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A first look at Unreal Engine 5

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Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#601

Post by lmilcin »

thu2111 wrote: post #599
jfkebwjsbx wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason behind demos looking so good is the fact that there is no input, no gameplay and no need for a toolset for designers and artists.

That doesn't seem fair in this case. The demo has input. The video shows them modifying the world at several points, it's not on rails. It's more like a mini game (except maybe at the end). UE's game creation tools are very good. The toolset is a huge part of their value prop. And this demo is very explicit in focusing on the fact that artists can now use movie-level tools instead of needing to spend a lot of time on…

No, it is fair in my view.

The person that shows the demo can for example choose to move and look and perform actions that are known to not cause performance trouble.

In a game a lot of unpredictable stuff can happen (for example, a bunch of people can cast a spell or drop a grenade at exactly same time). Or you may decide to quickly turn around causing a bunch of texture and geometry data to be loaded.

Game must take it into account and make sure the performance is acceptable with whatever input is allowed and lots of action around and not only when the guy walks slowly in a straight path and slowly pans around.

It doesn't mean it happens in this case but AFAIK it is fair to say that most engine demoes are put together to highlight strengths and hid weaknesses of the engine.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#602

Post by thu2111 »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #545
twoquestions wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes but isn't that obvious? Based on the quick talk at the start I didn't go into this video expecting literally everything to be photo realistic. The developers were quite clear that the two big things they wanted to demo were:

1. Better real-time global illumination

2. Ultra high poly models

Then they also briefly focused on a few other features, mostly ones that they already shipped. The Lara Croft adventure scenario was an excellent choice to let them show their new work off in a context with many sudden lighting changes, naturalistic assets, arbitrary changes in scene geometry, huge changes in horizon distance and other things that have historically been difficult for real time engines due to their reliance on very CPU intensive pre-processing passes to build static data structures.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#603

Post by waltpad »

anchpop wrote: post #452
waltpad wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that this game doesn't actually take in account all the seemingly existing light sources when computing the shadows: see for instance at around 7:45, there is an obvious light source in the bottom right region (actually a bunch of synchronized pulsating lights on some sort of cylinders) which clearly should affect the surfaces close to it, but it doesn't in either mode! In the next comparison, there's…

Current games that use raytracing often only use it for 1 light. For example, Metro Exodus only uses it for the sun. This means parts that take place underground look virtually identical with or without RT turned on. It's possible that they do the same thing in this game

Oh, I see. Wouldn't that make sense that each surface would be associated with its closest light source? It's still a rough approximation, but I guess it's better than one global light source?

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#604

Post by thu2111 »

airstrike wrote: post #221
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,…

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?

Presumably at some point the standard model for games will be streaming as you play.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#605

Post by nailer »

cdolan wrote: post #378
nailer wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say the Halo 5 video is better, but it's likely due to the artist.

The artist at Epic using UE5 didnt do the best job on the water, you mean?

Yes.

- The UE5 demo is showing off the deformation in the water but has a poor quality material that looks a bit like blue hair gel.

- Halo doesn't have any deformation, just a really lovely material.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#606

Post by dmos62 »

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 agree. Many projects seem to spend so much resources on graphics, which are getting quite impressive (not photoreal, though who cares), but game mechanics aren't getting better. Netcode has improved, allowing for more variety in multiplayer experiences, but other than that I get a sense of a game-mechanics winter.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#607

Post by dtech »

trynewideas wrote: post #575
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…

That video's amazing because the part of the UE5 demo I can't wrap my head around is where Nanite magically turns 1 billion triangles of source art to 20 million triangles of rendered art, per frame. And then I get a minute into the UE3 video from 2004 and what do I hear? "The scene you're seeing here is about 1 million polygons of in-game assets, which came from about 200 million polygons of source art." Then, deja…

> And then I get a minute into the UE3 video from 2004 and what do I hear? "The scene you're seeing here is about 1 million polygons of in-game assets, which came from about 200 million polygons of source art."

I know little about game development so might be wrong, but I think what that 2004 demo means is they had a 200M art asset geometry which was pre-rendered/transformed into a 1M in-game asset. This kind of reduction has been the standard for decades.

What they are indicating in this UE5 demo is that the engine dynamically adjusts the LoD of the source geometry so the engine can render it, the engine directly uses the art asset.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#609

Post by kriro »

I haven't looked into UE in quite some time as I use Unity for most of my stuff (not a game developer, just building quick prototypes for AI, simulations, dabbling in AR etc.) but the demo looks pretty stunning.

I tend to do a technology pass once a year or so to see if I might enjoy switching engines. From my last check my takeaway was that UE always seems more technically advanced but Unity is easier to work with/rapidly prototype. UE now seems to have a 1 million revenue barrier (I think for Unity it's 100k) which seems attractive for game devs. As a programmer the inclusion of ProBuilder/Grids in Unity is a godsent as I can quickly muddle together greyboxings and be done with graphics (combined with the recent Blender overhaul I almost feel like I'm semi-useful on the graphics/asset front now).

So quick question to the people who have used both (I'd also be interested in Godot feedback)...is that basic assessment still correct? Unity stronger for quicker prototyping, Unreal stronger high end? If I wasn't one person but a small team with an artist I'd probably pick UE as the artists will likely use their own tools and not build stuff in-engine.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#610

Post by capableweb »

leonfs wrote: post #608

Does anyone know in what language was the engine developed? Is it still C++?

You can access the source code via GitHub if you follow these steps: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ue4-on-github

Did a quick `cloc` run of the codebase, shows the following:

    github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.84  T=86.60 s (949.0 files/s, 297044.5 lines/s)
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Language                             files          blank        comment           code
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    C++                                  20720        1622066        1102650        7943910
    C/C++ Header                         46048        1443245        2403181        5914335
    C                                     3123         311091         384178        1319332
    Python                                2625         164396         219571         693345
    C#                                    2587          71616          99526         472242
    XML                                   1429           4589           4985         420621
    HTML                                   518           9623           1370         124409
    MSBuild script                         225             10            551         122808
    JSON                                   231             59              0         122326
    CMake                                 1655          18686          38278          97625
    Bourne Shell                           348          11335          15567          69747
    Objective C                            351          12507          15181          59608
    Objective C++                          124           7159           3992          34551
    Expect                                  20           3889             46          32132
    INI                                    341           5658           1719          27645
    make                                   682           9220          13527          25996
    Markdown                               156           7829              0          25333
    Windows Module Definition              145           1871            144          23754
    CSS                                     32           2699            553          23212
    Java                                   102           3035           3832          18332
    Pascal                                  15            798          26566          15507
    JavaScript                             103           2125           2208          15486
    Perl                                    76           2253           2218          11634
    HLSL                                   123           2518           3934          10942
    DOS Batch                              238           2492           1080           7361
    TypeScript                              32           1550            983           6242
    Windows Resource File                   70           1013           1348           3628
    GLSL                                    38            685            487           2994
    XAML                                    13            201             87           2861
    ASP.NET                                  7            538              7           2687
    Ant                                      4             54            216            799
    SAS                                      1             14             22             32
    Bourne Again Shell                       1              0              0              9
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    SUM:                                 82183        3724824        4348007       17651445
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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