Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A first look at Unreal Engine 5

unrealengine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 695 posts

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#161

Post by simias »

ksec wrote: 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…

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.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#162

Post by barbecue_sauce »

robmerki wrote: post #24

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,…

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.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#163

Post by gamblor956 »

VikingCoder wrote: post #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…

Nothing is stopping them from doing this.

At the same time, nothing is motivating them to do this either.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#164

Post by paavohtl »

skohan wrote: post #125
_bxg1 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to figure out whether the new GI used raytracing, and it doesn't seem like it is? If it is using raytracing hardware it isn't nearly as impressive. If it isn't , then it's sheer magic.

I'm almost certain they are. HW raytracing is of the big selling points of the new console generations, and if they achieved these kinds of results without it, then I would have to reconsider my skepticism of the occult.

It was confirmed[1] in a Digital Foundry interview that the demo is NOT using HW raytracing.

[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-this-...

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#165

Post by [deleted] »

_bxg1 wrote: post #120
skohan wrote: post #96

The real-time GI is amazing. Ray tracing is going to be a game changer, not only in terms of visual quality, but also because it's one of those rare times in computer graphics where the more advanced solution is actually making it easier on graphics programmers by replacing a bag of dirty tricks with a unified, physically based solution. One interesting note: they say the GI is "instant" but you can actually see that…

I tried to figure out whether the new GI used raytracing, and it doesn't seem like it is? If it is using raytracing hardware it isn't nearly as impressive. If it isn't , then it's sheer magic.

[deleted]

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#166

Post by danbolt »

dazzawazza wrote: post #154
flipgimble wrote: post #145

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.

I always wondered if that dinosaur was using the 2MB of memory in the final retail unit, or 4MB often seen in arcade boards using the the PS1's technology.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#168

Post by vvilliam0 »

VikingCoder wrote: post #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…

Not unreal engine, but you might be interested in https://aframe.io/

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#169

Post by autarch »

chongli wrote: post #40
trynewideas wrote: post #3

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.

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?

I'm not an expert in these things but my understanding is that Unity is much better for smaller games. I think Unreal is aimed at the AAA market.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#170

Post by dralley »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #56
fxtentacle wrote: post #36

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.

Wait. What about id Tech?

And Frostbite, although it's specific to EA.
Post reply on HN