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Epic Games shows jaw-dropping graphics for next-generation consoles

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Re: Epic Games shows jaw-dropping graphics for next-generation consoles

#81

Post by georgemcbay »

icefox wrote: post #74
bmalicoat wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm peripherally in the industry, but even I can say middleware is huge. Speedtree, as you mentioned, shows how niche the suites can be. You also have FMV players (especially on mobile) and of course physics engines are huge. Look for Havok and you'll see it powers most AAA games. I don't know specific pain points you can ease, but if you can generalize it, game companies will probably pay for it.

potatolicious mentioned animation systems http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2303453 Is this an area that is just not very important (wont buy) or one that just is low on the list of todo items? speedtree begs the question of what about speedFOOBAR such as buildings, cities, caves, worlds, fish or how about speedanimal (generating animal + animation)? Is the big place to find a nitch in Art or are there better place…

Animation? Granny. Audio? Miles Sound.

If you want to know what sorts of libraries the game industry wants to license, take a look at RAD Game Tools, they are the masters of this stuff. Some of the stuff they are currently focused on are large data-set compression/decompression (Charles Bloom) and I would guess some sort of tool/library to generically handle sparse virtual texture rendering (Sean Barrett) which is similar to id's megatexture technology... though the SVT guess is more speculation on my part than public knowledge.

In any case, this market is probably not a great one to get into unless you are a deep subject matter expert in one of these areas (or you want to become one and have a lot of time to spend doing so), the bar is set pretty high already and few game development studios are willing to put any effort into exploring solutions that aren't either well-proven or from people they already know and trust (the game industry is still rather incestuous).

Re: Epic Games shows jaw-dropping graphics for next-generation consoles

#82

Post by LogicHoleFlaw »

potatolicious wrote: post #30
mortenjorck wrote: post #21

Too bad all these beautiful effects will be covered up by the foreshortened perspective of a gun in one corner and a health bar in the other corner. I kid, but honestly, seeing this doesn't excite me anywhere near as much as a preview of whatever the team that made Mirror's Edge has in store next for current -generation consoles.

DICE made Mirror's Edge, but it was a commercial flop, so we are unlikely to see a sequel anytime soon :( Personally I loved it. Slightly OT but interesting: from what I hear from people at EA, it was a huge internal political war that year between the people who wanted to build more sequels and licensed franchises, and the people who thought that EA would die if it didn't innovate on its own IP. The latter won and w…

A lot of the presentation techniques from DICE's upcoming Battlefield 3 borrow very strongly from Mirror's Edge. I was watching a shakeycam video of B3 from last week's GDC and the influence was very apparent.

From this interview (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2380794,00.asp)

"[...] a lot of the physicality of Battlefield 3 comes from the thinking behind Mirror's Edge. So the fact that your hands are a part of the world—it's not just a gun on a stick—it's actually a character that moves around. You can see your feet, you can see your hands, you can touch stuff, you can interact with the world. A lot of thinking comes from Mirror's Edge and that's what you want."

Re: Epic Games shows jaw-dropping graphics for next-generation consoles

#83

Post by dan335 »

johngunderman wrote: post #58
rorrr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet more of the art will be procedurally generated.

I feel like we need a "library" of freely available hi-res textures and models that can be adapted for a given game. From what I understand, a huge part of the development costs go into the art, and having a huge library to draw from seems like it would mitigate that somewhat.

It's not that simple. There is more to a game artist's job than just creating a generic model and texture. The art has to be in a specific art style, it has to be within a certain budget, it has to be made in a certain way to work in the game engine. The textures have to be made to work with the shaders that it will be using and look good in the game's lighting system. Physics might need to be setup. Destruction states. Lightmaps generated. It might need to be created so that it can be rigged and animated. There are places like cgtextures.com for textures, and there are artists who turn those textures textures into the art you see in the game. You can't replace the game artist.

Re: Epic Games shows jaw-dropping graphics for next-generation consoles

#84

Post by johngunderman »

dan335 wrote: post #83
johngunderman wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like we need a "library" of freely available hi-res textures and models that can be adapted for a given game. From what I understand, a huge part of the development costs go into the art, and having a huge library to draw from seems like it would mitigate that somewhat.

It's not that simple. There is more to a game artist's job than just creating a generic model and texture. The art has to be in a specific art style, it has to be within a certain budget, it has to be made in a certain way to work in the game engine. The textures have to be made to work with the shaders that it will be using and look good in the game's lighting system. Physics might need to be setup. Destruction stat…

Believe me, I'm not trying to replace game artists or belittle their work in any way. I'm just musing about whether or not there is a way to streamline an artist's job, to make it easier for them to create content. Which, when phrased that way, seems like it is more an issue with the available tools rather then the library of previous works.

Re: Epic Games shows jaw-dropping graphics for next-generation consoles

#85

Post by grogers »

sgoraya wrote: post #37

Goes almost without saying that Epic develops great game engines; however, IMHO, Crytek's cryengine at GDC was more impressive and has done a better job of rendering outdoor environments and foliage better than the Epic's Unreal engine; Unreal still has top spot in market share but I think Crytek will make significant gains in the next couple of years; That said, Tim Sweeney is still a hero.

This has been true for over 5 years (far cry came out in 2004...). And yet, CryEngine has basically only been used in other Crytek titles. If destructible trees couldn't sell game engines, theres little new hotness in CryEngine 3 that will. I bet in another 5 years, we will be saying pretty much the same thing.

Re: Epic Games shows jaw-dropping graphics for next-generation consoles

#86

Post by dan335 »

johngunderman wrote: post #84
dan335 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that simple. There is more to a game artist's job than just creating a generic model and texture. The art has to be in a specific art style, it has to be within a certain budget, it has to be made in a certain way to work in the game engine. The textures have to be made to work with the shaders that it will be using and look good in the game's lighting system. Physics might need to be setup. Destruction stat…

Believe me, I'm not trying to replace game artists or belittle their work in any way. I'm just musing about whether or not there is a way to streamline an artist's job, to make it easier for them to create content. Which, when phrased that way, seems like it is more an issue with the available tools rather then the library of previous works.

Most companies have lots of in-house tools and scripts they have written to help artists do their job. A company like Bungie will have people dedicated to working on tools for artists. The positions are called tech artist or tools programmer. Some companies have much better tools than others.

Re: Epic Games shows jaw-dropping graphics for next-generation consoles

#87

Post by malkia »

icefox wrote: post #71
rorrr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet more of the art will be procedurally generated.

Can anyone in the game industry comment on this? Why type of problems are game companies paying for? I have seen at least one company that sells procedurally generated trees and am curious how good of an idea this is. Being customer oriented, what are the problems game companies have today?

I'm in the industry, in a tool group.

I guess you talk about SpeedTree. We used in some of our games, but not in our latest.

One of the problem of using middleware, especially one generating content is how to integrate it with the rest of the pipeline.

If our pipeline sees that as just another model/texture like the rest of the provided, then no problem - e.g. An artist uses the tool to generate the geometry. But if we have to put some control over it, and integrate it deeper so far into the rendering system, then other problems arise: - Speed of rendering - Memory usage - Collision support - Can it reuse existing shader techniques, or new are required. - others

  And since you've talked about procedural - this would entail more variations:
  
   For example if this is an multiplayer game you would have to synchronize the tree generation to look exactly the same for each player, and have the same collision box, or collision model (usually low-poly bounding convex or set of). This means you would have to communicate synchronize this with the clients.
Then some animatiors might've adjusted certain cut-scene to look very good, but the TREE has changed and now it's weird.

For an open world RPG, or strategy game this might not be a problem - more variation there for the better.

But all in all, if the price is right, and artists and coders agree - why not?

Re: Epic Games shows jaw-dropping graphics for next-generation consoles

#88

Post by malkia »

aphyr wrote: post #26
jacques_chester wrote: post #16

> The demo took about three months for 12 programmers and artists to build. So using the new engine, the world-leading experts on Unreal Engine NG - Epic - had to spend 1 person-year per minute of video. Like Hollywood, this can only make hit-driven game design more common on consoles and PCs.

Admittedly, this is a tech demo which was designed to pack in the maximum amount of variation into the shortest possible time frame. Game development typically reuses the same carefully-crafted assets (particle systems, models, textures, shaders, even level geometry) in as many places as possible.

Yet... No GAME was actually shown here.

Yes this was rendered with the engine, but having the same camera angles, people, etc. you can do lots of tricks that you can't when doing interactive stuff ... ahem GAMES: - You can cull your geometry offline (you know where you camera goes in and out) - You can prefetch certain calculations that are to come soon (you know what's gonna happen) - For sure you can implement correct motion blur filter as you know where you are moving - Probably no physics - they might aswel prerecord them. - In fact you can capture where each vertex, color, texture channel moves, and just replay it. - And probably many more.

I'm not saying it's not cool, and I love good cutscenes in games (Metal Gear Solid), but people seem to confuse that

   CUTSCENE RENDERED is the same as GAME RENDERED. No it's not.

Re: Epic Games shows jaw-dropping graphics for next-generation consoles

#89

Post by 6ren »

barrkel wrote: post #59
chipsy wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a really strong FPS AI would be a technical achievement similar to automatic car driving; it has have a "real eyesight" algorithm, notice motion, understand varied terrain, etc. A basic LOS check is insufficient since there's lighting, smoke, semi-transparent items like fences etc. included in typical FPS environments. Even considering that the data structures for the world and rendering can be reused for AI…

it's still pushing our current hardware to expect to get a whole squad of really detailed, smart AIs and also have a playable action game with modern graphics quality I don't buy this for a moment. On multicore PCs, graphics horsepower is almost completely separate from CPU horsepower available for AI. Modern games rarely escape the 15..40% CPU utilization envelope on my machine (i7 920); there is bags and bags of co…

If those spare cycles can be put to good use, that actually better serve gamers' needs, it seems that consoles would be disrupted.

I guess a big issue is install base: lots of consoles, and few people with expensive, upmarket PCs. Also, piracy. And a single hardware target. And perhaps console game quality is "good enough" for most gamers. Perhaps having many people to play FPS against is more important than graphics (or AI).

Even worse, as silicon gets cheaper, instead of those PCs becoming affordable, I predict most people will buy even cheaper PCs (or phones+HDMI+kb; or iPads; or a new ARM-based PC form-factor). i.e. PCs getting disrupted, as workstations, minicomputers and mainframes were.

Worst case: it's possible that consoles will never improve from where they are now.

The only hope I see is that someone comes up with something sensational, that everybody wants, that requires that extra processing power. Life-like AI might do it... but we already have real people to play against. Though I think cinematic graphics is probably the best bet.

Re: Epic Games shows jaw-dropping graphics for next-generation consoles

#90

Post by TimothyBurgess »

This is why I've always been a huge fan of Unreal Technology. You could definitely call me a fanboy since I played the original Unreal (the game on which UT was based) avidly for years... but for good reason. Just like most males my age, I've played tons of first person shooters... but I've always felt Unreal was way ahead of its time, not just with graphics but with gameplay as well. Although the gameplay of the Unreal series has steadily declined since the original but these days it's still hard to find a game on its level in the sense of how many different ways can be approached to be good at the game.

But back to the graphics, rendering these graphics in realtime with a high framerate is definitely possible... but not presently feasible. The only problem I've noticed with the Unreal series and its graphics is as I just said: it's ahead of its time. Sure, there's hardware out there that can handle it no problem... but the average consumer can't afford it. I have a feeling that even when the next generation of consoles is released, they'll still struggle to handle the Unreal Engine at its full potential. But I guess someone has to raise the bar.

I remember when UT3 came out... I was so stoked. My gaming PC was probably only a year behind the top (affordable) components at the time... and I wasn't about to go spend $500+ on a new video card, ram, and all that. I figured I'd be able to run it decently enough... but boy was I wrong. I got 30 fps tops (and that was when nothing was going on!) and if you've played an FPS like Unreal competitively, you'd know that the only way you stand a chance at dodging rockets and sniping people midair and all that awesome stuff possible with the Unreal series... you need upwards of 60 fps, consistently. So I only played the new game for a couple of weeks before giving up. It's probably for the best too because I needed to concentrate on my studies haha... but the moral of the story is the entire game basically died within a few months because only a small handful of people could run it.

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