Live data from Hacker News

A first look at Unreal Engine 5

unrealengine.com

151–160 of 695 posts

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#152
I've been wondering for a while Unreal doesn't just make the Unreal Browser.

You download and install it.

Then you give it a URL, and it streams down a map, and downloads DLLs containing behavior custom to that map. While you're in a map, you can walk through a portal to another map. Or you can just keep moving in a direction, which streams more and more map.

If you're in a multi-player environment, you connect to a server for that environment. If you're in a solo area, you're just running locally.

Isn't this what the Oasis (from "Ready Player One") is supposed to be like? What stops them from doing this?

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#153

Wow, we'll soon be down to only one game engine. 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.

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.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#154

Let me throw in an anecdote that may amuse some: I was working for a now defunct large game company when Epic and Tim Sweeny came in to demo Unreal Engine 3 very early before the PS3 and XBox360 were launched. This was about 2004. Their demo blew away executives in particular. They showed multicolored lights casting multicolored shadows on a single high detail character. One of the lights was behind a stained glass w…

Remember the PS1 dinosaur demo? Yeah the whole industry is famous for this.

Games are more than tech demos.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#155
post #72
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd sure hope so if iOS and Android are on the list.

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.

High end smartphones now cost around the same as the new Xbox and PlayStation combined would, or about as much as a solid mid range gaming PC...

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#156

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,…

Unity pays lip service to AAA but its primary market segment mobile game development (which is nearly half of the entire gaming market).

And indie devs. A ton of indie games are on unity on the desktop.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#157
post #115

Holy forking shirtballs, that looks amazing. 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.

Yeah, but I don't see 100% sync between where she moves her hand and where the ball glows.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#158

I've been wondering for a while Unreal doesn't just make the Unreal Browser. You download and install it. Then you give it a URL, and it streams down a map, and downloads DLLs containing behavior custom to that map. While you're in a map, you can walk through a portal to another map. Or you can just keep moving in a direction, which streams more and more map. If you're in a multi-player environment, you connect to a…

How do you make money from this? Who would buy it? Why would anyone use it? Is there a point beyond "this is a cool thing", which is pretty well captured by Roblox and Second Life and VRChat

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#159
post #15
post #8

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 Hol…

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.

"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."

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#160
post #142
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shadows are too sharp, so I don't think they use raytracing.

It certainly isn't completely raytraced, because current hardware can't support that. If they use the new hardware, they're using it in some kind of mixed mode. Whether that means only for certain materials, or whether they're able to use it to do "fat rays" that approximate only the general direction for indirect light, or whatever else. But direct, hard shadows are quite cheap (comparatively) on today's regular, ra…

It certainly isn't fully path traced, but the result does look to me like they are using ray-traced GI. You can tell by some of the details, like colored bounce lighting which I am not sure can be achieved with this level of detail using other methods.

The current standard for getting real-time performance for ray tracing is to limit the number of rays and bounces, and stabilize the results temporally.

I.e. to get a "physically accurate" result you would have to send hundreds, or thousands of rays per pixel, and bounce them up dozens or hundreds of times. With this method, instead you send maybe even one or two rays per pixel, which gives you a noisy result. But you store the result, and accumulate it over a number of frames, and apply de-noising, and over time you end up with a high-quality result.

I believe that is why when the light moves, the GI lags for a fraction of a second in this demo.

Post reply on HN