A first look at Unreal Engine 5 • Hacker News Board

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#541

Post by lasagnaphil » Thu, May 14, 2020, 2:40 AM UTC

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…

However I see the new features in this particular demo as a game changer in many practical ways other than just eyecandy:

- Realtime dynamic GI makes baking lights unnecessary, increasing iteration time for environment artists.

- Also using this dynamic GI it is possible to create new gameplay mechanics based on dynamic lighting (for example in the demo the roof of the cave falls down and the area becomes lit, making more things visible)

- The new animation system makes developers able to create natural motions that automatically adjust to the environment, which would also save a lot of developer time.

- The demo explanation video mentions that the statue model assets are imported directly from ZBrush without any postprocessing (with the original triangle count, without baking any normal maps/LODs), which also saves time for artists importing their work to Unreal (although the file size costs might probably be a bit high to practically use this in every scenario)

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#542

Post by bane » Thu, May 14, 2020, 2:42 AM UTC

pas wrote: post #415

mycall wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

No. However, the original Unreal game had some well known demosceners providing the music.

- Andrew Sega in particular was a particularly famous scene musician who went under the name "Necros" and is about as legendary as you can get for people who weren't part of the Future Crew team who made Unreal.

- Alexander Brandon (Siren) is still in the game industry and has done soundtracks for a ton of really well known games such as Jazz Jackrabbit.

- Daniel Gardopée went by Basehead and was part of FM and the KFMF demo groups (both big deals at the time) and I think is still in gaming.

- Michiel van den Bos (MCA) is the only non-American scener (Dutch) who provided music and is also still in gaming.

At the time it was kind of funny and completely cool to fire up Unreal and hear some well known Necros, Basehead, and Siren songs in the game which had been circulating in BBS and early demoscene ftp sites for a while.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_(1998_video_game)#Audio

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#543

Post by jfkebwjsbx » Thu, May 14, 2020, 2:48 AM UTC

sterlind wrote: post #413

crazygringo wrote: post #408

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.…

What you are suggesting are called voxel engines, and there have been a lot of attempts at them, none close to success.

There is no way we can simulate physics at the level you suggest for real-time games, not even in a hundred years. Unless you achieve a breakthrough in fundamental physics which would have an impact in every aspect of life, not just games.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#544

Post by samplatt » Thu, May 14, 2020, 2:49 AM UTC

Krasnol wrote: post #245

Lorin wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CIG's customizations to the Lumberyard engine have been pretty impressive - believe they're working on SDF now

Yeah it looks nice but the price is that it's broken everywhere else and will probably be overtaken by newer engines until it reaches a release. That is...if it ever does. Otherwise, not many games made it to release on that engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Lumberyard

Lumberyard is targeted by MMO's due to Amazon's content delivery network abilities... and MMO's are the biggest genre to fail before during and after release, purely because of their scope and difficulty to pull it off "right".

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#545

Post by SAI_Peregrinus » Thu, May 14, 2020, 2:55 AM UTC

twoquestions wrote: post #398

Shivetya wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the water effects just after the four minute mark looked odd. while the fixed assets like the statues and such later on looked great. however I kept going back to the water and questioning some of the lighting effects too. don't get me wrong, the fixed assets look amazing and I look forward to seeing more done with this system

It's not so much that the water looked off (which it did compared to the rock), it's that the character was completely unencumbered by the water. If you're walking through ankle-deep water, your feet are going to slow down as they drag through the water and go faster through air, and the character's stride didn't account for the increased drag. It'd be the same as if you put that super-realistic character in a styliz…

That and the climbing scene. As a climber there's no way to do that in those boots! Or, given the apparent story context, to do it that fast: nearly speed-climbing for an on-sight just doesn't look right. And her body movement for it was all wrong.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#546

Post by grogenaut » Thu, May 14, 2020, 3:11 AM UTC

tekknik wrote: post #525

wolco wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not open source in any sense. You can see it so that part is shared but if you try to use it you fall under a very different licease. If you try to modify and sell you can't. Modify and use you must pay. Use you must pay. Bait open source might be a better term.

This isn’t true, they encourage you to run source builds instead of the editor and you are free to modify the engine for your projects as needed. In fact they’re even generous enough to allow you to post up to 30 lines of engine code in public forums. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/publishing

that in no way makes it "open source" in the common use of the term.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#547

Post by arminiusreturns » Thu, May 14, 2020, 3:18 AM UTC

Pfhreak wrote: post #491

arminiusreturns wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 asked for fiascos, not negatives. I think it's absolutely fair to be critical or disagree with the approaches of Epic. It's one thing to say they made a decision you thought was wrong, it's another thing to call them a 'fiasco', that's all.

What you may consider a problem I may consider a fiasco. It's a very subjective term.

fiasco: a complete failure, bomb, bummer, bust, catastrophe, clinker, clunker, debacle (also débâcle), disaster, dud, failure, fizzle, flop, frost, lemon, loser, miss, shipwreck, turkey, washout

What I've said was searchable. Please excuse me if I didn't feel like spending an hour on a single comment. If you want to know you can find the truth of what I've said.

> Epic buying games and removing support for systems?

I already told you about these. "(Shenmue 3, Outer Wilds, Pheonix Point)" Also some of the issues with such a large investment from a Chinese company "Tencent" seem rather obvious to me at this point, and to insinuate it's a sort of sinophobia just reeks of intellectual disingenuousness.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#548

Post by arminiusreturns » Thu, May 14, 2020, 3:38 AM UTC

Pfhreak wrote: post #493

fartcannon wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

First, not 'his'. Second, I explicitly asked for evidence of any of the concerns, as many of the claims either didn't raise a specific concern (e.g. Tencent ownership) or didn't seem to be corroborated by evidence (e.g. Epic buying studios to pull their games off steam). I'll ask you the same, can you provide examples of Epic buying games and removing support for systems? The only example I can find is Rocket League,…

You did not "explicitly ask[...] for evidence of any of the concerns".

"I'm trying to think of others, maybe you could expand a bit?"

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#549

Post by sterlind » Thu, May 14, 2020, 3:41 AM UTC

jfkebwjsbx wrote: post #543

sterlind wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

What you are suggesting are called voxel engines, and there have been a lot of attempts at them, none close to success. There is no way we can simulate physics at the level you suggest for real-time games, not even in a hundred years. Unless you achieve a breakthrough in fundamental physics which would have an impact in every aspect of life, not just games.

Thanks, I didn't know what they were called!

There must be some granularity at which voxel engines can work smoothly today. Let's say my room is a square with 320 pixels on each side. 320^3 = 32,768,000 voxels, which looks like a lot, but an RTX 2080 can render 17 billion triangles per second, which works out to 273 million per frame at 60fps.

Let's ignore gravity and focus on momentum vectors and collisions. Even if simulating physics for each voxel were 10x slower than rendering a triangle, you could do 320^3 voxels in 60fps on today's hardware.

And this is naive, assuming you can't merge neighboring voxels together! I think you're being unfairly pessimistic.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#550

Post by sterlind » Thu, May 14, 2020, 3:49 AM UTC

zamalek wrote: post #504

sterlind wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> 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." There is an extreme amount of doubt about whether the tech is real (myself included). These people have promised the world, have incredible videos, but have nothing to show in terms of a demo you can download and run yourself. Still, they claim…

Holy shit, wow! I hear you on the skepticism, but did you notice how the vehicles shimmer during some of the editing? I think think they're optimizing by joining adjacent voxels together until they're deleted, at which point they get replaced with new polys, and it causes a ripple effect.

That type of detail suggests to me that it's a real (clunky) demo, but maybe it's running slower than advertised.

I can also understand not releasing a demo.. the code would be too valuable to risk reverse engineers.