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.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 246 ms ] threadIn 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...
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.
When it comes to animation the interesting stuff were the "automated" hand/foot placement animations like the hand on the door they mentioned.
(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.)
A lot of it actually looks subpar 2020 standards.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZmRt8gCsC0
> 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 also means no official support and a few missing features, not sure if UE4 offers everything for free)
> 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).
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.
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 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.
Pretty much every game needs someone talented in art or design. It can be one of the programmers, of course.
Unreal is not a good choice for a 2D game, anyway.
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.
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.
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".
So developer can expect it to perform identical to whatever balance they've set between CPU/GPU. That's my understanding at least.
'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."'
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-plays...
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.
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.
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.
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.
How common is this though in an era where most releases are multi-platform?
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.
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.
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.
Next-gen consoles will have to become more ubiquitous before the previous gen consoles are left out of game releases.
Here is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjb-AqMD-a4
https://youtu.be/gUnxzVOs3rk
I wonder how many GPU's that system had.
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)
btw. Only about 50% of the scenes were made with this setup. rest was traditional ray-tracing.
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.
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.
"The final animated VFX would be added in later; the screens were merely to provide interactive lighting to match the animations." -- https://ascmag.com/articles/the-mandalorian, discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22378679
I don't think that's correct, the ILM team presented this technology in a video:
https://youtu.be/gUnxzVOs3rk?t=104
(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.
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).
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.
Absolutely mind-boggling.
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.
REF: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-03-14-crunch-once-ag...
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...
It is an interesting complaint. Need some time to think about that in details.
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...
Physics engine, character movement, etc. could still be improved.
don't get me wrong, the fixed assets look amazing and I look forward to seeing more done with this system
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.
Though I was totally blown away by the detail of the rock texture and very realistic lighting.
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.
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.
it's different from e.g. Moana, where skin is kind of marzipan-y, but still recognizably skin-like
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.
And then you wonder why AAA studios focus on graphics?
> That being said I concede that I'm clearly in the minority
You definitely aren't in the minority. r/gaming is full of people racing to be most unimpressed by a good looking game.
All the HN comments pointing out flaws with "don't get me wrong, it looks decent!" could be predicted the second I read the submission title.
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.
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.
Sometimes the simpler, the better.
But on the flipside, there's literally thousands of indie games with innovative, interesting gameplay, if not sparkling graphics.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
But I do agree with you in general that more advanced simulation is a huge, largely untouched opportunity in games.
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)
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzvOgTABwr0
[1] https://www.filfre.net/2019/02/ultima-vii/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHFqOat79Cg
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.
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.
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.
- 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)
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.
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
You might be looking for Minecraft! :D
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.
- obvious SSAO when hand touched the rock wall
- odd reflections on the bird sculptures
- down-resing of textures and motion blur when she flew
- obvious uncanny valley face (pancake makeup, no subsurface scattering) on face closeup
- dust sprite clouds
were some of the things I noticed on my first watch
but it was still quite pretty. like what I'd expect uncharted 5 on the pc to look like
I think that was intended and programmed into the clip on purpose - not a side-effect of a poor engine.
Covid-19 games.
Unreal looks better than Unity but I found it difficult to get started.
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.
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.
> 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.
(Shipping in UE4 means release mode with full optimization enabled, most logging & profiling stripped out, etc)
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/PythonAPI/introduction.h...
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've been hobbyist in Unity for a long time. But I think I'll switch to Unreal just for that.
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.
[0] http://hhoppe.com/gim.pdf
> 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.
From here: http://www.pbr-book.org/3ed-2018/Shapes/Triangle_Meshes.html
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.
that give's you up to 16.7m (2^24) possible triangles. Your napkin math is way off,
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.
Are we going to download 500GB games on our Playstation 5s?
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/ConvolverNo...
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.
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.
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS_Fbueh7F4
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.
I am convinced every human can hear the difference. Computation is cheap. There's no reason not to solve the problem.
Time for everyone to learn Unreal, Houdini, and Mari.
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.
Crytek has financial worries. Plus it's the most difficult to use, because it's almost all C++.
Unity is very accessible thanks to C# scripting, but has bug issues (and no source code).
Unreal Engine looks amazing, is cheap or free for indie studios, and has source code included.
If they can make UE slightly easier to develop for, they'll dominate the market.
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...
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.
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 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.
And then there is always the possibility to pay for the source code anyway.
This is a business after all.
Unity source code is partially available on github, and full available on commercial license, which is fair.
Then there are plenty of other engines out there, for example Cocos2d-x is number one in Asia for 2D mobile games.
I wonder if they consider the Switch a current-generation console.
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
You'll probably have to compile it yourself, but it isn't hard. (I did it).
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Platforms/Linux/Beginner...
Otherwise it's simply astonishing.
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.
Is this like a weird infinite depth of field kind of thing?
The problem here is probably some sharpening filter.
https://ibb.co/PrYT6pq
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSxk7THBnxY&t=2s
mild \s
We can now all sit back and watch Epic eat Valve’s and Microsoft’s Lunch right in front of them, like some kind of sordid picnic.
I look forward to seeing the pricing details and revenue options based on player base and time.