning of the market as Unity takes over the low-mid and Unreal takes over the high-end. Unity actually no longer has the (partially) realtime global illumination they were so proud of just a couple years ago, because of licensing woes: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/07/03/enlighten-will-be-repla...
You aren't wrong about features, but the fact it's now free until $1 million USD in sales means by the time you own Epic a cent you've made a LOT of money, in Indie terms. Depending on how tight you think your budget will be that could be important.
Dota 2 Reborn is the first game on it, full release was in September 2015. Also Dota 3 was a joke over 7.0.0 patch which had changed all of the core mechanics in the game, but to be fair it had breaked the chains from WC3 map mechanics.
It's okay. I forgot for a second that memes and internet humor are frowned upon here. I guess that's okay. The signal to noise ratio of HN is astounding (in a positive way) as a result.
Other Bethesda studios can still use them. I remember Arkane got ahold of id tech 5 for Dishonored 2, and then renamed it "Void Engine" and added a bunch of bugs.
Plenty of proprietary engines are in use today. And you've got FOSS options like Godot and Blender. UE's definitely the biggest, but other options aren't going away any time soon.
Amazon is getting in the engine game as well, with Lumberyard.
And there is always the possibility of other studios making their proprietary engine available if there is a profit opportunity. RAGE and Anvil come to mind.
Unity doesn't really overlap with Unreal. Unreal is big and cutting edge for AAA titles. Unity is much more simplified. The path of least resistance is usually pretty clear for someone starting a project.
For a while there they really tried to overlap. Unity's been making a huge graphics push over the last five years - it actually had realtime GI before Unreal did, and wasted no time telling the whole world about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk8gpz0o5TU
More recently it's been making a lot of noise about its new scriptable render pipeline and shader graph. Of course these are still playing catch-up with Unreal, but they're doing an admirable job.
Meanwhile Unreal totally changed its pricing model ~5 years ago to be much more similar to Unity's and affordable for indies/individuals, as well as adding native support for mobile platforms, etc.
For some customers there may be a clear choice, but for now at least there's also a ton of overlap between their markets. We'll see where things go in the future.
Both Unity and Unreal Engine offer their source code on Github...
Both engines have bugs, and one of the biggest complaints about Unreal Engine is that any feature not used by Fortnite is half-baked until Fortnite uses it. With Unity, the biggest complaints are about the relatively transitory lifetimes of some of their biggest-marketed features, like rendering pipelines or networking code.
Indeed. However, they do offer a commercial license to big developers/publishers will full source access. Substantially cheaper than the non-royalty, commercial Epic license too (but at the AAA level they're both rounding errors).
> Unreal Engine 5 will be available in preview in early 2021, and in full release late in 2021, supporting next-generation consoles, current-generation consoles, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android.
I wonder if they consider the Switch a current-generation console.
I'm pretty sure that most high-end iOS and Android devices are significantly more powerful than the switch—I mean, they generally cost hundreds of dollars more.
Too bad. I'm always curious about gains in cross-platform target productivity. The dream being that you build a high fidelity game and just need to drag a slider down to create a build that runs at 30fps+ on the, for example, Switch.
Of course what we normally see is a lot of work to port down games. A good example being all the work that went into getting Witcher 3 to run on the Switch: https://developer.nvidia.com/gtc/2020/video/s22697
Somewhat tangential - I was hoping I could download and run a demo to see how things look on my hardware. What are your favorite downloadable graphics demos?
Even with all the amazing lighting and polygon counts, they still have screenshake from a 2001 game, only now even more uncanny. "Is this a video game or real li.... never mind"
I just saw the tech demo on the ps5, really really impressive, the dynamic light, the zbrush import, the huge amount of polygons... I'm saying this with some experience as a 3d artist (zbrush) and a programmer.
The environment demo is very impressive - wonder why they didn't put a bit more effort in to the character, it would have been insanely impressive if the character detail was next-gen.
Yes the character stuck out as much less realistic than the environment. I thought it was an engine limitation but I suppose it could be improved with additional effort.
The only things I can possibly criticize is the global illumination lagging behind environment changes (presumably because it's iterative) and the water simulation not being movie-quality.
that water simulation was pretty bad and blurred out, I went over it a few times. I don't think this is a limitation of the engine because I have seen plenty of games use Unreal Engine 4 and do it differently.
Dont't see it? The Unreal Tournament is the team which released the Battle Royale version of Fortnite. Hence why Fortnite has bouncy, fast, area-ish gameplay.
Sure it is different, but if you do not want any changes from the old Tournament games, just go play those.
I've always been excited to see these demos over the years, from childhood until now. Although they may not be what is actually implemented in a real game, Unreal, id, Nvidia, etc. have always managed to spark that feeling of giddy euphoria, a glimpse into the future, with these demos.
Can someone help me articulate my issue with this? Looking at a lot objects, they seem unnaturally detailed. Like the bugs, or the statue at around 6 minutes. Something about it makes me really uncomfortable feeling physically.
Is this like a weird infinite depth of field kind of thing?
There's no distance blur and the entire shot is "in focus". These shots would be impossible to take with a camera. In addition, if you game a bunch, you'd expect LOD to drop with distance, but here it doesn't.
There's limited places for your eyes to rest. The end scene with heavily detailed architecture surrounded by smooth desert, does it feel more comfortable than the earlier footage?
There are all sorts of weird (temporal?) artifacts in the demo, I think especially visible in the climbing scene. Look at this cropped capture for example:
The region below her arm is much sharper/detailed (missing dof/motion blur?) than surrounding area. It seems to be somehow related how stuff is revealed, as her arm was moving up in this bit, so the overly sharp region was covered in previous frames.
Also the shadow (e.g. her fingers) has very sharp pixelated edges which can contribute to the feeling of oversharpness. There are some other lesser artifacts also abound, so yeah, its obvious that the engine cuts corners. But of course that is to be expected, realtime graphics is all about compromises.
So I don't care much for graphics quality, I started moving towards the terminal and CLI for most everything in my life about ten years ago, ultimately I feel that graphics falls under unnecessary fluff and eyecandy that distracts from "real" data, gameplay, etc.
But that flight scene at the end of the demo, how realistic it was, how it was seamless, how detailed it produced a physical reaction in me, a feeling of like "WOW" throughout my entire body as I watched it. That was amazing.
Graphical quality can be a way of conveying "real" data. Here's a video where they cover the importance of graphics in fighting games, such as allowing characters to have larger move sets because the better graphics allows moves to be visually distinct to players.
You kids are spoiled nowadays with all your fancy graphics that substitute flash for performance, I played Warcraft Orcs and Humans for weeks, in all of it's beautiful pixelated, 8 bit glory. Now get off my lawn, zug zug.
why do you want that, out of curiosity. The description seems to mimic human eye and reduce load on rendering processor, but it seems like less information for the player at once
It's not less information if you have eye tracking VR hardware, because you literally cannot see where you aren't looking. If anything it gives you the ability to dedicate more resources where it actually matters.
there have been a couple games over the decades that do this well, I too am surprised how this isn't built right into the engines for everyone to independently opt for doing that
I don't actually hate motion blur, I really like the cinematic feel of in-engine graphics.
I went through a phase where I wanted things sharper and sharper to showcase technical ability (mostly in consumer grade video and photography), but then once THAT was ubiquitous I found myself focusing on deteriorating the quality for its uniqueness and allure. Forcing the viewer to find focal points themselves and increasing interest.
I feel like gamers don't really have an opinion one way or the other, but have been told not to like blur? I'm not really sure I just haven't seen the arguments and have gone full circle on the meme myself. At the end of the day I enjoy it.
I've played open world games like the Witcher 3, or Assassin's Creed Odissey; and damn they're impressive games.
Assassin's creed in particular was really amazing, you could wander through ancient Greece and just enjoy the sights, visit the cities.
With the kind of things demoed here it will be even more amazing.
But the games feel somehow lifeless, as if you're the only one really living in there.
Sure there are some NPCs, but they are all reactive, not active. You can roam the countryside for a while and come back to civilization, nothing will have changed, except maybe the town will be governed by blue instead of red.
There's some premises, on Odissey, you have some patrols for both sides moving around, and if they encounter each other they start fighting.
But that's small scale, and partly scripted at that, there will always be the same patrols going through the same
paths.
What's missing is that you cannot walk on a battle in progress unless it is in the story. You won't see a city patching up its walls after a siege, merchants running a real economy, people going on with their lives in general. But meaningfully, not just walking around the town and going back to their house at night.
I assume it's really difficult though.
First technically, it's a lot of CPU power. And a lot of work to create AI that meaningfully impact the world.
Then it's how to design a game in a world you cannot really predict. It could be purely open box, a la mount and blade, but I think it could be more, with an underlying story line that would adapt to the changing world.
Of course you don't need to do everything at once. In this case, simply having the 2 armies stateful (e.g. a set number of troops with some replenishments, but not always the same soldiers in the places), with troops moving across the countryside, and 2 AIs vying for power across the land would be fantastic
yeah, all the economy stuff in games is because you are the only one amassing wealth, stealing and looting from everyone and everything. it is pretty ridiculous.
even that skyrim patch that lets you invest and makes shop owners have more money was still only influenced by you and you alone
Do you have any ideas for approaches to this not including the dominant behavior tree paradigm used in Unreal Engine? If this type of true AI behavior has to be built on a case by case basis per game per behavior (pathfinding, animation, mechanics): it's gonna be a few decades to get there.
I wonder if the background in the flight scene is pre-rendered. If not, then PlayStation 5 (which the demo is running on) is going to be a beast of a console.
I have to wonder how much of this requires ray tracing hardware. I've noticed for many, many years that the quality of models and textures has been 'good enough', but lighting, for the most part, still sucked. Ray tracing seems to solve a lot of lighting problems.
The real-time GI is amazing. Ray tracing is going to be a game changer, not only in terms of visual quality, but also because it's one of those rare times in computer graphics where the more advanced solution is actually making it easier on graphics programmers by replacing a bag of dirty tricks with a unified, physically based solution.
One interesting note: they say the GI is "instant" but you can actually see that they are using temporal stabilization to achieve this effect, and there's a slight lag between when the light changes and when the GI finds its resting point. I suspect removing this lag will be one of the things which makes graphics feel "next gen" when GPUs can handle enough rays per pixel to handle GI in one or two frames instead of a few dozen.
I tried to figure out whether the new GI used raytracing, and it doesn't seem like it is? If it is using raytracing hardware it isn't nearly as impressive. If it isn't, then it's sheer magic.
I'm almost certain they are. HW raytracing is of the big selling points of the new console generations, and if they achieved these kinds of results without it, then I would have to reconsider my skepticism of the occult.
It certainly isn't completely raytraced, because current hardware can't support that. If they use the new hardware, they're using it in some kind of mixed mode. Whether that means only for certain materials, or whether they're able to use it to do "fat rays" that approximate only the general direction for indirect light, or whatever else. But direct, hard shadows are quite cheap (comparatively) on today's regular, rasterization-based rendering systems, so that part isn't surprising.
It certainly isn't fully path traced, but the result does look to me like they are using ray-traced GI. You can tell by some of the details, like colored bounce lighting which I am not sure can be achieved with this level of detail using other methods.
The current standard for getting real-time performance for ray tracing is to limit the number of rays and bounces, and stabilize the results temporally.
I.e. to get a "physically accurate" result you would have to send hundreds, or thousands of rays per pixel, and bounce them up dozens or hundreds of times. With this method, instead you send maybe even one or two rays per pixel, which gives you a noisy result. But you store the result, and accumulate it over a number of frames, and apply de-noising, and over time you end up with a high-quality result.
I believe that is why when the light moves, the GI lags for a fraction of a second in this demo.
Another trick is in stead of tracing multiple bounces per ray at once, to compute one indirect bounce every n-th frame using intermediate results from the previous (not the current) frame and then spatio-temporally smooth the results, possibly with on-screen bilateral filtering of the past few frames. I think one can see they do this when they move the light source. It takes a while for the indirect bounces to fade out. Perhaps they use screen space ray tracing for this (meaning no indirect bounces for occluded geometry).
Because softer shadows add to the realism, so they would have used them if they had invented a new efficient ray tracing method! Look at 5:12 in the video. The shadows are way too sharp. It's probably good old shadow mapping for the first bounce and then screen space(?) global illumination.
Feels to me like: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1026182/ (which Nvidia has wrapped up in their RTXGI library: https://developer.nvidia.com/rtxgi). The idea is to supplement basic irradiance probes with moment shadow maps, so you can efficiently calculate how much each pixel should be affected by each probe. This greatly reduces the light bleeding problem, which is the biggest downfall of irradiance probes. Nvidia uses raytracing to update some percentage of the probes each frame, and I wouldn't be surprised if UE5 does, too (despite the Euro Gamer article). That said, their geometry solution is likely more amenable to random access than traditional rasterization, so that may make raytracing for probes and probe shadow maps unnecessary. Also, judging by when the player character puts her hand on the door, it looks like there's a bit of screen space GI going on, as well.
Real-time ray tracing is not impressive in the current generation of games because they’re optimized to maximize the quality of traditional lighting solutions. Most games use mostly static assets and lighting, because baked lighting can get a nearly photorealistic result as long as nothing moves.
Highly dynamic environments are where the technology shines, because it can achieve results which traditional solutions simply can’t. I think ray-traced Minecraft is the best current example of the potential of this technology.
For some tasks, ray tracing already outperforms traditional rasterization.
All "photorealistic" 3D renderers are trying to produce output on par with a true ray tracing renderer, and because the computation required is so high, tons of bodges and hacks are employed to approach that level of quality. The resulting complexity of a traditional rasterizer is astronomical compared to the complexity of a ray traced renderer.
Ray traced graphics has been the goal the entire time computer graphics have been a thing; for the past 40 years, at least. That's always been the goal. I can't remember a time when it wasn't.
It's only now that hardware fabrication technology has put us in a place where we're able to slightly open the door to the rendering techniques we've desired for so long. It's an exciting time.
It is not a scam. It may not perform well in most situations currently, but I can promise you, that will change significantly as time goes on.
Just like how early CPU hardware was slow and expensive, early ray tracing hardware is slow and expensive. Over time, CPU hardware has gotten cheaper and faster, and the same will happen with ray tracing hardware.
IMO, ray tracing is a scam as currently presented by Nvidia, et. al. GPUs are not the correct way to approach this problem. RTX is an approximation at best and a complete joke at worst. That said, I do believe ray tracing is the future and can become the standard way in which we engage with all 3D graphics concerns.
Contrast the GPU with the newest generation of x86 CPUs. They have more cores than you can typically use, provide ridiculous amounts of pipelined throughput, and have specialized vector instructions which can dramatically accelerate common 3D graphics tasks (i.e. matrix multiplication).
Most practical ray tracing algorithms are trivially parallelized (e.g. just throw each scanline at a thread) and also exhibit properties which can leverage the deep stack depths and OoO execution enabled by modern CPUs. Ray tracing is inherently a recursive activity with a profound number of potential branching opportunities. x86 has absolutely no problem dealing with this kind of scenario. This is exactly what it was built for. GPUs on the other hand require yet more specialized hardware that has its limitations baked-in at the transistor level. x86 does not have these same kind of limitations.
Consider the hypothetical benefits of having your entire graphics pipeline implemented within 1 cache-coherent memory domain and on top of a single instruction set. Imagine no Direct3D/OpenGL/Vulkan/drivers/etc are involved to ruin your day. What if you could fit all of your required scene, texture and model data into L3 cache? How many times can you fill L3 from RAM per second on a 3950x with reasonable memory configuration? How many times per frame at 60fps? I feel we need to take some time to look at the emerging opportunities with the new hardware that is coming to market.
I worry that the developer community is so out of touch with the hardware aspect (e.g. 22ms hello world) that we are basically saying "lol no just use GPU magic graphics rectangle" and calling it a day. I feel like specialization of ASICs is fundamentally taking us in the wrong direction now that we are able to put so many general purpose cores onto a single package/die in a very cost-effective manner. Maybe this is why AMD is taking so long to bring a proper Nvidia killer to market. At some point there has to be a certain # of cores where someone raises their hand and asks "why do we still need a separate GPU?".
I don't know the implementation details of this, but I use both a 3950x and a 2080 Ti for rendering in Blender's Cycles, which is a non-realtime path-traced engine. I've experimented with several different configurations, and the GPU using its raytracing cores is much faster than the CPU for identical results. Given that next-gen cards are expected to increase the number of these cores by 2x or 4x, I don't see how software raytracing could compete.
It seems to me that this game doesn't actually take in account all the seemingly existing light sources when computing the shadows: see for instance at around 7:45, there is an obvious light source in the bottom right region (actually a bunch of synchronized pulsating lights on some sort of cylinders) which clearly should affect the surfaces close to it, but it doesn't in either mode! In the next comparison, there's a fire burning close to a wall, and likewise the fire doesn't seem to emit any light on the wall. Actually, the commentators do mention that there isn't that much dynamic lights handled in the game, limiting the effect of RTX.
I don't know how that RTX tech is working, but from what I've seen of the port of Quake2, it looked much more convincing - did you see it before making that judgement?
Current games that use raytracing often only use it for 1 light. For example, Metro Exodus only uses it for the sun. This means parts that take place underground look virtually identical with or without RT turned on. It's possible that they do the same thing in this game
Oh, I see. Wouldn't that make sense that each surface would be associated with its closest light source? It's still a rough approximation, but I guess it's better than one global light source?
Any chance we can get a scalable network backend to go along with the render enhancements? Fan-out workers on actors and a KCP implementation would great!
That said, I am struck by how the inaccuracies in physics modeling start sticking out like a sore thumb the closer the visuals get to realism. After gawking at the ground and falling rocks in the first scene, I kept getting stuck on the weird movement of her ponytail. Also the landing of the first jump across the chasm.
I got the uncanny valley sense from the footage and had to watch it a few times to understand why. As you say, there are still subsystems whose fidelity don't meet the quality bar that the texture and lighting set.
Little things like the player model's hands interacting with an invisible flat surface above the incredibly intricate rock textures.
Yes, nits. With the player model acting as a locus for these uncanny interactions, I wonder if there will be a wave of first person games that can take full advantage of the photorealism.
The more accurate the rendering is, the more accuracy you expect of everything else.
A game with cartoonish or simplified rendering can get away with one attack animation, one "working" animation etc; but once the rendering becomes realistic, you need better animations and physics, etc.
For sure, the physics once she starts rock climbing are horrific and super uncanny.
Forearms need to be parallel to the gravity vector almost all the time. Arms need to be kept straight almost all the time. The only exceptions for these are the actual top of a motion to move up to the next hold.
All stuff you would never notice if the graphics weren't amazing.
I think I'm so used to seeing unrealistic pony tails and clothes I don't even notice.
Other than Uncharted I don't recall playing games with climbing.. I've spent enough real world climbing time since then it's noticeable now.
For all the advancements the demo is still essentially monochromatic.
As I recall this is done to avoid the difficulties of rendering how two adjacent differently colored objects bleed their colors onto each other. No color - no bleeding.
I think it is interesting that the first thing they talk about is LOD. UE4 is famous for its bad LOD implementation. Look at FFVII Remake [0]. It's an insanely high budget game made in UE4 with top-of-the-line assets, yet some textures never load in to their high resolution versions. UE4 has earned this stain. Since they're talking LOD first and foremost, maybe Epic actually fixed their UE LOD issues this time around.
Many fiascos? Are you talking about how epic didn't pay dancers for their dances in fortnite? Or the crunch they pushed on their workers to ship fortnite content?
I'm trying to think of others, maybe you could expand a bit?
Just a bit of background first. I bought in heavily to the ue4 ecosystem as soon as UE4 was released, back when it was $20/mo. After about 3 years I had enough and moved to godot and blender and being away from that ecosystems it's deficiencies grow ever more glaring.
It started with promises that the editor would treat linux as a first class client. Those were lies, as not only did a community fork do more work than epic for years because they refused PRs, but the launcher still hasn't been made available for linux, requiring people to use Windows just to get marketplace assets. Now I get it, linux is a small subset of the community and it's their choice, etc, so I moved on with only a few hundred in marketplace assets lost, my personal choice and not a huge deal...
Then there was paragon (at least I got a refund). Then they completely changed fortnite. Then it was just one thing after another. For example, epic was bad enough with exclusives, but they actually even pulled Metro Exodus from steam even after it was taking pre-orders! They promised they wouldn't do it again, and then did it again with Anno 1800. Then they started buying studios to remove old games from steam. They even started "bribing" crowdfunded games that magically moved away from steam despite originally promising steam release. (Shenmue 3, Outer Wilds, Pheonix Point)
Their security was breached multiple times, with one single breach being over 9mil accounts. Multiple people with credit card issues who chargedback'ed immediately got a refund and then had their accounts suspended. (epic getting around chargeback fees).
They bought easy anti cheat (EAC) and then completely stopped all efforts to support linux (Valve had been in talks with them and discussing the linux issue). (a pretty big deal for the linux community as it affects many games present and future)
They started paying off mods at the fortnitebr reddit sub which caused a mod exodus and a lot of hubub.
Tim Sweeney on linux: "Installing Linux is sort of the equivalent of moving to Canada when one doesn’t like US political trends. Nope, we’ve got to fight for the freedoms we have today, where we have them today."
Tim Sweeney doesn't understand the difference between first and third party: "Steam’s the largest PC store and already has PC exclusives such as DOTA2, Counterstrike, and Portal. Valve has every right to make deals with developers and publishers to secure more exclusives, just as Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and Epic Games do!"
They bought "views" on youtube at least a few times (see Shenmue 3 trailer)
There is no gifting in the epic game store, and if you use the same payment on other accounts (like family) they will lock that payment method.
They killed Rocket League on linux and macos.
The epic games store barely functions, with no user reviews and plans for the devs to "opt in" reviews so they can select only the reviews they like. They did enable OpenCritic reviews though. Broken or no cloud saves, achievements, mod support, forums, or wishlists.
This is only a partial list!
It wasn't until 2019 that the Fortnight dev crunch thing came up, and honestly just calling it a "crunch" doesn't seem to do the issue justice when contractors were under a culture of fear to work 70-100 hr work weeks!
When someone has a repeated pattern of abuse and lies and gaslighting, you can be sure thats what they will continue to do in the future, and that is what both Epic and Tim Sweeney have and are going to continue to do. Anybody who buys into the UE4 or UE5 ecosystem is probably going to regret it... unless Epic pays them off like they have plenty of times before.
Some of those are very valid concerns, others don't really seem like fiascos.
Paragon: Epic returned all purchases and made all the assets free on their marketplace. That seems like a pretty consumer friendly way to shutter a product that wasn't doing well.
Exclusives: Paid exclusivity made games like Satisfactory possible, and I believe that all the exclusives are timed? Making games is expensive and unpredictable, exclusives ensure devs can take more risks without worrying about going bankrupt.
Security is a serious concern for sure.
Acquisitions: As far as I can tell, Psyonix is the only game studio they've bought, and they haven't pulled their game from Steam? Are there others?
Tencent ownership: What's the actual concern here? There's a lot of sinophobia in gaming circles these days. There's plenty to be concerned about with the CCP and Tencent, but what's the specific worry about them having a minority stake in Epic?
Linux support (Rocket League, Editor, etc.). These are data driven decisions. Rocket League, for instance, had 0.3% playership across Mac and Linux combined. They were updating their game, and fixing bugs for that small of a community just doesn't make financial sense. They issued 100% refunds, which seems pretty reasonable?
> Anybody who buys into the UE4 or UE5 ecosystem is probably going to regret it
As someone who worked in the industry for years (but never for Epic), I highly doubt this. I've worked with UE, Unity, and CryEngine/Lumberyard and there's a huge difference in support and tooling between them.
You asked for the negatives, but please don't get me wrong. I really like the interface and many of the features of UE, and the tech behind it. It's just a shame I felt forced to move away from it. Also, please keep in mind I'm not the typical person who is trying to get into gamedev on the side, as I'm a RMS loving, linux-only, most of my stack is gpl sorta dude.
On the last point, you may be right, I might have been a bit hyperbolic but there are cases where I have seen it play out. One of my favorite games in the potential department was Mortal Online, but it constantly struggled with UE3 limitations despite official Epic support and moves with Atlas, etc (heres to hoping Mortal Online II using UE4 is good). UE4 has great graphics but as you know there is more to a game than that.
I think you were totally right. His counter-arguement basically boils down to 'so what' which is pretty bad.
Some thing's are more important than others. Buying and removing support for already supported systems is an incredibly anticompetitive move and shouldn't be forgotten.
Second, I explicitly asked for evidence of any of the concerns, as many of the claims either didn't raise a specific concern (e.g. Tencent ownership) or didn't seem to be corroborated by evidence (e.g. Epic buying studios to pull their games off steam).
I'll ask you the same, can you provide examples of Epic buying games and removing support for systems? The only example I can find is Rocket League, and that decision was coupled to a desire to remove technical debt and unrelated to Epic's purchase of Psyonix.
I asked for fiascos, not negatives. I think it's absolutely fair to be critical or disagree with the approaches of Epic. It's one thing to say they made a decision you thought was wrong, it's another thing to call them a 'fiasco', that's all.
What I've said was searchable. Please excuse me if I didn't feel like spending an hour on a single comment. If you want to know you can find the truth of what I've said.
> Epic buying games and removing support for systems?
I already told you about these. "(Shenmue 3, Outer Wilds, Pheonix Point)" Also some of the issues with such a large investment from a Chinese company "Tencent" seem rather obvious to me at this point, and to insinuate it's a sort of sinophobia just reeks of intellectual disingenuousness.
The graphics look good because of two things: Quixel and global illumination. Quixel is Swedish company that Epic acquired in 2019. Quixel does high-resolution scans of actual physical objects(photogrammetry) and makes them available as textures in Unreal Engine. The sheer rock faces that you see in the demo are Quixel megascans of actual rocks.
The other thing that makes the graphics look impressive is global illumination, which provides real time dynamic lighting of the environment, instead of baked in (pre-rendered) lighting. The demo seems to only have a single light source - sunlight in the cave, light from the crystal looking thing in her hand while inside the room. I am not sure how well it look like in actual games when there are multiple light sources.
The rest of the stuff doesn't look too different from current gen games.
What makes this stuff possible now though? New global illumination algorithms? Better scanning techniques? Or mostly better hardware?
I don't know how it compares to other games to be honest. If it's a big jump though, I'd be interested to know what's being done different and why it's being done now.
The 8K cinematic assets that Epic used in the demo are between 1 and 2MB in size. So I suspect it's more to do with PS5's SSD which has a bandwidth of more than 5GB/s and 16GB of GDDR6 RAM, which allows more textures to be streamed from the hard drive and held in the RAM.
PS5's GPU supports raytracing, which Epic said they didn't use in the demo. So the dynamic lighting must be something new they've developed for UE5.
The big thing people keep not understanding is how big a deal the the PS5's SSD infrastructure is. This engine is based around the idea of being able to grab (very large) assets from the disk only milliseconds before they're needed. In current video games designed to be playable with a HDD (spinning disk drive), they need to make sure that if it's possible for a player to look at an asset in the next 30 seconds, it needs to be already loaded in to the VRAM (the ram of the video card).
The PS5 (and XSX, to a lesser degree) put a ton of work into making is so that data can be moved from storage on the disk into the GPU as fast as possible. It does this through having shared ram between the CPU and GPU, having a fast interconnect and having dedicated hardware so that data from the SSD can be decompressed without ever going through the CPU.
On a PC with PCIe 4.0, you can basically move the same amount of textures to the GPU in the same amount of time as these new consoles, but there's going to be way more latency because data has to first be loaded into the CPU's RAM, then decompressed by the CPU then go through a bumch of software layers to ensure compatibility and sent through the motherboard to the GPU's VRAM and only then can the GPU use the texture to draw something on screen.
The PS5 and XSX built a highway between the storage and GPU that doesn't need the CPU, or compatibility software to be involved at all. That opens the door to a ton of new graphical techniques that used to just not be possible because of VRAM limitations.
For people not working in video games in might seems super impresive but I can assure you that major publisher have similar rendering visual in there in-house engine. Super cool none the less!
As soon as the majority of the audience clamor for it? Ie. possibly never.
Only a minority of gamers/audiences really want to experience VR or binocular 3D and are a prepared to wear cumbersome headsets or 3D glasses right now. I think the hardware has to improve a lot for it to become accepted as standard.
Let me throw in an anecdote that may amuse some: I was working for a now defunct large game company when Epic and Tim Sweeny came in to demo Unreal Engine 3 very early before the PS3 and XBox360 were launched. This was about 2004. Their demo blew away executives in particular. They showed multicolored lights casting multicolored shadows on a single high detail character. One of the lights was behind a stained glass window, projecting beautiful patterns. Soon after a deal was signed to use the engine throughout the entire studio. In retrospect that was a good decision and I have a lot of respect for Unreal Engine and Epic in general.
However UE3-generation games that finally shipped had none of the visual effects from the early demos. The multicolored shadows could only be rendered with multiple passes, at least one per light, which proved to be too expensive for larger dynamic game scenes. It took years of work from the demo to shipped games, and an army of unnamed engineers to wrestle the technology into a product.
UE4 had a great early demo of dynamic global illumination using something like voxel cone tracing if I remember correctly. To my knowledge that tech demo was never incorporated into the engine and never shipped.
Epic is famous for their demos, and I love them for it... at least now that I no longer work professionally in that field. If anything it charts a long term technical direction for interactive entertainment.
I always wondered if that dinosaur was using the 2MB of memory in the final retail unit, or 4MB often seen in arcade boards using the the PS1's technology.
I recall seeing it live in a devkit but I can't for the life of me remember the devkit specs. Note that that demo catered very expertly to the strengths of the PS1 hardware, it should run jut fine in a retail unit.
- Dinos were so in vogue and so suggesting of technological innovation. Jurassic Park came out what, 2-3 years earlier?
- Very limited z-sorting requirements, could likely be done with a simple bsp if sorting individual polys proved too taxing.
- Polys of fairly regular dimensions, not overly long in one direction. Helps with less visible sorting and clipping artifacts.
- No problem with lack of perspective correction, because textures are already shimmering due to the organic skin animation.
- That black fog has always been very effective. We love terrifying things emerging from the dark, which Doom3 tech proved again, and more recently VR.
I guess they go completely to the limit in their demos, so in actual games you will see it only after the next version of their engine has been released.
To be fair, Epic wanted to have real-time global illumination for UE4. They even had a lot of the work done, but it just never quite made it. The performance impact was too great. I imagine several years later they've been able to deal with most of the issues, especially since we have a lot more computational power available.
Look up E3 game demo's and their launched comparison on YouTube. You'll learn all the game trailers with 'real game play footage' are all fake. The whole industry is filled this.
I'm playing through Doom 2016 at the moment, and if anything, it looks even better than that. Could be Youtube compression, or they've added in graphical tweaks with the Vulkan update.
That reminds me of the old trick of using a 1x1 pixel in an empty table cell to ensure that internet explorer would actually expand the table cell to whatever width you set it to (height still needed another trick if i recall correctly).
would work, too, but then the minimum height of the cell would be whatever the line height was set to, and the line-height property didn't behave the same across browsers.
It's funny how old tricks make a comeback. I see a lot of 's in React codebases to preserve whitespace around JSX tags.
And the old trick of a 2x2 pixel gif with one colour transparent, and the other a non-transparent colour which, when set as a background to the table cell, provided an illusion of colour transparency with the main background behind the table.
Until surprisingly recently, there was no built-in way to make a rectangular element on a webpage have rounded corners. People had to use all sorts of dirty hacks to make a final product that "looked like" it was a native, built-in feature. Usually in the old days it basically amounted to various forms of "putting a picture of a rounded corner" (often a gif) in each of the corners of the element you were putting on the page.
There were a lot of different ways to do that, but one of them was to use "tables" - tables these days are usually only used for what their genuine, semantic intent is: for drawing a literally spreadsheet-like table of data. But back in the earliest days of the web, they were the only controllable way to visually lay things out on any kind of grid, so despite the fact that they were "supposed" to have nothing to do with visual layout, they'd get used all the time for that - often getting used to do visual borders and stuff.
So to do rounded corners, you'd basically make a table that was a 3x3 grid. In the corner elements of the grid, you'd have tiny pictures of rounded corners; in the side elements of the grid you'd basically have nothing (they'd be really skinny elements, either very wide or tall). Then the middle element in the grid would be gigantic, and would hold your actual content.
And for an authentic contemporaneous example of this technique, here's my website that I designed in 2002 when I was in high school: http://cydeweys.com/archive/
You won't know it from looking at it because you'll only see the rendered static HTML, but that entire site was actually written in C++. Using the AP C++ libraries (yes, that AP).
I was about to weigh in on how 9-slicing is absolutely a valid strategy for UI components, and give you an example from my professional work, only to realize that I can't think of a single example that wasn't, "hack around some library that doesn't have border-radius".
I'll be glad for the day when 9-slice is a truly obscure technique.
I never did it myself. I know there are plenty of reasons to dislike flash. And I know plenty of people absolutely hated sites created solely using Flash.
But I have to admit I enjoyed the creativity I saw on many Flash sites. There a generic sameness to much of the modern web. I know Flash sites were useless for SEO, and probably for accessibility too. So I don't think things are necessarily worse now. Just more generic.
Of course, you can create a Flash-like site using web-native technologies, but it's probably more work.
Wasn't the problem with "Flash sites" that it was way way worse than any regular website... as a website? Kinda like SPAs today. You had to reinvent stuff the browser already did perfectly. But as long as you made Flash APPS to be run embedded on websites, it was pretty awesome. Animation, video, etc. No competition, hands down just great tech... until HTML5 caught up.
I was going to say something similar. A lot of the drawbacks from flash sites also apply to current SPAs. I know you can get usable and SEO friendly SPAs, but it's so much work compared to plain HTML files or templating in the backend.
This made my day dude, thanks for that. Imma dropping everything now and going to make rounded corners button with WebGL canvas, using signed distance function in a fragment shader.
Really great! This reminds me of how epic and iconic this company truly was -- I lived in a constant state of delight as a child using their software and software developed on their platforms starting with the old BRUN command on apple ][
For a few years around 2001, rounded corners were a big part of hp's branding. I was in a dev shop that maintained part of hp.com, and we had to have them everywhere. I didn't work on their site very often myself, but I think that team must have been experts at rounded rectangles. :-) At the time it was still sort of a cool effect on the web.
Is this code adding successive divs to simulate rounded corners? Looks incredible -- invariably someone would need animation on these too would this work?
I told my wife it wasn't possible for her website since I didn't want to do it with images to coddle IE, which was apparently the state of the art at the time. She still brings it up 10 years later!
Yeah it looks nice but the price is that it's broken everywhere else and will probably be overtaken by newer engines until it reaches a release. That is...if it ever does.
Lumberyard is a fork of the CryEngine, and quite a few games have shipped on either CryEngine or one of its forks (particularly Dunia, which Ubisoft uses extensively).
I wouldn't say unpopular, just relatively new. The only games I can think of running that engine haven't released yet -- RSI's Star Citizen and Amazon's Crucible. Star Citizen's long development cycle and various funding sources have been well-documented, and it still lacks a concrete release date; on the other hand, Crucible comes out next week.
Lumberyard is targeted by MMO's due to Amazon's content delivery network abilities... and MMO's are the biggest genre to fail before during and after release, purely because of their scope and difficulty to pull it off "right".
FF 7 remake comes extremely close though. That's the best looking UE4 game I know. It's expected that real games do not have demo levels of visual fidelity.
I will say its Gears 5. Coalition has been incredible with their usage of Unreal since the original Gears of War back in Xbox360 days. They peaked with Gears 5.
The original Gears was developed by Epic and was a very good showcase (and probably a driver and validator as well) for the Unreal Engine tech Epic developed in parallel.
They describe how this is still their dynamic when they mention their goal to have Fortnite running on UE5 before they consider it ready for the masses.
FF7 Remake is such mixture of amazing graphics and not amazing graphics, but then the level of detail in scenes makes up for it (pretty much all of the midgar slums), I don't know what to think so I revert to "am I having fun?" which is a resounding YES!
I think the Decima engine would have worked better (Horizon Zero Dawn), because the bar for 'amazing' is so high. Final Fantasy 7 requires impressive visuals for its story to have impact in its original release, in all of its spinoffs, and that bar is so high now.
Just looking at demoscene, it is possible to create amazing results with very little resources if you have right people and infinite time and resources to polish couple of seconds of it.
This rarely transfers to a product that has a lot of content to be built, an actual budget, good but not star developers and conflicting requirements.
No. However, the original Unreal game had some well known demosceners providing the music.
- Andrew Sega in particular was a particularly famous scene musician who went under the name "Necros" and is about as legendary as you can get for people who weren't part of the Future Crew team who made Unreal.
- Alexander Brandon (Siren) is still in the game industry and has done soundtracks for a ton of really well known games such as Jazz Jackrabbit.
- Daniel Gardopée went by Basehead and was part of FM and the KFMF demo groups (both big deals at the time) and I think is still in gaming.
- Michiel van den Bos (MCA) is the only non-American scener (Dutch) who provided music and is also still in gaming.
At the time it was kind of funny and completely cool to fire up Unreal and hear some well known Necros, Basehead, and Siren songs in the game which had been circulating in BBS and early demoscene ftp sites for a while.
The demo has input. The video shows them modifying the world at several points, it's not on rails. It's more like a mini game (except maybe at the end).
UE's game creation tools are very good. The toolset is a huge part of their value prop. And this demo is very explicit in focusing on the fact that artists can now use movie-level tools instead of needing to spend a lot of time on optimisation and game-custom art assets. That's one of the two big leaps they're promoting here - it's partly about an increase in graphics quality, but clearly what they feel most proud of is the increase in tooling and asset flexibility the new capabilities give content creators.
The person that shows the demo can for example choose to move and look and perform actions that are known to not cause performance trouble.
In a game a lot of unpredictable stuff can happen (for example, a bunch of people can cast a spell or drop a grenade at exactly same time). Or you may decide to quickly turn around causing a bunch of texture and geometry data to be loaded.
Game must take it into account and make sure the performance is acceptable with whatever input is allowed and lots of action around and not only when the guy walks slowly in a straight path and slowly pans around.
It doesn't mean it happens in this case but AFAIK it is fair to say that most engine demoes are put together to highlight strengths and hid weaknesses of the engine.
Their early demos are usually really good, but the early versions rarely ship with all of them, over time though to their credit they do arrive, and often exceed the demonstrations.
Some of the new lighting features in UE5 are interesting and should be cheaper than RTX overall, but will be interesting to see the mix and match which developers will achieve. Looking forward to having a play around with it.
Unreal Engine's old business model were exactly that, get you excited with demos and sign up ( paid ) for their engine. And it was the same with UE 3 and UE 4. But in 2015 all that changed. It was open sourced on Github, it has a very sustainable revenue model due to the explosion of Mobile Gaming, the Gaming industry as a whole is now bigger than Movies and Music industry combined.
I think it is fair to say EPYC no longer has the incentive to do that with UE 5. And because it is / will be open source, they can now actively work with many different partners ( Hardware such as Sony and Microsoft and other publishers ) to make sure those technology works as intended.
You can see it so that part is shared but if you try to use it you fall under a very different licease. If you try to modify and sell you can't. Modify and use you must pay. Use you must pay.
This isn’t true, they encourage you to run source builds instead of the editor and you are free to modify the engine for your projects as needed. In fact they’re even generous enough to allow you to post up to 30 lines of engine code in public forums.
I'm not sure where people get the idea that they can assert something as a counterpoint on no basis. "That's just your opinion," is not a rational basis to disagree, especially when your counterpoint requires the implied basis (semantic) to be equally relevant to the original argument's basis (law).
"Open source" isn't based on the semantic that the source code is public, its definition comes exclusively from a set of guidelines that limit the rights of the original creator to enforce a specific range of IP protections guaranteed to them by domestic and international laws. There are various types of public licenses, also known as GNU, that are considered "true open source" in that the original creator can only enforce some provisions like a source attribution credit in a modified distribution. And there are permission licenses, like the MIT License, which don't necessarily meet every guideline for FOSS, but do meet most of them.
When it comes to IP, the only basis that matters is legal, as its the only basis that's universally enforceable. Laypersons can define "open source" however they please, but when engineers, devs, business, and legal discuss it, it has one definition, and that definition is well-established as exemptions from current IP law.
The rationale is people can have different opinion, preference, thinking. People do not always agree with a single definition. No entity has sole authority of a meaning open source.
O... k? But what does open source mean today? What has it meant for approximately the last twenty years? Did Epic claim their software is open source? Did Microsoft claim their source-available software was open source? I wonder why not, it would've been a good marketing term, what with all the developers who want open source.
The answer is that pretty much everyone agreed that open source means something roughly equivalent to the OSI definition, and even big companies agreed with that... until a year ago or so when somebody decided that they wanted all the benefits of claiming to contribute to open source without actually doing so, and a bunch of people who never actually cared about the FOSS ecosystem aided them in doing so.
at some point in the nineties open source initiative emerged as the bastion of what's open source and what not and put strict guideline to the usage of the term, which for whatever reason people around the tech community elected to follow even if OSI doesn't own the open source trademark.
guess it helps the discussion and to defend agains marketing-speak appropriation to have a single uniform definition. but it's confusing as heck if someone is unknowing or resisting the OSI coup to position themselves as the open source regent.
Lots of people arguing schematics. Everyone knows exactly what the guy meant.
I don't see why continuing to argue it makes any sense here. All this type of behavior does is drive people away from further discussions on sites like this, reddit, etc.
The word meaning can always evolve, at another point for whatever reason the open source may not be the same as what you prefer. No one own the sole authority of the word usage.
Sorry for the confusion and late reply. I didn't catch this part of the comment. I cant edit it now. I should not have use the term "Open Source" which I agree meant something different. May be source available would be better. But the point of my argument still stand.
Please accept my sincere apology. And no offence intended.
Let hope we continue to focus and amaze at the technical marvel that is UE5.
Good point, but OP's point is that they can't hide behind demos. Anyone who requests the source will most likely get it and be able to see what's going on.
Indeed, that part is accurate. It would be technically interesting if the tech demo was a part of UE5 source release. I'm not familiar if they've done that in the past.
> To my knowledge that tech demo was never incorporated into the engine and never shipped.
I'm not sure when it shipped (it certainly may have not launched with the first version of the engine), but it is currently called "Light Propagation Volumes."
> I'm not sure when it shipped (it certainly may have not launched with the first version of the engine), but it is currently called "Light Propagation Volumes."
SVOGI (Sparse Voxel Octree Global Illumination) which is first demoed by Unreal 4, yet it never shipped due performances problems. Meanwhile Cryengine manage to get it working with minimal performances penalty (only 10%) and have shipped games with it (Kingdom Come: Deliverance) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEfqtOYjolE
you can use hand painted, imported models. Painting has to do with texturing which is different than poly count. This allows you to import directly from zbrush and not have to prebuild the LODs. This tech is already in a more basic form in UE4
That video's amazing because the part of the UE5 demo I can't wrap my head around is where Nanite magically turns 1 billion triangles of source art to 20 million triangles of rendered art, per frame.
And then I get a minute into the UE3 video from 2004 and what do I hear?
"The scene you're seeing here is about 1 million polygons of in-game assets, which came from about 200 million polygons of source art."
Then, deja vu, right into a realtime lighting demo.
> And then I get a minute into the UE3 video from 2004 and what do I hear? "The scene you're seeing here is about 1 million polygons of in-game assets, which came from about 200 million polygons of source art."
I know little about game development so might be wrong, but I think what that 2004 demo means is they had a 200M art asset geometry which was pre-rendered/transformed into a 1M in-game asset. This kind of reduction has been the standard for decades.
What they are indicating in this UE5 demo is that the engine dynamically adjusts the LoD of the source geometry so the engine can render it, the engine directly uses the art asset.
+1 I also think they have multiple levels of detail and render the appropriate one based on distance/view.
Should have said so though, as is, it's full of misleading statements (often by omission).
That video's amazing because the part of the UE5 demo I can't wrap my head around is where Nanite magically turns 1 billion triangles of source art to 20 million triangles of rendered art, per frame.
I was wondering about that too. My best guess is that they put the heavy geometry items in an acceleration data structure and then ray trace / cone trace these in a first pass to get the points where the camera rays intersect the geometry. Then generate triangles on the fly from these points in every frame. This would be quite similar in flavor to GigaVoxels [1] or the (IMO unjustly much hated) "Unlimited Detail" engine [2], except that instead of shading / visualising the intersections directly they just use it to generate triangles as another input to their overall pipeline.
If you look at the video closely all the heavy geometry items are static, i.e. they don't deform. This matches with a classic limitation of ray tracing as deformations invalidate the acceleration data structures used for making ray tracing efficient.
I'm not convinced, because mixing ray-marched and triangulated geometry is quite doable. If you've already computed a ray intersection, generating a triangle and putting a burden on vertex processing makes little sense if the geometry is static. If you wanted it to be deformable, then yes you may want to use a vertex shader. But in this demo, none of the high resolution geometries are deformable AFAICT.
In the video they mention that the "heavy geometry" you are talking about is 100s of billions of triangles. Storing 1 billion triangles using 32-bit floats takes ~12 Gb, so we are talking about N * 12 Tbs only in triangle storage for this demo. Building an acceleration data-structure on top of this would also take up a lot of storage, so I don't think how you can make this approach successful on a PS5 with limited GPU memory.
To me this tech sounds more like they finally figured out all the quirks around how to properly construct "seamless geometry atlasses" (geometry images) and reconstruct geometry from them, and managed to bring that to production. It required quite a bit of compute, and there were also a lot of quirks about how to automatically "cut" an input geometry so that you can put it in a 2D image, how to compress and decompress the image or parts of it without artifacts (such that you don't get jumps across triangles), etc.
That approach doesn't store any triangles, but a 2D xyz (rgb) image that you can use to reconstruct the original geometry from, and to which you can apply all usual image compression algorithms, use all GPU texture features (but for geometry), etc.
That's ~15 year old tech, and they mention they have been working on this for over 10 years, so timeline-wise it would fit (search for geometry images, texture atlasses, etc. there was a siggraph talk from ~2005 about wavelet compression of geometry images).
It's quite possible that they make heavy use of instancing, which might reduce the memory footprint by a lot. Not every pebble or rock needs an individual geometry.
From the video it sounded to me that the 100s billions of triangles were from single instance geometry. The models they mention in the video are in the ball park of >1 billion triangles each (that's 12 Gb per model). So if they have 100 models of that resolution, that's 12 Tbs, and whether they instance each model 1 or 100 times doesn't matter much because the problem of having to fit those 12 Tb in triangles somewhere still remains.
That's why it seems much more plausible to me that they are not storing triangles anywhere, and instead just storing geometry images.
If one mesh is 1 billion triangles, and you have 100 different meshes, you need to store 100 billion tringles, unless you do something radically differently.
If you have 1 triangle mesh, and instance it 100 billion times, you don't need to do that.
> "more than 33 million triangles."
The assets the company they mention makes have 100s of millions of triangles, and billions as well. So I wonder if they are not using those original assets after all.
IIUC they are, but they are only rendering at lower triangle counts and the LOD happens automatically.
This doesn't really seem volumetric in nature to me.
Firstly, UE4 has broad-phase that I understand they are quite happy with, I doubt they would add in a ray-trace, since not only would that not really improve anything, it would also not integrate well with any non-nanite techniques of rendering geometry, and my understanding is at least for now, nanite can only handle (mostrly)static geometry, and I doubt they would want to give up the ability to work with other rendering techniques.
If I had to take a wild guess, I would guess they have a somewhat standard process to generate a low detail mesh, which is what get's dispatched to the GPU, then, atop of that mesh they may build triangles acceleration structures parameterized across the surface perhaps similar to this paper [1] From there, you could do similar to what you suggest, and just generate additional triangles such as is in that paper.
However, given how poorly GPUs handle pixel-sized polygons, that may not be the best approach. so I wouldn't be surprised if tessellation is used to around a quad level and then from there, the rest is either done using compute-style rasterization in the pixel shader, or some outputs are written and additional rasterization is actually deferred for a compute job.
I'm sure there are all sorts of exceptions and edge-cases, but I wouldn't be surprised if it looks something like that general workflow. On the other hand, I'd be very surprised if there was anything that looked like ray-tracing on the scene level, perhaps traversing the surface-space data structures looks a bit like ray-tracing.
I've been wondering for a while Unreal doesn't just make the Unreal Browser.
You download and install it.
Then you give it a URL, and it streams down a map, and downloads DLLs containing behavior custom to that map. While you're in a map, you can walk through a portal to another map. Or you can just keep moving in a direction, which streams more and more map.
If you're in a multi-player environment, you connect to a server for that environment. If you're in a solo area, you're just running locally.
Isn't this what the Oasis (from "Ready Player One") is supposed to be like? What stops them from doing this?
How do you make money from this? Who would buy it? Why would anyone use it? Is there a point beyond "this is a cool thing", which is pretty well captured by Roblox and Second Life and VRChat
> Do you think Roblox, Second Life, and VRChat look as good as Unreal Engine 5?
The main bottleneck is the price of asset production. Producing assets on the level of this demo videos is magnitudes more expensive than what you would see in those other platforms. So for someone to be able to turn a profit with that, there would need to be either a bigger willingness to spend, or an explosion in player base.
There are also likely technical challenges. I'd imagine that very few people have both the storage capacity and bandwidth to sustain such a system. You see people on here complaining about websites being a few MB heavy. In such a high quality 3D browser, you would need to load multiple GBs per scene.
Isn't that kind of like saying that "we can all just keep using Postscript files. There's no need for this HTTP / HTML thing. Why would I want to stay in the 'browser'? I just use FTP to fetch content, and use my favorite Postscript renderer to view content."
The hard part of the multiverse is the business model. Features like dynamic maps are just that, features. If you have a business model that works you can bring all the tech features to play. If you bring the tech to play without a business model you just crater spectacularly. This is why Fortnite is important.
It may not be the feature list you thought the multiverse would launch with but in hindsight it will be the feature list that the multiverse did launch with.
For me, if the content is compelling, I'm paying a monthly membership. I expect the multiverse to pay content creators based on how much time I linger in their content.
Did HTML / HTTP have a business model? Or were they a platform upon which other things were built?
The business model for HTML/HTTP was and is advertising.
People initially tried subscription models for HTML content but it didn't work so everyone went to advertising based models. Observationally, subscription HTML content models have continued to not work (yes, Netflix, but Netflix is more about video content than HTML content).
Read the Game Engine Black Books by Fabien Sanglard at fabiensanglard.net ! They are among the most beautiful books on game engine I've ever read. I read the PDF and then bought them both to support him because he really, really deserves it. The other articles on his website are also really well-written and super interesting!
This is stunning, but scary. Even if my descendants survive plagues, nuclear war, climate change and malevolent AI's, they might not have a chance against the allure of these simulated worlds.
If there are other civilizations out there, I think we’re more likely to be visited by super-intelligent AI than we are to meet their creators. Think of a small sentient spaceship going the speed of light with a million IQ hive of replicators on board. They wouldn’t have to bother about life preservation or oxygen or any of that noise. Their creator species would stay in their galaxy until their AI finds another ideal planet to colonize, or they could be dead and their legacy lives on in the AI. The existence of extraordinarily compelling virtual worlds wouldn’t have much of an impact in my opinion.
If these graphics are impressive today, imagine what will be possible in 500 years. We'll hit a point where simulated worlds will be indistinguishable from the real world.
But then, if simulated worlds can reach this level of fidelity, that means we could be in such a world right now and there would be no way to know it.
We've had super fun & addicting games for quite a while now, and, though gaming is not a niche interest anymore, a good chunk of the population prefers to do other things, like watch TV. If anything, the fear of alluring entertainment sapping people's will to do other things is borne out with television. The average American watches something like 5 hours of TV a day. That's just incredible. In my mind, switching from that to video games is a lateral move - you gain the sociability of video games, but lose out on the often more complex stories of television. (Great video games get up to the level of prestige TV, but most have narratives only as good as basic cable.)
> you can download and use Unreal Engine to build games for free as you always have
That's a very stretched-out definition of always. Unreal used to be one of the most expensive, if not the most expensive, game engines you could license. It's been only few years they adopted this free model.
i believe the latest rumors suggest 16GB unified GDDR6, but the relevant tech here might be sophisticated caching technology that also leverages a fast PCIe 4.0 SSD
PCIe 4.0 is in the order of Gigabytes per second. Hundreds of billions of triangles would demand hundreds of Gigabytes. There is no way they can calculate this stuff in real time (and tbf, they never claimed that they did).
So presumably, the engine now does that kind of stuff at load-time. The bottleneck is then the place on the SSD and the scene change pace. This fits quite nicely with the repetitive statures, but it leaves a question mark for that final flight.
This looks nice, but I'm not sure what the practical gameplay consequences for the new tech are. I sure as shit am not going to ship a terabyte of original-quality assets in my game.
It would help me produce cinematics more easily though, I suppose.
Real-time global illumination looks dope. No more overnight lighting builds :)
If I understand the geometry images paper correctly, you don't have to ship the original assets. The technique uses fancy topology to encode a mesh as an image --- x, y, z of each vertex being the r, g, and b channels of the image --- and pages the images into the GPU on demand. You can downsample the images as much as you want
What a magical demo! That made my day. I had largely written off console gaming as a never-ending sequence of brain-dead first person shooters. I'm glad to see real innovation in the graphics space - coupled with advances in AI and NLP, I think we could see a crop of incredibly realistic and meaningful games in the next few years.
IMHO, a key innovation that still needs to occur is a shift away from flunky and unintuitive hand-held controllers to a more natural and vibrant method of input. I really liked the scene in the movie Her, for example, where the protagonist is playing a video game and uses hand gestures to control his avatar, all without a physical controller. Wii and Kinect were the first few steps in this direction - I'm not sure what the next steps are.
I think voice input and NLP is an incredibly fruitful space to explore - imagine what video games would be like if you could actually talk to the characters, instead of merely punching and shooting them.
To play devil's advocate - games with this kind of production value require a huge investment in asset production, which means they tend to be very conservative when it comes to gameplay, because they want to be damn sure it doesn't flop. So until the production of something like this comes way down in price, the games that look like this are likely to be clones of existing successful games, e.g. Uncharted, brain-dead first person shooters, etc.
I thought Horizon Zero Dawn hit the right balance across gameplay, visuals and story narrative in this current generation of gaming and received all the praise it deserved. Now, I’ll say in my opinion, not one thing was overwhelmingly novel in comparison to the rest, but the attention to detail given to each of those elements elevated the collective experience in that particular title, the result was a game that felt incredibly fresh and easily replayable.
Maybe, but photogrammetry is a waaaay cheaper way of producing assets, and being able to directly ingest high res models from a scan could actually drop the art costs of games a great deal.
That was my first thought- it's a shame all we have to interact with such a complex, richly rendered world is a couple of analog sticks and some buttons.
Hand control doesn't make sense without being able to see it in your hand and conversely VR is pretty much a gimmick until they added high fidelity hand tracking (Talking Vive/Rift level).
I kept expecting the demo to fall back into some kind of traditional combat scenario as the player character explored the environment, but I love that Epic decided to make the hypothetical game in this tech demo exclusively about exploration.
I would absolutely love to play a game like this, combining the sensibilities of indie walking-sims with the epic scale of triple-A productions.
Minority report style hand waving is a dead end. Tactile feedback is a hard requirement for a decent hand controlled interface. But that doesn't mean we need to stick with traditional game controllers. Valve Index controllers give you buttons without the requirement to hold anything, plus far better tracking than any controller free tracking system.
I guess this might sound unreal, but I literally have not looked at AAA game graphics in over 10 years, so this looks absolutely stunning.
Back in 2009 my 360 died. I had been an avid console gamer before that, but I never replaced the Xbox and in 2010 went off to college, where I mainly played N64 with friends as well as games on my phone.
After I graduated I was busy with work and life and never got back into the gaming cutting edge. Sure I played StarCraft once in a while for old times' sake as well as different old Total War games cause they're awesome, but never the sort of major AAA release I used to play all the time as a kid.
I also never really looked at modern graphics since I didn't have friends who played modern games and never watched videos showcasing what games looked like.
Demos are always beautiful but how about fixing some of the stuff that makes playing UE games unpleasant? The ridiculous load times, the random stutters and pop-ins, crazy high memory usage...
Graphics tech has been good enough for a while. I wish developers would start giving more love to improving other areas like physics, AI, and speech synthesis, that can make a game actually feel and play more realistic than just eye candy would.
But I guess those other technologies depend more on the CPU/RAM etc. which consoles lack in, so they don't want to bother with that.
Here's an example of how games have actually been going backwards in almost all other areas except graphics:
Woah! The AI and physics in Far Cry 2 is an order of magnitude better. It makes me wonder how the games regressed to be so bad (maybe devs just don't care as much anymore?), given that Dunia Engine is used by both games.
'the game's director, Clint Hocking, noted that internally, much of the design of Far Cry 2 was haphazard'
> It makes me wonder how the games regressed to be so bad (maybe devs just don't care as much anymore?)
Console limitations might be one reason. Apparently everything has to run on every platform under the sun or you might die impoverished in a dark alley, a mindset that has inflicted other horrors, like Electron, upon us.
I remember I liked Electron on first glance, but then realized it was a drag how slow it was. I really hope this doesn't get worse to the point where we need to consider x platform x proprietary GPU architecture. It will make centralized engines like Unreal the only commercially viable options for big projects with less money or exclusivity than say BOTW.
It mostly looks amazing but also very uncanny valley.
The development process improvements sound most promising.
I was amazed until the the character started climbing the rocks.
Seems like no one at Epic has ever climbed a rock in their life.. it sent the whole demo back to PS1 land. It doesn't even look like a super hero rock climbing, just looks totally wrong. Almost no part of the body ever looks angled correctly to reflect gravity being a thing, like the physics engine switches off.
That and her ankles are fused and never plantar flex so the walking looks bizarre. Again, it's all amazing but now it becomes uncanny valley cause you notice the weird remaining stuff.
Similar feeling but starting off with the initial leap. The animation of the interaction/grab with the cliff edge looked very off - climbing without the feet touching the rocks.
Creating a scenery with a lot of details depth is fine but it doesn't even come close to having proper animation/character models and especially realistic physics.
The environment looks great, the anime-eyes character with porcelain skin definitely looks UV. The climbing motion is uhhh a little floaty? In any real rock climbing video, you can see that the effort is much more labored.
For someone with zero insight into these kinds of things. What happened with Id software delivering game engines? Do they have competing software or are they not doing that sort of thing?
They are still doing in house engine. id Tech is now at version 7 and is used by their latest game Doom Eternal (running on Vulkan exclusively). Extremely well optimized for any configuration spec and run great especially on AMD GPU.
Interesting how these demos used to be about how awesome everything looks. That still matters, of course, but previous gen engines already achieved cinematic photorealism. Now it’s all about ease of use and workflow. No more need to worry about poly counts, normal maps etc.
I really liked the fluid simulations. It's always been something hard to get right in games. Albeit, it did look pretty janky in the demo but I hope we can get some quality fluid simulations in games soon.
It's a tech demo so I cannot expect more but it feels bland to me. More like a live interactive movie. I see no potential for gaming.. the visual and geometric complexity dwarfs the usual gameplay IMO.
I'm very confused by this. This demo gameplay is pretty representative of a few genres of games like Tomb Raider. It also translates well to different types of gameplay, so I don't get your dismissal.
Does anyone have any theories as to how Nanite actually works? I've never heard of virtualized micropolygon geometry before and it sounds a bit buzzwordy. Do we think they are just loading the full model into GPU memory, or are they baking down various LODs and normal maps at compile time through some automatic process? Either way, it's a huge workflow improvement. It's just unclear what's actually happening...
“Micropolygon” I assume means Reyes rendering, I.e that the polygons are created on demand from underlying geometry. Instead of various LODs you tessellate when rendering, specifically for the view so each pixel has ~1 vertex. Walk closer to the statue and it gets more triangles in tesselation.
But how is it running so quickly? I've seen adaptive rendering implementations before, but they couldn't run in real time. If they are really using billions of polys they can't store them all in VRAM. Is the PS5 SSD fast enough to recalculate polys for every model in the scene every frame (Or even every few frames)?
> I don’t think the SSD but rather the GPU would be doing the tesselation...
Ha, I phrased that badly. I meant that, if the high-poly models can't all be stored in VRAM at once, is the SSD fast enough to load them back onto the GPU every frame?
If the tesselation is performed on the GPU (surfaces uploaded to GPU in some non-triangle representation e.g image geometry/SDFs/patches) then I don’t think it’s ever viable to have the tesselated triangles loaded back from GPU memory even to RAM (never mind disk). This isn’t a lot of data. 2 triangles/1 vertex per pixel is just 8K triangles and 4K vertices every frame, that can be overwritten each frame. This is tiny. It’s <1MB!
Ah, that makes sense. I was thinking the problem lay in loading the original meshes, but I didn't consider they could be using a smaller non-triangle format. I really hope they share more about how this works.
I wouldn't be surprised if it has something to do with "Geometry Images." Like REYES, the goal is to target pixel-sized polygons, but it handles tessellation differently. Brian Karis, the programmer speaking in the video linked this old blog post of his from his twitter when talking about inspirations for the technology: http://graphicrants.blogspot.com/2009/01/virtual-geometry-im...
All this for sure looks amazing. But I do not think it will bring anything new to gameplay. There is no big gameplay changes in past 15 years. All shooters, all MMORPG, all strategy games and etc are based on the ideas of 2003-2005 years. Graphics are improving but most games have similar gameplay. I think the biggest next impact to gameplay and game industry will be engine that will be able to have huge zoom ability + ability to handle more than 30 000 players on the same map (of course that also depend on server software and not only game engine). Like traveling from space on ship to planet and after landing and play as a regular 1st person game but all of this with lots of players on the same world (more than 30 000). I think that is next big thing that will change game industry.
This ignores AR, VR, and other recent genres. We just had No Man's Sky come out doing exactly what you describe. Other procedural infinite space games exist.
They sounded promising but they did not made actual revolution in games. They are not mass product used by most players.
> No Man's Sky come out doing exactly what you describe. Other procedural infinite space games exist.
I said "able to have huge zoom ability + ability to handle more than 30 000 players on the same map". There are no games that have those both at the same time. Only those 2 in one game is what I am saying.
Play Half Life: Alyx and you might change your mind about VR. I think it convincingly shows that VR is the future.
My setup:
- OG Vive with deluxe audio kit and the wireless kits. (Both kits completely change the Vive and are in my opinion critical)
- GTX 1080 Strix (factory overclocked)
- 7th 6700k
If I’m having this much fun on first gen hardware, then imagine next gen headsets with higher resolution, wider FOV, eye tracking, foveated rendering (enabling graphical fidelity more similar to big budget 2D games), a better developer ecosystem, more extensive haptics, built in wireless, more players (for social experiences and multiplayer), and increased comfort.
No new ideas in the last 15 years? Have you played Return of the Obra Dinn? Or Overcooked? Or Spiderman for PS4? Idk, I think these are bringing whole new levels of gameplay to the table just in the past year.
Game Devs: Is Unreal Engine the premiere game engine at this point? UE has been a popular engine for a long time and with the recent massive success of Epic Games, I have a hard time imagining Unity or even in-house engines are able to match the engineering that goes into this. That said, I am not familiar with this at all — which is why I’m asking.
When you say "At the point" do you mean now with UE4 or what we think UE5 will bring? Unity will probably be a bit behind because they seem to focus on mobile more but they're not usually significantly behind.
UE sort of seems to have a technical advantage on some platforms and Unity sort of has more of an outreach to smaller teams. Most games are not trying to be on the cutting edge though.
You can ship a game on either engine just fine. In my experience, licensing plays the biggest role in the decision.
So I'm going to join the naysayers here and say while the graphics look absolutely phenomenal the game itself looks the the same game I've been playing for 20-25 years.
A 3rd person character who walks through caves, canyons, ruins, slides through tight places where the camera moves in close, can only climb on areas painted with the "you can climb here color" and then pushes or pulls a few knobs for "puzzles"
It could be the original Tomb Raider (1996) or God of War (2005) or any Uncharted or all the other similar games in between. I'm sure others can name the same game that's been skinned over and over and over.
I love pretty graphics but I'd really like to see the tech used to give me a new game, not just an old game with prettier images.
This is a tech demo. Epic will be able to demonstrate their engine more effectively in a familiar genre. If they were to showcase this using a completely original game genre concept it would distract from where the focus should rightly be, the pretty graphics. As far as I know, this is not a game that's being developed or released. If you are not interested in 3rd person action games, don't buy them.
This seems like a silly complaint to me. Epic's engine team isn't the one coming up with game mechanics - that's largely up to teams actually making games. Unreal may have some functionality related to commonly implemented mechanics but anything truly unique isn't coming from the code in a generic engine anyway - it's coming from the studios building on top of it.
This is a demo showing off tech. Any "game" that exists in the demo is purely to sell the realtime aspect and making it in a familiar environment or with familiar mechanics is just to show how the tech might be implemented in an otherwise known area.
this is a demo. and i prefer graphics at engine level and let the games win or lose due to their quest/lore/immersion of storyline rather than a poor choice of graphics that looks clunky.
I'm hoping games shift to a physics realism approach once we catch to what ever graphics goal the industry sees as "good enough". I'd prefer if 90% of the environment was "tangible".
This was also what I thought of. I get the “this is a demo” but my first consideration after realizing the stale example gameplay was to think about what UE 5 would be most awesome for and it is VR / AR.
These flat “3D” experiences are like Duck Hunt to the kids in the retro bar in Back to the Future 2.
Whatever the tech actually delivers, as braggadocios as the claims are (they would render hundreds of utilities and workflows obsolete), I am astounded by their licensing update.
I'd long migrated to Unreal for technical and workflow reasons as well as having an open engine, but this just seals the deal. A lot of indie studios could get their big break self-publishing this way.
While this is completely amazing, a caveat: graphics are way less important than we think it is. I still remember every nook and cranny from Tomb Raider 3's jungle level, and when I think about it I imagine being deep inside a real jungle. It didn't matter that everything looked jagged; my imagination could go wild.
This is probably a flawed opinion, but sometimes I think the more realistic games become, the less work for our imagination. I don't mean to say that we should stop upgrading graphics. What I do wish to say is this: if you have to choose between optimizing gameplay or graphics, choose gameplay. If you can do both, do both. Having access to a ridiculously powerful easy to use engine does not automatically mean you can do both by just jumbling high detailed props, foliage, terrain together and be done with it. It's counterintuitive, but it takes even more skill and a keen eye to create beautiful and immersive environments in a nearly photo realistic engine than those used 20 years ago. Why? We live in a perfect photorealistic real world, so we immediately spot things that just look weird and unnatural in game. Whereas in old engines our imagination corrected for all those things.
Exactly why I find good roguelikes to offer the most immersive gaming experiences. Just the input you need to let your imagination go wild. But not many friends share that sentiment, unfortunately.
Yeah, when all graphic is blocky, your imagination does the rest. But when you have blocky graphics together with shining water animation like in Morrowind (I think) it breaks immersion.
Still though, that demo was impressive (even though there were maybe some tiny things not perfectly balanced with the shining other effect)
I have a sister opinion to this take, which is that artstyle is far more important than graphics, and there is a very important difference between the two that is often ignored by large game studios. \*
Your graphical capability can push a hundred million triangles, but choosing the color, composition, and visual coherence of those triangles is more important to how people interpret your world than anything else. Humans have an extremely attuned visual processor that infers so much about the way the world behaves solely by the way it looks.
The reason that classic games can be immersive despite a low poly count is because the artists have made the visuals behave in a way that is coherent with our internal model of the game world.
An example of this is Portal. The portal gun is an interesting gameplay tool, but the game was able to fully take advantage of it because the artstyle of the game was very tightly coupled with the mechanics. They did a great job of making sure that the visual environment offered clues to how the game mechanics worked, which made it so easy for people to quickly grasp how the portal gun operated in complex environments. Had the artists failed, Portal would have been "oh yeah, I remember that game -- the portal gun was a neat gimmick but it felt clunky."
The easy way out is to just try to make your environments and game mechanics as realistic as possible, essentially borrowing that creation of intuition from the real world. But the most creative games have worlds whose completely novel or alien mechanics are coupled with art direction that preserves this coherence, which makes the world just "click." Putting more triangles on screen makes for much prettier art, but the true substance of a game is something completely different.
\* not on purpose; it's just extremely difficult to pull off.
I am super late with this reply, but it can not be stressed enough that artsyle is far more important than ‘graphics.’ You referenced Portal, which is an excellent example. I’d cite ARC Stystem Works’ Guilty Gear and Dragonball Fighter Z as equally excellent. They don’t follow the real world intuition principle you mentioned (which I think is a great point) but they put 100% of their ‘graphical’ effort into ensuring that the art style of the subject matter is conveyed consistently and as envisioned.
In a post about a new piece of graphics technology might not be the best place to have this conversation, but I'm glad it popped up. I recently decided to start playing Dwarf Fortress, a game with such terrible graphics it literally takes an act of will to get past them. Seriously, people post a screenshot full of commas and equal signs and say "epic battle, lol!"
Yet, something anazubg happened once I dedicated myself to deciphering the ascii characters: my imagination sprung to life to fill in the gaps. From those bland a-z characters came vaulting ceilings with intricate wall designs. Epic twisting caves. The oddest looking characters.
I compare it to a game of RimWorld, where the graphics make a lot more sense, but turns out limits my need to imagine it being different.
> my imagination sprung to life to fill in the gaps
That's pretty much exactly what I've said for years about 8-bit and 16-bit graphics when I was younger - there was so much more invested imagination back then, necessarily. The last time I experienced this in a 'contemporary' game was when Minecraft came out.
I'm in awe of the tech demo here, but bluntly I'd rather see all those billions of polygons being used for actual game-relevant elements, not just mostly background eye candy.
Wow. It seems like real-time lighting and detail are getting to the point where they're so indistinguishable from reality...
...that now it's the actual quality of the models themselves, and even more of character motion, that are going to have to be the next steps in better graphics.
I'm stunned by the lighting and detail, absolutely stunned.
But at the same time, especially when you get into the architectural rooms, everything's far too "perfect". No grime, no crumbling edges, the motion of the ceiling opening is far too smooth, no vibration or catching, etc.
Likewise, the character's ponytail isn't bobbing like real hair at all. Sometimes her movements seem to be anti-gravity and bizarrely robotic. The leather over her shoulder seems to float rather than rest, and twists as if it were made of gelatin rather than stiff cowskin.
Not that these are criticisms at all -- I'm well aware of how hard they are. It's just fascinating to me to see, once rendering is basically "good enough", how the flaws in modeling come to the fore.
And so where are those advances going to come in? Are there going to be procedural-generation advances in creating realistic grime and imperfections and irregularities? Or deep-learning advances for realistic bodily movement? And why is it so damn hard to get clothing to actually fall on the body right, instead of always looking like a stretchy foam skinsuit?
All sorts of rendering tricks had to be played before RTX. Now that we have real-time ray tracing, models are becoming more important than shaders (see e.g. Minecraft. It looks like a real world made of Legos - the blocks make it look artificial.)
Maybe once real time photorealism is cracked, we'll move to a completely Newtonian global physics for some games, with some analogue of "atoms" the way RTX models "photons."
I'm not in the industry, this is just something I'm wondering about. What would Minecraft be like if blocks were the size of pixels and the physics were real?
It's going to be at least a solid 3-5 years until one can say "now that we have real-time ray tracing" as far as most consumer devices are concerned, and even then it likely won't mean that all games will use raytracing for all rendering - more likely just for select special effects etc. I wouldn't give it less than at least a decade or two before we can have a mainstream fully raytraced game; and even then, I'd guess that good game artists will keep using smoke and mirrors to make effects even more stunning than what they can make by the brute force ray tracing approach.
Almost exactly what I was looking for! I can't fathom how a single person manages to make a game like that. He mentions a physics solver in that video.. I wonder if he'll talk about how it works
> Maybe once real time photorealism is cracked, we'll move to a completely Newtonian global physics for some games, with some analogue of "atoms" the way RTX models "photons."
There is an extreme amount of doubt about whether the tech is real (myself included). These people have promised the world, have incredible videos, but have nothing to show in terms of a demo you can download and run yourself. Still, they claim to do what you describe and have videos demonstrating it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J62z_7JaYMw
Holy shit, wow! I hear you on the skepticism, but did you notice how the vehicles shimmer during some of the editing? I think think they're optimizing by joining adjacent voxels together until they're deleted, at which point they get replaced with new polys, and it causes a ripple effect.
That type of detail suggests to me that it's a real (clunky) demo, but maybe it's running slower than advertised.
I can also understand not releasing a demo.. the code would be too valuable to risk reverse engineers.
It's possible that it's an async compute task, which could potentially miss a frame and show old data (instead of the whole frame missing vsync).
Also this demo is supposed to be running on a PS5 devkit, which means that you'd need a devkit to run it, which means that you'd need to sign NDAs and join their developer programs and whatnot.
Having worked with current gen consoles (meaning I can't go into any amount of detail), it's not a trivial thing to get a demo like this running well on PCs. This demo is likely making use of every platform specific feature available to them.
That said, the demo might be accessible through some back channels if you're already a UE4 licensee and have a PS5 devkit.
The link I shared wasn't UE5, and their other videos specifically indicate that they are running on PC - unbelievably modest PC hardware at that.
> it's not a trivial thing to get a demo like this running well on PCs
This old tired argument.
The current theory for how the meshing is done is something similar to mesh shaders (available on commodity PC hardware since 2018)[1]. This "PS5 platform specific feature" running on PC in 2018[2].
As for the lighting, NVDIA have already had this "platform specific feature" on PCs for some time now. It's called RTX. In 2018[3] (using DLSS), in 2020[4] (no apparent DLSS usage, but it may have improved).
Both next-gen consoles are essentially PCs. Their primary advantage is tightly coupled hardware (e.g. memory latency, the absurdly fast PS5 SSD). While dedicated raytracing silicon on AMD is currently unique to PS5 (AMD claims they can emulate DXRT on Navi), it has been around for more than a year in consumer hands in the form RTX.
I work in AAA. I'm talking lower level things like picking which "type" of GPU memory to allocate, access to specific registers in shaders, etc. PC didn't have real async compute capabilities until DX12, for example.
On the CPU side yeah it's 100% just a normal computer but nothing will be interrupting your threads. I think Windows 10 tries to do in it's new game mode too.
Sorry for assuming the link was the PS5 one. I have a UDN account and their login setup sometimes just dumps me to their homepage, so I made the assumption that it was the same video that I had seen everywhere else.
AMD GCN absolutely supports async compute[1]. Radeon cards for years would only make use of the ACEs in pure compute contexts, as OpenGL and DX11 had no concept of a secondary command queue and could not make use of them. This is a big part of the reason why Vulkan/DX12 require so much boilerplate to get a triangle rendered.
The PS3's SPU definitely counts as async compute especially with how it was used later in the console lifecycle[2] once people had time to familiarize themselves with it.
However, in the current gen consoles, you don't have to deal with a different ISA, command queuing, and shared memory between the GPU and CELL processor. You are only writing HLSL/GLSL/PSSL and setting up an aggressive amount of fencing to transition resources between readable and writable states within the GPU.
What you are suggesting are called voxel engines, and there have been a lot of attempts at them, none close to success.
There is no way we can simulate physics at the level you suggest for real-time games, not even in a hundred years. Unless you achieve a breakthrough in fundamental physics which would have an impact in every aspect of life, not just games.
There must be some granularity at which voxel engines can work smoothly today. Let's say my room is a square with 320 pixels on each side. 320^3 = 32,768,000 voxels, which looks like a lot, but an RTX 2080 can render 17 billion triangles per second, which works out to 273 million per frame at 60fps.
Let's ignore gravity and focus on momentum vectors and collisions. Even if simulating physics for each voxel were 10x slower than rendering a triangle, you could do 320^3 voxels in 60fps on today's hardware.
And this is naive, assuming you can't merge neighboring voxels together! I think you're being unfairly pessimistic.
Current systems simulate about 30k simple bodies. So that is already off by 3 orders of magnitude.
And that is a basic simulation, nothing complex, no fancy physics simulated, just rigid collisions.
Even if you could simulate the numbers you propose, 320 voxels per side is really low. Each voxel would be around a centimeter wide, which would look very bad (compared to the usual way of doing things).
You might be interested in the upcoming game, Teardown[0]. The voxels are definitely larger than pixels, but much smaller than in Minecraft. It definitely exploits the voxel geometry for really impressive physics (as well as optimized ray tracing).
Yeah, this is looking so good now that we seem to have reached the uncanny valley of rendering. Where instead of thinking "this game has really good graphics" I'm now thinking "this reality has some bad graphics".
>And why is it so damn hard to get clothing to actually fall on the body right, instead of always looking like a stretchy foam skinsuit?
Mostly because it is a stretchy foam suit. A model is deformed and translated based on animated bones in the model. Essentially each vertex is tied to a small number of transforms matrices(bones) with multiplier/weight. Animations are updating the transform matrices over time. You only get so many bones per model and per vertex and because of this clothes moved inline with other parts of a model like skin because its using the exact same bone.
I'm not sure where we're at in terms of increasing bone counts or independently animating clothes on a character. As bone counts increase, the amount of matrix data that must be sent to the GPU every frame increases.
How so? We can already render really nice cloth offline. The issue is the runtime cost of sending that animation data to the GPU.
Are you suggesting building some kind of GPU side physics protocol that takes material properties, and existing bone data and fills in some of the blanks? I suppose you could start to push bone motion vectors and interpolate some things.
Computing & rendering all on the GPU without having to query back to the CPU at all seems a natural fit to me, but I don't have a deep technical understanding of it.
My main thought is just that DL reduces the amount of computate you actually need by allowing you to approximate rather than derive things like cloth physics, how that's eventually integrated seems an implementation detail.
The tech here is impressive but so is the content they have created or it. Even more so. It's kind of insane that game art isn't usually given the credit it deserves. Everyone seems to think that the engine just produces these images somehow. Look, the artists had to actually design all this architecture and statues etc. It's not an easier job than actually being an architect... Producing content at such level of detail is very expensive and time-consuming and it just doesn't come automatically with the engine.
Multiple comments here agree that the water is not the engine’s strong suit, but the thing that bothers me the most these days is not the water, but the wetness (or lack thereof).
Why can’t nobody do wetness well? In most games you’ll play, you can dive deep into the water and when you go out your model will stay completely dry. If Naughty Dog managed to do it well on a PS3, so can the game engine as a feature on the PS5.
OK there are N=10^6 triangles and that shows the raw GPU power. True indirect lighting would be N^2: this is both impossible and not worth the cost in terms of realism. So maybe they do it on a low LOD geometry or even a dirtier trick. A low LOD is probably also used for collision detection. Keep in mind that these people's job is to trick you, to the letter. Maybe there is not much more than a larger GPU and an simplified creation process in this demo.
The lede seems somewhat buried here. The tech they spend most of their time talking about has more to do with development iteration than graphics. Not having to optimize LODs or light maps mean more time spent generating models and iterating on a scene. As with other kinds of software development, game dev quality is all about how quickly you can iterate. As for the rest, this demo says more about the PlayStation 5 than Unreal.
As a consumer, I'm expecting to see a graphics jump in the next generation of games (as you would expect) and some fun new lighting details (yo, RTX!), but not much beyond that. However, this will likely lower the cost of developing cinematic games like Uncharted or RDR.
I hope they name the authors of the theses that they used to achieve this. It's inconceivable to me that some dude sat down and decided how everything should be coded.
No one seems to be talking about the announcement at the end of the page:
> Friends, matchmaking, lobbies, achievements, leaderboards, and accounts: we built these services for Fortnite, we launched them across seven major platforms - PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android. Now we’re opening up Epic Online Services to all developers FOR FREE in a simple multiplatform SDK!
> Mix and match these services together with your own account services, platform accounts, or Epic Games accounts, which reach the world’s largest cross-platform social graph with over 350 million players and their 2.2 billion friend connections across half a billion devices.
Free SDK for online game services? That's an insane boon to any small studio / solo development of a multiplayer game.
people that make games n game engines are fucking incredible. with tools like these the future is bright for film-makers on a limited budget. which is beneficial for a diversified high quality movie industry. imagine something like game of thrones, instead of actual humans. just have it all entirely done via unreal 5. you'll still need good writers though.
Very late to the discussion but I might be missing something; a majority of you are bashing this by saying "it's just a demo"/"games never end up looking like that":
a) If this demo is runnable at real time fps on ps5 hardware ($400-500 WITH markup)...that's a technologically phenomenal feat in itself.
b) If the engine IS capable of running something like this...they are not lying. The responsibility for "good looking games" then falls on to game studios to deliver instead of halfassing something just to hit a deadline.
You are correct. I am personally excited that this technology exists, but I am also sad that we will have to wait a few years to see an actual game to utilize this.
The engine releases sometime in 2021 and then it will probably take a few years for some other studio to develop a decent AAA title using this.
That is, unless Epic Games releases something awesome on their own soon.
As a newcomer to Unreal, I have a question. Is C++ really that verbose and difficult to use, or does it get better as you gain more experience?
I'm relatively new to gamedev, I've spent several months learning Godot, and now I'm trying out Unreal.
Unreal has many exciting things, but from what I can see so far, C++ looks like nightmare.
It seems like everything I'm trying to do takes me 5x lines of code and 10x the time compared to doing this in Godot.
Also the code looks far less readable and way more confusing.
Granted I'm new to Unreal and C++, but I didn't have the same problems with other programming languages I've been using.
So my question is - does this get better/faster/easier when you get used to it and gain more experience? Or is this something you struggle with every day?
I know that Unreal has Blueprints, but they also seem pretty slow and limiting. I've been watching a tutorial where a guy has spend 40 minutes explaining how to do a thing in Blueprints which would take me like 3 minutes and 15 lines of code to do in Godot.
I really want to use all the sexy exciting features unreal has, but C++/Blueprints are really holding me back.
I've been using UE4 for VR development as a hobby for the last year or so. I have to say that I was against Blueprints and had quite to fight with myself to give them a chance, but once you get used to it it's not that bad. IMO still worse than pure code and sometimes much slower to write (complex arithmetic operations are painful), but at least it's not C++.
Also, sometimes a visual representation of what your code is doing helps you simplify your code architecture when it gets too convoluted.
Not sure, the git remote is `git@github.com:EpicGames/UnrealEngine.git` and the commit at the time I run cloc was `f8f4b403eb682ffc055613c7caf9d2ba5df7f319` which is the head of the `release` branch.
But, if UE4 was/is mainly, you can expect UE5 to follow the same path, they are not gonna rewrite 20720 files into a different language just for fun.
I haven't looked into UE in quite some time as I use Unity for most of my stuff (not a game developer, just building quick prototypes for AI, simulations, dabbling in AR etc.) but the demo looks pretty stunning.
I tend to do a technology pass once a year or so to see if I might enjoy switching engines. From my last check my takeaway was that UE always seems more technically advanced but Unity is easier to work with/rapidly prototype. UE now seems to have a 1 million revenue barrier (I think for Unity it's 100k) which seems attractive for game devs. As a programmer the inclusion of ProBuilder/Grids in Unity is a godsent as I can quickly muddle together greyboxings and be done with graphics (combined with the recent Blender overhaul I almost feel like I'm semi-useful on the graphics/asset front now).
So quick question to the people who have used both (I'd also be interested in Godot feedback)...is that basic assessment still correct? Unity stronger for quicker prototyping, Unreal stronger high end? If I wasn't one person but a small team with an artist I'd probably pick UE as the artists will likely use their own tools and not build stuff in-engine.
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