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A first look at Unreal Engine 5

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Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#441

Post by Jare »

danbolt wrote: post #330
Jare wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall seeing it live in a devkit but I can't for the life of me remember the devkit specs. Note that that demo catered very expertly to the strengths of the PS1 hardware, it should run jut fine in a retail unit.

Yeah, the sort of things pictured in the dinosaur demo don't always match what's seen in retail PS1 games. I'd love to see a dissection of it.

Some things I can think of:

- Dinos were so in vogue and so suggesting of technological innovation. Jurassic Park came out what, 2-3 years earlier?

- Very limited z-sorting requirements, could likely be done with a simple bsp if sorting individual polys proved too taxing.

- Polys of fairly regular dimensions, not overly long in one direction. Helps with less visible sorting and clipping artifacts.

- No problem with lack of perspective correction, because textures are already shimmering due to the organic skin animation.

- That black fog has always been very effective. We love terrifying things emerging from the dark, which Doom3 tech proved again, and more recently VR.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#442

Post by staticassertion »

simias wrote: post #161
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 matt…

I think there's just an obvious law of diminishing returns on certain things.

If you double the number of triangles, it doesn't take long to get to a clean looking circle - the next time you double it, it doesn't look that much better unless you're zooming way in on it.

So there's two things here, I think:

* There are tons of other improvements, like dynamic lighting. This turns into more of an immersion/ realism thing, and less of a "detail" thing. It's weird when your characters shadow doesn't move the way you expect with the light sources, it's weird when one part of the room is totally dark because a block is just slightly in the way of a light source, and the light isn't bouncing around it.

* With VR, this will all matter way more. You're going to have people taking objects in the game and putting them right up to their face - suddenly the difference between X triangles and 2X triangles is really noticeable again, relative to a 3rd person view on a monitor that's at least a foot or two away from you, where objects are always at a distance. Immersion is an extremely important factor for VR, so optimizing there makes a lot of sense.

So while todays mediums may not demonstrate these wins, they open up possibilities for new mediums.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#443

Post by random_ind_dude »

seanwilson wrote: post #119

What's going on behind the scenes to explain the jump in graphics quality? Hardware? Algorithmic? Does this involve some breakthrough somewhere or is this incremental?

The graphics look good because of two things: Quixel and global illumination. Quixel is Swedish company that Epic acquired in 2019. Quixel does high-resolution scans of actual physical objects(photogrammetry) and makes them available as textures in Unreal Engine. The sheer rock faces that you see in the demo are Quixel megascans of actual rocks.

The other thing that makes the graphics look impressive is global illumination, which provides real time dynamic lighting of the environment, instead of baked in (pre-rendered) lighting. The demo seems to only have a single light source - sunlight in the cave, light from the crystal looking thing in her hand while inside the room. I am not sure how well it look like in actual games when there are multiple light sources.

The rest of the stuff doesn't look too different from current gen games.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#444

Post by conradfr »

JorgeGT wrote: post #407
conradfr wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know it. 9 cells tables, slicing your pixel-perfect corners in Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop, exporting as a gif with transparent color. That also reminds of the transparent 1px gif "hack". I'm not that nostalgic about that. Once in a while all that knowledge comes in handy for troubleshooting an email template...

> in Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop That's a weird way of spelling Macromedia Dreamweaver...

Ah. I remember using Dreamweaver 4 a bit, and Fireworks (alpha channel transparency in png ? What is this sorcery?).

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#445

Post by fartcannon »

arminiusreturns wrote: post #336
Pfhreak wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of those are very valid concerns, others don't really seem like fiascos. Paragon: Epic returned all purchases and made all the assets free on their marketplace. That seems like a pretty consumer friendly way to shutter a product that wasn't doing well. Exclusives: Paid exclusivity made games like Satisfactory possible, and I believe that all the exclusives are timed? Making games is expensive and unpredictable,…

You asked for the negatives, but please don't get me wrong. I really like the interface and many of the features of UE, and the tech behind it. It's just a shame I felt forced to move away from it. Also, please keep in mind I'm not the typical person who is trying to get into gamedev on the side, as I'm a RMS loving, linux-only, most of my stack is gpl sorta dude. On the last point, you may be right, I might have bee…

I think you were totally right. His counter-arguement basically boils down to 'so what' which is pretty bad.

Some thing's are more important than others. Buying and removing support for already supported systems is an incredibly anticompetitive move and shouldn't be forgotten.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#446

Post by pjungwir »

artsyca wrote: post #184
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…

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

For a few years around 2001, rounded corners were a big part of hp's branding. I was in a dev shop that maintained part of hp.com, and we had to have them everywhere. I didn't work on their site very often myself, but I think that team must have been experts at rounded rectangles. :-) At the time it was still sort of a cool effect on the web.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#447

Post by andy_ppp »

disease wrote: post #312
waterhouse wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thanks for the flashbacks! I had blacked out any memories of the world before 'border-radius' before seeing that!

And now that it's easy people try to avoid using rounded corners...

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#448

Post by bilekas »

atonse wrote: post #384
ksec wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For movies industry, a lot of the cost are actors and time involved. Having everything filmed with pre made scenes saves you lots of time comparing to green screen back and forth with VFX. Real world location also means lots of travelling.

Traveling with lots of heavy, expensive equipment, setting up, tearing down, then all the unpredictability of outdoor anything (weather, etc). Also one amazing thing was the guy talking about "shooting a 10-hour dawn" – I can imagine a lot of time is wasted trying to recreate a certain time of day. With this, you don't waste that time. You can do as many takes as you need. The sun stays right where it is. Absolutely…

> Also one amazing thing was the guy talking about "shooting a 10-hour dawn"

I watched the whole video on the MAnchurian example, and it sold it obviously for me, but I was only initially thinking of the first demo.

Clearly its hugely beneficial.

What I find interesting is, naughty dog had a bit of a staff turnover for designers and hired film animators (in this case it was a crunch), cgi etc.. Funny how they're now almost cross skillset now. Have to admit, makes me feel older every day.

REF: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-03-14-crunch-once-ag...

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#450

Post by rland »

Priem19 wrote: post #400

While this is completely amazing, a caveat: graphics are way less important than we think it is. I still remember every nook and cranny from Tomb Raider 3's jungle level, and when I think about it I imagine being deep inside a real jungle. It didn't matter that everything looked jagged; my imagination could go wild. This is probably a flawed opinion, but sometimes I think the more realistic games become, the less wor…

I have a sister opinion to this take, which is that artstyle is far more important than graphics, and there is a very important difference between the two that is often ignored by large game studios. \*

Your graphical capability can push a hundred million triangles, but choosing the color, composition, and visual coherence of those triangles is more important to how people interpret your world than anything else. Humans have an extremely attuned visual processor that infers so much about the way the world behaves solely by the way it looks.

The reason that classic games can be immersive despite a low poly count is because the artists have made the visuals behave in a way that is coherent with our internal model of the game world.

An example of this is Portal. The portal gun is an interesting gameplay tool, but the game was able to fully take advantage of it because the artstyle of the game was very tightly coupled with the mechanics. They did a great job of making sure that the visual environment offered clues to how the game mechanics worked, which made it so easy for people to quickly grasp how the portal gun operated in complex environments. Had the artists failed, Portal would have been "oh yeah, I remember that game -- the portal gun was a neat gimmick but it felt clunky."

The easy way out is to just try to make your environments and game mechanics as realistic as possible, essentially borrowing that creation of intuition from the real world. But the most creative games have worlds whose completely novel or alien mechanics are coupled with art direction that preserves this coherence, which makes the world just "click." Putting more triangles on screen makes for much prettier art, but the true substance of a game is something completely different.

\* not on purpose; it's just extremely difficult to pull off.

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