Game Devs: Is Unreal Engine the premiere game engine at this point? UE has been a popular engine for a long time and with the recent massive success of Epic Games, I have a hard time imagining Unity or even in-house engines are able to match the engineering that goes into this. That said, I am not familiar with this at all — which is why I’m asking.
A first look at Unreal Engine 5
361–370 of 695 posts
Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5
#362I 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,…
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 tha…
In reality its the same rock mesh 1000s of times.
Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5
#363Let 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…
Dude I spent a large portion of my early career as a web developer making rounded corners on divs using all sorts of kludges
All Steve Jobs’ fault: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_...
Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could swear I “played” it when I was a kid off a PlayStation magazine or Pizza Hut demo disk on a retail (well modded) unit
I think it came out on a demo disk at some point. You got to move the dino about and maybe the light source? It's been a long time!
Yep, I remember this too.
Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5
#365All this for sure looks amazing. But I do not think it will bring anything new to gameplay. There is no big gameplay changes in past 15 years. All shooters, all MMORPG, all strategy games and etc are based on the ideas of 2003-2005 years. Graphics are improving but most games have similar gameplay. I think the biggest next impact to gameplay and game industry will be engine that will be able to have huge zoom ability…
This ignores AR, VR, and other recent genres. We just had No Man's Sky come out doing exactly what you describe. Other procedural infinite space games exist.
Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5
#366In 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…
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.
It was done on purpose, similar to how Pixar movies have obviously cartoony and unrealistic characters in an otherwise photo-realistic environment.
Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5
#367Game Devs: Is Unreal Engine the premiere game engine at this point? UE has been a popular engine for a long time and with the recent massive success of Epic Games, I have a hard time imagining Unity or even in-house engines are able to match the engineering that goes into this. That said, I am not familiar with this at all — which is why I’m asking.
When you say "At the point" do you mean now with UE4 or what we think UE5 will bring? Unity will probably be a bit behind because they seem to focus on mobile more but they're not usually significantly behind.
UE sort of seems to have a technical advantage on some platforms and Unity sort of has more of an outreach to smaller teams. Most games are not trying to be on the cutting edge though.
You can ship a game on either engine just fine. In my experience, licensing plays the biggest role in the decision.
Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5
#368It'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 collaborat…
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 F…
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.
Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rounded corners using tables and gifs?
To invoke the old "rule 5" of explaining things: Until surprisingly recently, there was no built-in way to make a rectangular element on a webpage have rounded corners. People had to use all sorts of dirty hacks to make a final product that "looked like" it was a native, built-in feature. Usually in the old days it basically amounted to various forms of "putting a picture of a rounded corner" (often a gif) in each of…
And for an authentic contemporaneous example of this technique, here's my website that I designed in 2002 when I was in high school: http://cydeweys.com/archive/
You won't know it from looking at it because you'll only see the rendered static HTML, but that entire site was actually written in C++. Using the AP C++ libraries (yes, that AP).
Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me, if the content is compelling, I'm paying a monthly membership. I expect the multiverse to pay content creators based on how much time I linger in their content. Did HTML / HTTP have a business model? Or were they a platform upon which other things were built?
The business model for HTML/HTTP was and is advertising. People initially tried subscription models for HTML content but it didn't work so everyone went to advertising based models. Observationally, subscription HTML content models have continued to not work (yes, Netflix, but Netflix is more about video content than HTML content).
There was no business model for HTML/HTTP.
It was a set of technologies. Advertising later came to it.
There are tons of subscription models for HTML content that you're ignoring. Patreon, YouTube, online news. Some small, some large.