Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gorgeous Unreal Engine 4 brings direct programming, indirect lighting

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 92 posts

Re: Gorgeous Unreal Engine 4 brings direct programming, indirect lighting

#41

Post by malexw »

psykotic wrote: post #26
malexw wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read Jason Gregory's "Game Engine Architecture" cover-to-cover and I'd highly recommend it for someone new to the industry who's interested in learning about game development. Gregory is a developer at Naughty Dog (Uncharted series). http://www.amazon.com/Game-Engine-Architecture-Jason-Gregory...

Indeed. Having been in the game industry for close to a decade now (apropos of this thread, my first job was at Epic Games as an engine programmer working on UE2 and UE3), I can't say I personally learned a lot from Gregory's book (outside of some tidbits on character animation, where the book is especially strong), but I can say that it's the best book on the subject I've read. An older book like Eberly's 3D Game En…

It seems that each time I come back and read your comment, you've added a new recommendation. Awesome!

That Real-Time Collision Detection book sounds particularly interesting to me. I had resigned myself to just using Bullet in the toy engine I'm working on since I couldn't find any good resources on the subject. I'll check that out!

The only book you're missing is the one that explains how to get your foot in the door ;)

Re: Gorgeous Unreal Engine 4 brings direct programming, indirect lighting

#42

Post by asianexpress »

In a way, this system reminds me of Light Table[1] in its ability to change some code/settings and get instant feedback. It totally changes the way people create content because it becomes so much more accessible and so much faster to see changes -- you can play around with a lot of different approaches more quickly, resulting in more room for experimentation.

Pretty amazing stuff! Really curious to see the tools that power all of this, as well as hear the architect's (or architects') vision for all of this

[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table

Re: Gorgeous Unreal Engine 4 brings direct programming, indirect lighting

#43

Post by MartinCron »

daenz wrote: post #30
wmf wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting back to UE4, if its lights behave more like real-world lights it may allow game artists to translate real-world lighting knowledge into games or let them spend less time working around kinks in the engine.

Definitely true. We draw our experience on lights from the real world, so the closer an engine is to the real world, the faster the artists can prototype and test lighting setups.

As a still photographer who sometimes works with multiple off-camera lights (strobist-style) I would love to be able to experiment in software to see a very close approximation of how a setup would look.

Re: Gorgeous Unreal Engine 4 brings direct programming, indirect lighting

#45

Post by photon137 »

dualogy wrote: post #39

Incredibly stunning tech. Now, I'm gonna go fantasize about an open-source version of this with updates every month (instead of every 3 years) -- as a compromise, I could do without the whole hot-reloading IntelliEditor shebang and consoles support -- a concentration on PC hardware that "will be commodity in 2 years, on mobile in 4 years, but can already be bought as state of the art now" (aka Kepler GPUs) would be e…

Some branch of the GPL'ed idTech 4, I suppose?

Back in the day, OGRE, Crystal Space and Irrlicht used to be the dominant FOSS ones.

Crystal Space is a bit outdated now. Irrlicht is stuck at DX 9.0 and OpenGL 3.x

OGRE seems the most likely candidate (ie the project is the most active and has been for years). Although it is also stuck at SM 3.0 - so no geometry shaders or access to the compute pipeline.

I am likely to be missing out on some other engines here.

Re: Gorgeous Unreal Engine 4 brings direct programming, indirect lighting

#46

Post by dualogy »

dualogy wrote: post #39

Incredibly stunning tech. Now, I'm gonna go fantasize about an open-source version of this with updates every month (instead of every 3 years) -- as a compromise, I could do without the whole hot-reloading IntelliEditor shebang and consoles support -- a concentration on PC hardware that "will be commodity in 2 years, on mobile in 4 years, but can already be bought as state of the art now" (aka Kepler GPUs) would be e…

Also I'm wondering about the lighting. Some folks on Twitter called it dynamic Global Illumination but here they just call it indirect lighting. I wonder -- are they still using an ambient light? More specifically, what's their GI algorithm? Might be something like the voxel approach sported by @icare3D but then it seems that one's just barely interactive, not as "real-time" as this stuff -- or well it might be on a GTX680 with a really-lo-res voxelization.

Re: Gorgeous Unreal Engine 4 brings direct programming, indirect lighting

#47

Post by dkersten »

dualogy wrote: post #39

Incredibly stunning tech. Now, I'm gonna go fantasize about an open-source version of this with updates every month (instead of every 3 years) -- as a compromise, I could do without the whole hot-reloading IntelliEditor shebang and consoles support -- a concentration on PC hardware that "will be commodity in 2 years, on mobile in 4 years, but can already be bought as state of the art now" (aka Kepler GPUs) would be e…

the whole hot-reloading IntelliEditor shebang

As a programmer, I find this much more compelling than the graphical improvements.

Re: Gorgeous Unreal Engine 4 brings direct programming, indirect lighting

#48

Post by dualogy »

dkersten wrote: post #47
dualogy wrote: post #39

Incredibly stunning tech. Now, I'm gonna go fantasize about an open-source version of this with updates every month (instead of every 3 years) -- as a compromise, I could do without the whole hot-reloading IntelliEditor shebang and consoles support -- a concentration on PC hardware that "will be commodity in 2 years, on mobile in 4 years, but can already be bought as state of the art now" (aka Kepler GPUs) would be e…

the whole hot-reloading IntelliEditor shebang As a programmer, I find this much more compelling than the graphical improvements.

I agree it's incredibly neat -- but let's say I'm just personally most interested in the core engine side of things -- much less a however-advanced "Game Studio" of sorts. Is it compelling -- you bet.

Re: Gorgeous Unreal Engine 4 brings direct programming, indirect lighting

#49

Post by azakai »

photon137 wrote: post #45
dualogy wrote: post #39

Incredibly stunning tech. Now, I'm gonna go fantasize about an open-source version of this with updates every month (instead of every 3 years) -- as a compromise, I could do without the whole hot-reloading IntelliEditor shebang and consoles support -- a concentration on PC hardware that "will be commodity in 2 years, on mobile in 4 years, but can already be bought as state of the art now" (aka Kepler GPUs) would be e…

Some branch of the GPL'ed idTech 4, I suppose? Back in the day, OGRE, Crystal Space and Irrlicht used to be the dominant FOSS ones. Crystal Space is a bit outdated now. Irrlicht is stuck at DX 9.0 and OpenGL 3.x OGRE seems the most likely candidate (ie the project is the most active and has been for years). Although it is also stuck at SM 3.0 - so no geometry shaders or access to the compute pipeline. I am likely to…

Sauerbraten has an experimental branch called Tesseract

http://cubeengine.com/forum.php4?action=display_thread&t... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkFT1ra2w-A

Deferred shading, realtime lighting, etc. etc. Also it has the Sauerbraten in-game editor (like Unreal is getting).

Probably the best complete open source game engine out there. And it's zlib (unlike the id Techs which are GPL).

Re: Gorgeous Unreal Engine 4 brings direct programming, indirect lighting

#50

Post by luiperd »

alainbryden wrote: post #18
augustl wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been looking for a source on what hardware this demo ran on, where did you figure that out?

It's mentioned in the parent article: > You're going to need the latest hardware to get access to all that graphical power, though. The demo we saw was running on a top-of-the-line NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 graphics card, and we were told explicitly that the engine was currently being targeted for the next generation of console hardware rather than the Xbox 360 and PS3

I wonder how well this'll run on the GTX 570 (or two of 'em). Wish they'd release a demo for people to play with.
Post reply on HN