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A first look at Unreal Engine 5

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Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#661

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That was my first thought- it's a shame all we have to interact with such a complex, richly rendered world is a couple of analog sticks and some buttons.

Well, Microsoft tried the Kinect, but it wasn't popular.

Hand control doesn't make sense without being able to see it in your hand and conversely VR is pretty much a gimmick until they added high fidelity hand tracking (Talking Vive/Rift level).

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#662

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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 under…

It's possible that it's an async compute task, which could potentially miss a frame and show old data (instead of the whole frame missing vsync). Also this demo is supposed to be running on a PS5 devkit, which means that you'd need a devkit to run it, which means that you'd need to sign NDAs and join their developer programs and whatnot. Having worked with current gen consoles (meaning I can't go into any amount of d…

The link I shared wasn't UE5, and their other videos specifically indicate that they are running on PC - unbelievably modest PC hardware at that.

> it's not a trivial thing to get a demo like this running well on PCs

This old tired argument.

The current theory for how the meshing is done is something similar to mesh shaders (available on commodity PC hardware since 2018)[1]. This "PS5 platform specific feature" running on PC in 2018[2].

As for the lighting, NVDIA have already had this "platform specific feature" on PCs for some time now. It's called RTX. In 2018[3] (using DLSS), in 2020[4] (no apparent DLSS usage, but it may have improved).

Both next-gen consoles are essentially PCs. Their primary advantage is tightly coupled hardware (e.g. memory latency, the absurdly fast PS5 SSD). While dedicated raytracing silicon on AMD is currently unique to PS5 (AMD claims they can emulate DXRT on Navi), it has been around for more than a year in consumer hands in the form RTX.

[1]: https://devblogs.nvidia.com/introduction-turing-mesh-shaders... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRfZYJ_sk5E [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkhBlmKtEAk [4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2744rWPvNuE

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#663

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> To my knowledge that tech demo was never incorporated into the engine and never shipped. I'm not sure when it shipped (it certainly may have not launched with the first version of the engine), but it is currently called "Light Propagation Volumes."

> I'm not sure when it shipped (it certainly may have not launched with the first version of the engine), but it is currently called "Light Propagation Volumes." That's actually a different things. Light Propagation Volumes (LPV) is real-time global illumination first used in Cryengine 3 in 2009. http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2009/Light_Propagatio... SVOGI (Sparse Voxel Octree Global Illumination) which is f…

You're right, I got my wires crossed.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#665
post #618

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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 -------------------------------------------…

Is that for UE4 or UE5? In any case, thanks for the reply.

Not sure, the git remote is `git@github.com:EpicGames/UnrealEngine.git` and the commit at the time I run cloc was `f8f4b403eb682ffc055613c7caf9d2ba5df7f319` which is the head of the `release` branch.

But, if UE4 was/is mainly, you can expect UE5 to follow the same path, they are not gonna rewrite 20720 files into a different language just for fun.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#666

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No details yet, but hopefully that will follow soon. I don’t think the SSD but rather the GPU would be doing the tesselation... Here is a good presentation on micropolygon rendering (note: nothing says nanite works like this at all): https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15418-s12/www/l...

> I don’t think the SSD but rather the GPU would be doing the tesselation... Ha, I phrased that badly. I meant that, if the high-poly models can't all be stored in VRAM at once, is the SSD fast enough to load them back onto the GPU every frame?

If the tesselation is performed on the GPU (surfaces uploaded to GPU in some non-triangle representation e.g image geometry/SDFs/patches) then I don’t think it’s ever viable to have the tesselated triangles loaded back from GPU memory even to RAM (never mind disk). This isn’t a lot of data. 2 triangles/1 vertex per pixel is just 8K triangles and 4K vertices every frame, that can be overwritten each frame. This is tiny. It’s <1MB!

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#667

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That's not entirelly true, there are for instance Python bindings, and I think some work exists on bindings for other languages. I just think they don't always have a lot of support until a case exists where it ends up being really valuable. Film studios in the case of Python. https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/PythonAPI/introduction.h...

Unreal's Python integration is incredible. I made some modifications to it at work to run a version of WinPython (both for loose scripts outside the engine and pip access) It's great for complex asset pipelines and quick one-off editor scripts, at least in my experience. The only thing that felt a bit wonky to me was attempting to use bitflag enums.

That's actually good to hear. I haven't used it, but it seems that it's important for some clients!

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#668
post #319

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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…

I was about to weigh in on how 9-slicing is absolutely a valid strategy for UI components, and give you an example from my professional work, only to realize that I can't think of a single example that wasn't, "hack around some library that doesn't have border-radius". I'll be glad for the day when 9-slice is a truly obscure technique.

I haven't seen it on the web for literally a decade, but I think… Android might use it still?

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#669
post #529

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Look up E3 game demo's and their launched comparison on YouTube. You'll learn all the game trailers with 'real game play footage' are all fake. The whole industry is filled this.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/09/12

What a classic :) I was working at EA Tiburon when this came out (not on the Madden team). Good times.
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