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A first look at Unreal Engine 5

unrealengine.com

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Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#411

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…

It's say current UE4 games don't match the details of the UE4 demos they showed on release.

I really don't agree with that. Current games look better than the UE4 demo.

See this for the original demo of UE4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD9CPqSKjTU

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#412
post #333
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rounded corners using tables and gifs?

Or by just using Flash. I never did it myself. I know there are plenty of reasons to dislike flash. And I know plenty of people absolutely hated sites created solely using Flash. But I have to admit I enjoyed the creativity I saw on many Flash sites. There a generic sameness to much of the modern web. I know Flash sites were useless for SEO, and probably for accessibility too. So I don't think things are necessarily…

Wasn't the problem with "Flash sites" that it was way way worse than any regular website... as a website? Kinda like SPAs today. You had to reinvent stuff the browser already did perfectly. But as long as you made Flash APPS to be run embedded on websites, it was pretty awesome. Animation, video, etc. No competition, hands down just great tech... until HTML5 caught up.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#413

Wow. It seems like real-time lighting and detail are getting to the point where they're so indistinguishable from reality... ...that now it's the actual quality of the models themselves, and even more of character motion, that are going to have to be the next steps in better graphics. I'm stunned by the lighting and detail, absolutely stunned. But at the same time, especially when you get into the architectural rooms…

All sorts of rendering tricks had to be played before RTX. Now that we have real-time ray tracing, models are becoming more important than shaders (see e.g. Minecraft. It looks like a real world made of Legos - the blocks make it look artificial.)

Maybe once real time photorealism is cracked, we'll move to a completely Newtonian global physics for some games, with some analogue of "atoms" the way RTX models "photons."

I'm not in the industry, this is just something I'm wondering about. What would Minecraft be like if blocks were the size of pixels and the physics were real?

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#415
post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just looking at demoscene, it is possible to create amazing results with very little resources if you have right people and infinite time and resources to polish couple of seconds of it. This rarely transfers to a product that has a lot of content to be built, an actual budget, good but not star developers and conflicting requirements.

Is Unreal Engine at all related to Future Crew's Unreal in 1992?

Who knows, they had a hard time coming up with the name.

https://web.archive.org/web/20010814190955/http://www.gamesp...

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#416
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…

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.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#417
The tech here is impressive but so is the content they have created or it. Even more so. It's kind of insane that game art isn't usually given the credit it deserves. Everyone seems to think that the engine just produces these images somehow. Look, the artists had to actually design all this architecture and statues etc. It's not an easier job than actually being an architect... Producing content at such level of detail is very expensive and time-consuming and it just doesn't come automatically with the engine.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#418

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,…

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…

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.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#419

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,…

I'm mostly concerned about the storage and bandwidth issues associated with this level of detail. Are we going to download 500GB games on our Playstation 5s?

Gears of War with updates is 250G, so yeah, looks like it.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude I spent a large portion of my early career as a web developer making rounded corners on divs using all sorts of kludges

Better or worse kludges than this one? http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/roundy.html

Well I just discovered this 11 year old Firefox bug due to that page

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477157

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