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Unreal Engine 4.11 Released

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Re: Unreal Engine 4.11 Released

#71

Post by Keyframe »

hacker_9 wrote: post #67
jmatthews wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing your own engine, when you intend to make a game is a black hole where many many projects go to die. Implementing a cross platform modern game engine is perhaps a single step below writing an operating system from scratch. Source- I've written 3 feature rich, but not feature complete, game engines over the last 25 years.

Writing an 'engine' is just good code reuse - as I build my game I have 2 separate groups of projects: one is for the engine where I put generic game tools such as model loading, input handling etc - and the other group of projects is my game logic which contain specific jobs and tasks my AI perform in-game for example. When new engine features come out, FXAA for example, it's mainly just a case of finding it online…

I both agree and disagree with you. It's certainly possible to write an engine by jury-rigging stuff you find online/in books around, but that will not lead you far. Modern graphics approach is not even possible anymore with elementary knowledge of trigonometry. You can't do anything complex if you don't have, at least, a basic grasp of calculus. It is just not possible anymore. And, on top of that, you have to be able to parse modern research in graphics in order to understand what is going on and why and then implement that. Most of modern rendering approaches lie on the shoulders of this great paper: https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/veach_thesis/thesis.pdf but they have since built upon that. You have to keep at it, new stuff is always brought to light, and you have to know both how and why. It's a task that needs special attention, a lot of it, and you still have a game to write - which is a large task in itself. So, my takeaway is that it's great to outsource that large of a task to Unreal/Cryengine/Unity/whatever and concentrate on game design and mechanics itself. Unless, you enjoy writing graphics engines/renderers (I wrote a couple over the years, and used in production. I wouldn't do that again.). Other thing is if you want to do something special, not possible with what's available - streamlining performance for certain cases, some special technique, etc.

One other benefit, apart from outsourcing, is that there's now a large pool of people using the same system. So, you're not working in isolation anymore and you can ask for help when you get stuck - and stuck you will get.

Re: Unreal Engine 4.11 Released

#72

Post by liquidise »

The depth of these notes, both in verbosity and sheer number of line items, are of a scale i'd expect from a major OS release. The fact that UE is managing these "minor" releases on a regular (and relatively rapid) cadence leaves me baffled about the process they have in place.

A bit of perspective:

  bullet points in patch notes: 2625
  weekdays since last "minor" release: 100
  bullets per day: 26
I don't know how big their team is, but there are days when i don't code 26 lines. The prospect of releasing that many bug fixes and large features is simply astounding.

Re: Unreal Engine 4.11 Released

#73

Post by iamcreasy »

spyder wrote: post #41
mrec wrote: post #18

Holy crap, the "New Realistic Eye Shading" is insane: The shading model approximates subsurface scattering through the sclera, caustics on the iris and specular on the wet layer. To be used in conjunction with the provided eye material and eyeball geometry. Together these additionally model the refraction through the cornea, darkening of the limbal ring, with controls for dilating the pupils. In realtime 3d games. Th…

Here is the video about it: https://youtu.be/toLJh5nnJA8?t=2774

Now they only need their subsurface scattering to get better. Despite a lots of improvements it still looks like plastic.

Re: Unreal Engine 4.11 Released

#74

Post by magicalist »

redtuesday wrote: post #17

It's interesting that Unreal releases end up always on the front page, but when Crytek released the source code of Cryengine 5 for free ~3 weeks ago [1] (with DX12, official C# bindings, volumetric clouds, no royalties, even better renderer, VR support for all major VR headsets, Python scriptable editor based on QT, a humble bundle including Ryse assets etc.) it didn't even scratch the front page. I know most people…

In addition to the other responses you got, don't underestimate the power of presentation of content.

Even as someone who is stuck at the "I should really do something with Unreal one of these days" level, there's a ton in this post for me to read and easily grasp about the changes they made. Even smaller features have enough about them I can speculate about the changes that had to be made under the hood to enable them, and what I could do with them if I ever actually followed through on trying Unreal out. The screenshots are particularly nice.

Another great example of this sort of thing is the Dolphin progress reports.

It seems a little silly (it's just extended descriptions and some screenshots), but the effect is real and the effort needed is just often not made because those closest to a project either don't see the need because they're so close, or are exhausted from pushing a major release of the project so just don't have the time or energy to put into a good post about the release.

So, for example, the Cryengine 5 release post is about a major development and there's plenty to discuss there, but there's not a ton of substance to the post, and it's certainly not very engaging for anyone not in the thick of the industry (and maybe not even for them).

Re: Unreal Engine 4.11 Released

#75

Post by iamcreasy »

hacker_9 wrote: post #44
Keyframe wrote: post #33

If anyone told me 10 years ago that Unreal and CryEngine would be, for all practical purposes, free... It's wonderful time to be a gamedev (tech-wise), I presume. Writing your own graphics engine now seems to be more in line if you really enjoy writing your engine more than the game itself - or if you really want to do something you can't do easily with engines available.

Graphics engines aren't particularly hard to write though once you grep the shader pipeline, as many/all of the latest effects are available for free online (FXAA, HDR, Deferred Lighting etc), though an engine will nicely package them together for you in a ready to use fashion. The biggest problem with this pre-packaged software is when something ultimately goes wrong, which it always does. Then you find yourself dig…

> Unreal blueprints for example are a nightmare once you add a decent amount of functionality as per the law that visual programming does not scale.

Could you please elaborate on this one? Do you have first hand experience?

Re: Unreal Engine 4.11 Released

#76

Post by magicalist »

spyder wrote: post #41
mrec wrote: post #18

Holy crap, the "New Realistic Eye Shading" is insane: The shading model approximates subsurface scattering through the sclera, caustics on the iris and specular on the wet layer. To be used in conjunction with the provided eye material and eyeball geometry. Together these additionally model the refraction through the cornea, darkening of the limbal ring, with controls for dilating the pupils. In realtime 3d games. Th…

Here is the video about it: https://youtu.be/toLJh5nnJA8?t=2774

That's pretty great. They should deep link into some of these videos from the notes. I always mean to catch up with some of their livestreams, but they produce a ton of them, so an index to talking about particular features would be great.

Re: Unreal Engine 4.11 Released

#77

Post by iamcreasy »

shadowmint wrote: post #37
larryweya wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm running a mid 2012 macbook with a Geforce 650M and unreal runs very well, runs even better when I boot into windows. Looking forward to trying the new Metal renderer. For me, Unreal wins on its its extensibility, being able to expose custom functionality to the artist, access to the source even if only for reference.

O_o This is my machine: iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015) 3.2 GHz Intel Core i5 32 GB 1867 MHz DDR3 AMD Radeon R9 M380 2048 MB All I can say is the engine runs like rubbish on it, so I'm flat out astonished to hear it runs 'very well' on your 2012 macbook . This is the compile time for running a 'hello world' project with a few tests: [2016.03.20-09.44.43:606][ 0]Log file open, 03/20/16 17:44:43 [2016.03.20-09.44.…

Would I be wrong to say Apple doesn't prioritize GPU performance. Ergo, for game development it's undoubtedly safer to buy non-apple brand machines?

Re: Unreal Engine 4.11 Released

#78

Post by mortenjorck »

Capsule shadows are a huge step toward a broader photorealism in games.

You've probably played a number of games (this is especially true in open-world environments) where direct sunlight looks amazing: Everything casts shadows realistically, giving the scene a very believable sense of illumination and depth. But walk into the shadows, and all that vanishes: Even if the environment has some approximation of global illumination, no shadows are calculated (since there would be far too many secondary light sources versus the single sun).

Screen-space ambient occlusion helps somewhat, but it's a hack that looks good sometimes and weird other times. Capsule shadows, if calculated from the top one or two secondary light sources, can approximate the shadows resulting from that complex network of bouncing light in a much more realistic and believable way.

Re: Unreal Engine 4.11 Released

#79

Post by hacker_9 »

iamcreasy wrote: post #75
hacker_9 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Graphics engines aren't particularly hard to write though once you grep the shader pipeline, as many/all of the latest effects are available for free online (FXAA, HDR, Deferred Lighting etc), though an engine will nicely package them together for you in a ready to use fashion. The biggest problem with this pre-packaged software is when something ultimately goes wrong, which it always does. Then you find yourself dig…

> Unreal blueprints for example are a nightmare once you add a decent amount of functionality as per the law that visual programming does not scale. Could you please elaborate on this one? Do you have first hand experience?

The beauty of programming with visual nodes:

http://scriptsofanotherdimension.tumblr.com/

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