A first look at Unreal Engine 5 • Hacker News Board

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#641

Post by jhrmnn » Thu, May 14, 2020, 12:57 PM UTC

sterlind wrote: post #549

jfkebwjsbx wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you need to discretize time very finely to have believable collisiom physics. So it’s orders of magnitude more than 10x.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#642

Post by fluffything » Thu, May 14, 2020, 12:57 PM UTC

rsp1984 wrote: post #613

trynewideas wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. I was wondering about that too. My best guess is that they put the heavy geometry items in an acceleration data structure and then ray trace / cone trace these in a first pass to get the points where the camera rays inte…

In the video they mention that the "heavy geometry" you are talking about is 100s of billions of triangles. Storing 1 billion triangles using 32-bit floats takes ~12 Gb, so we are talking about N * 12 Tbs only in triangle storage for this demo. Building an acceleration data-structure on top of this would also take up a lot of storage, so I don't think how you can make this approach successful on a PS5 with limited GPU memory.

To me this tech sounds more like they finally figured out all the quirks around how to properly construct "seamless geometry atlasses" (geometry images) and reconstruct geometry from them, and managed to bring that to production. It required quite a bit of compute, and there were also a lot of quirks about how to automatically "cut" an input geometry so that you can put it in a 2D image, how to compress and decompress the image or parts of it without artifacts (such that you don't get jumps across triangles), etc.

That approach doesn't store any triangles, but a 2D xyz (rgb) image that you can use to reconstruct the original geometry from, and to which you can apply all usual image compression algorithms, use all GPU texture features (but for geometry), etc.

That's ~15 year old tech, and they mention they have been working on this for over 10 years, so timeline-wise it would fit (search for geometry images, texture atlasses, etc. there was a siggraph talk from ~2005 about wavelet compression of geometry images).

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#643

Post by revel » Thu, May 14, 2020, 1:11 PM UTC

I remember seeing Mario 64 and thinking "this is it, graphics can't get any better than this"

My tiny, 12 year old, N64-powered brain would explode watching this video

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#644

Post by ahaferburg » Thu, May 14, 2020, 1:13 PM UTC

fluffything wrote: post #642

rsp1984 wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. I was wondering about that too. My best guess is that they put the heavy geometry items in an acceleration data structure and then ray trace / cone trace these in a first pass to get the points where the camera rays inte…

In the video they mention that the "heavy geometry" you are talking about is 100s of billions of triangles. Storing 1 billion triangles using 32-bit floats takes ~12 Gb, so we are talking about N * 12 Tbs only in triangle storage for this demo. Building an acceleration data-structure on top of this would also take up a lot of storage, so I don't think how you can make this approach successful on a PS5 with limited GP…

It's quite possible that they make heavy use of instancing, which might reduce the memory footprint by a lot. Not every pebble or rock needs an individual geometry.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#645

Post by fluffything » Thu, May 14, 2020, 1:24 PM UTC

ahaferburg wrote: post #644

fluffything wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the video they mention that the "heavy geometry" you are talking about is 100s of billions of triangles. Storing 1 billion triangles using 32-bit floats takes ~12 Gb, so we are talking about N * 12 Tbs only in triangle storage for this demo. Building an acceleration data-structure on top of this would also take up a lot of storage, so I don't think how you can make this approach successful on a PS5 with limited GP…

It's quite possible that they make heavy use of instancing, which might reduce the memory footprint by a lot. Not every pebble or rock needs an individual geometry.

From the video it sounded to me that the 100s billions of triangles were from single instance geometry. The models they mention in the video are in the ball park of >1 billion triangles each (that's 12 Gb per model). So if they have 100 models of that resolution, that's 12 Tbs, and whether they instance each model 1 or 100 times doesn't matter much because the problem of having to fit those 12 Tb in triangles somewhere still remains.

That's why it seems much more plausible to me that they are not storing triangles anywhere, and instead just storing geometry images.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#646

Post by jp555 » Thu, May 14, 2020, 1:46 PM UTC

lmilcin wrote: post #258

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…

Just looking at demoscene, it is possible to create amazing results with very little resources if you have right people and infinite time and resources to polish couple of seconds of it. This rarely transfers to a product that has a lot of content to be built, an actual budget, good but not star developers and conflicting requirements.

Isn’t this like saying movie makers all have access to the same tools but not all movies are great?

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#647

Post by geddy » Thu, May 14, 2020, 2:20 PM UTC

tekknik wrote: post #531

geddy wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can appreciate the technology behind it, but once the graphics in a game (which you play to escape real life) begin to mimic real life, it can feel underwhelming. For instance, a game like Okami on PS2 is far more impressive to me than some 4K tech demo. When it comes down to actually playing a game, I don't give a shit about the polygon count, I give a shit if it's fun to play.

I love some pretty gfx as well, but I have the same feeling. Lately I’ve been finding the simplistic gfx of minecraft and terraria just fine especially given the mechanics are rather deep and enjoyable (for me at least). The simple graphics even add a bit of charm

Same here! Minecraft captured the hearts and minds of nearly every demographic, even with "rudimentary" blocky graphics. Never would have happened it went for realism.

Lately I've been playing this great mountain biking game called Lonely Mountains: Downhill that uses this gorgeous minimalist aesthetic. I'm also playing Trails in the Sky on the PSP. Those graphics just age beautifully.

Sometimes the simpler, the better.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#648

Post by ascagnel_ » Thu, May 14, 2020, 2:20 PM UTC

Krasnol wrote: post #528

ascagnel_ wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lumberyard is a fork of the CryEngine, and quite a few games have shipped on either CryEngine or one of its forks (particularly Dunia, which Ubisoft uses extensively).

So what is the reason the Lumberyard fork is so "unpopular"?

I wouldn't say unpopular, just relatively new. The only games I can think of running that engine haven't released yet -- RSI's Star Citizen and Amazon's Crucible. Star Citizen's long development cycle and various funding sources have been well-documented, and it still lacks a concrete release date; on the other hand, Crucible comes out next week.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#649

Post by pythonaut_16 » Thu, May 14, 2020, 2:28 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #308

simias wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 that Story telling and Game Play is still the top priorities. Look at Nintendo! I enjoy Zelda,( not exactly the best graphics looking game ) more so than most "photorealistic" game in recent years. ( I will also admit I am now a lot older and dont have time for serious gaming ) But still, the graphics in UE5 is stunning. The last time I was stunned by 3D Graphics was Crysis, and that was I think over 10 years…

The Zelda games (and Nintendo in general) are the perfect proof that great graphics are about way more than more sophisticated or technically advanced graphics.

Many games on the Switch look way better than generic AAA games on PS4 and Xbox. Granted the Switch games are still somewhat held back by limited hardware.

Personally I'd take Breath of the Wild over some generic UE4 game any day.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#650

Post by pythonaut_16 » Thu, May 14, 2020, 2:33 PM UTC

uryga wrote: post #533

extesy wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was done on purpose, similar to how Pixar movies have obviously cartoony and unrealistic characters in an otherwise photo-realistic environment.

the problem isn't that her design is a bit stylized; it's that her face looks kind of... not-face-like in closeups. (missing some shininess & subsurface scattering imo). it's different from e.g. Moana, where skin is kind of marzipan-y, but still recognizably skin-like

This is the best way to do graphics IMO. Instead of pushing the tech to its limits and landing in the uncanny valley, it's better to back off a bit from the limits of the tech and perfectly execute a more stylized result.