A first look at Unreal Engine 5
unrealengine.com
unrealengine.com
Edit: found the video of the demo levels that shipped with very early UE3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m7T5ay_8DI
However UE3-generation games that finally shipped had none of the visual effects from the early demos. The multicolored shadows could only be rendered with multiple passes, at least one per light, which proved to be too expensive for larger dynamic game scenes. It took years of work from the demo to shipped games, and an army of unnamed engineers to wrestle the technology into a product.
UE4 had a great early demo of dynamic global illumination using something like voxel cone tracing if I remember correctly. To my knowledge that tech demo was never incorporated into the engine and never shipped.
Epic is famous for their demos, and I love them for it... at least now that I no longer work professionally in that field. If anything it charts a long term technical direction for interactive entertainment.
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 vu, right into a realtime lighting demo.
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 intersect the geometry. Then generate triangles on the fly from these points in every frame. This would be quite similar in flavor to GigaVoxels [1] or the (IMO unjustly much hated) "Unlimited Detail" engine [2], except that instead of shading / visualising the intersections directly they just use it to generate triangles as another input to their overall pipeline.
If you look at the video closely all the heavy geometry items are static, i.e. they don't deform. This matches with a classic limitation of ray tracing as deformations invalidate the acceleration data structures used for making ray tracing efficient.
[1] http://gigavoxels.inrialpes.fr/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM6QkPsA2ds
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.
Unreal Engine's old business model were exactly that, get you excited with demos and sign up ( paid ) for their engine. And it was the same with UE 3 and UE 4. But in 2015 all that changed. It was open sourced on Github, it has a very sustainable revenue model due to the explosion of Mobile Gaming, the Gaming industry as a whole is now bigger than Movies and Music industry combined.
I think it is fair to say EPYC no longer has the incentive to do that with UE 5. And because it is / will be open source, they can now actively work with many different partners ( Hardware such as Sony and Microsoft and other publishers ) to make sure those technology works as intended.
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.
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 first demoed by Unreal 4, yet it never shipped due performances problems. Meanwhile Cryengine manage to get it working with minimal performances penalty (only 10%) and have shipped games with it (Kingdom Come: Deliverance) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEfqtOYjolE
Some of the new lighting features in UE5 are interesting and should be cheaper than RTX overall, but will be interesting to see the mix and match which developers will achieve. Looking forward to having a play around with it.
Games are more than tech demos.
Otherwise, not many games made it to release on that engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Lumberyard
See this for the original demo of UE4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD9CPqSKjTU
No coincidence it's called 'Unreal' Engine heh
one more time ya'll
That Unreal 5 Demo was the first time ever I thought this is Hollywood Movie quality GFX ..... ( Apart from the Character ). IT IS STUNNING! And this is done Real time on PS5!
Edit: I am sorry for the tone and block capitals.... I am seriously geeking out.
Here is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjb-AqMD-a4
Meanwhile all the dynamic stuff is still fairly primitive IMO. At around 4 minute in the video they briefly mention the water effects. They don't really spend a lot of time on them and for a good reason, they don't look particularly good.
When I was a kid in the 90s I definitely expected future games to look a lot better, but I also expect gameplay and world interaction to progress massively. Fully interactive environments you can interact with like in the real world. You could destroy everything, dig holes, build things, have advanced physics, great AI for NPCs etc...
It saddens me that the AAA video game industry is almost entirely focused on eye candy first and foremost. That being said I concede that I'm clearly in the minority, after all the Uncharted games are generally considered to be good games when I find them incredibly boring.
I hope that now that we can reach near-photorealism in games they'll have to come up with something new to keep pushing the envelope.
That said, The Mandalorian has used the Unreal engine to render real-time backgrounds for scenes, so it's good enough for that at least.
And in films they don't need to do real-time, they can take their time to render a scene.
don't get me wrong, the fixed assets look amazing and I look forward to seeing more done with this system
I'm sure this is all fixable, but some part of me wonders how much larger game budgets will have to become (or correspondingly, how much less content will be offered) in order to achieve the new standard in production qualities.
Physics engine, character movement, etc. could still be improved.
...that now it's the actual quality of the models themselves, and even more of character motion, that are going to have to be the next steps in better graphics.
I'm stunned by the lighting and detail, absolutely stunned.
But at the same time, especially when you get into the architectural rooms, everything's far too "perfect". No grime, no crumbling edges, the motion of the ceiling opening is far too smooth, no vibration or catching, etc.
Likewise, the character's ponytail isn't bobbing like real hair at all. Sometimes her movements seem to be anti-gravity and bizarrely robotic. The leather over her shoulder seems to float rather than rest, and twists as if it were made of gelatin rather than stiff cowskin.
Not that these are criticisms at all -- I'm well aware of how hard they are. It's just fascinating to me to see, once rendering is basically "good enough", how the flaws in modeling come to the fore.
And so where are those advances going to come in? Are there going to be procedural-generation advances in creating realistic grime and imperfections and irregularities? Or deep-learning advances for realistic bodily movement? And why is it so damn hard to get clothing to actually fall on the body right, instead of always looking like a stretchy foam skinsuit?
Mostly because it is a stretchy foam suit. A model is deformed and translated based on animated bones in the model. Essentially each vertex is tied to a small number of transforms matrices(bones) with multiplier/weight. Animations are updating the transform matrices over time. You only get so many bones per model and per vertex and because of this clothes moved inline with other parts of a model like skin because its using the exact same bone.
I'm not sure where we're at in terms of increasing bone counts or independently animating clothes on a character. As bone counts increase, the amount of matrix data that must be sent to the GPU every frame increases.
Maybe once real time photorealism is cracked, we'll move to a completely Newtonian global physics for some games, with some analogue of "atoms" the way RTX models "photons."
I'm not in the industry, this is just something I'm wondering about. What would Minecraft be like if blocks were the size of pixels and the physics were real?
There is an extreme amount of doubt about whether the tech is real (myself included). These people have promised the world, have incredible videos, but have nothing to show in terms of a demo you can download and run yourself. Still, they claim to do what you describe and have videos demonstrating it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J62z_7JaYMw
There are a few indie devs trying to make "finer resolution" Minecraft; e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQv1OEm_www
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.
They also bought Quixel, which gives all of these photo realistic assets to any Unreal Engine developer (even if you're some kid building a game for free). Not sure how Unity can keep up with this.
> Not sure how Unity can keep up with this.
Unity still has a big edge on usability. Unreal is very much a AAA tool: you have to use C++, all the built-in systems have a much steeper learning curve, etc. Even as a professional dev who's tried a few times to get into it for fun, it's just too much headache for my level of project. Whereas I can whip something together in Unity really easily. All that said, this definitely widens the gap for actual studios. If you have the time and know-how to use Unreal, you have even less reason to consider Unity now.
That said, yes, of course, assets are getting enormous - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare - 175.2GB on PS4.
There was a post about the new MS Flight Simulator and how it'll stream high-def textures from the "cloud" during gameplay, because it has petabytes of textures.
that give's you up to 16.7m (2^24) possible triangles. Your napkin math is way off,
Are we going to download 500GB games on our Playstation 5s?
I've been hobbyist in Unity for a long time. But I think I'll switch to Unreal just for that.
This is probably a flawed opinion, but sometimes I think the more realistic games become, the less work for our imagination. I don't mean to say that we should stop upgrading graphics. What I do wish to say is this: if you have to choose between optimizing gameplay or graphics, choose gameplay. If you can do both, do both. Having access to a ridiculously powerful easy to use engine does not automatically mean you can do both by just jumbling high detailed props, foliage, terrain together and be done with it. It's counterintuitive, but it takes even more skill and a keen eye to create beautiful and immersive environments in a nearly photo realistic engine than those used 20 years ago. Why? We live in a perfect photorealistic real world, so we immediately spot things that just look weird and unnatural in game. Whereas in old engines our imagination corrected for all those things.
Your graphical capability can push a hundred million triangles, but choosing the color, composition, and visual coherence of those triangles is more important to how people interpret your world than anything else. Humans have an extremely attuned visual processor that infers so much about the way the world behaves solely by the way it looks.
The reason that classic games can be immersive despite a low poly count is because the artists have made the visuals behave in a way that is coherent with our internal model of the game world.
An example of this is Portal. The portal gun is an interesting gameplay tool, but the game was able to fully take advantage of it because the artstyle of the game was very tightly coupled with the mechanics. They did a great job of making sure that the visual environment offered clues to how the game mechanics worked, which made it so easy for people to quickly grasp how the portal gun operated in complex environments. Had the artists failed, Portal would have been "oh yeah, I remember that game -- the portal gun was a neat gimmick but it felt clunky."
The easy way out is to just try to make your environments and game mechanics as realistic as possible, essentially borrowing that creation of intuition from the real world. But the most creative games have worlds whose completely novel or alien mechanics are coupled with art direction that preserves this coherence, which makes the world just "click." Putting more triangles on screen makes for much prettier art, but the true substance of a game is something completely different.
\* not on purpose; it's just extremely difficult to pull off.
Yet, something anazubg happened once I dedicated myself to deciphering the ascii characters: my imagination sprung to life to fill in the gaps. From those bland a-z characters came vaulting ceilings with intricate wall designs. Epic twisting caves. The oddest looking characters.
I compare it to a game of RimWorld, where the graphics make a lot more sense, but turns out limits my need to imagine it being different.
That's pretty much exactly what I've said for years about 8-bit and 16-bit graphics when I was younger - there was so much more invested imagination back then, necessarily. The last time I experienced this in a 'contemporary' game was when Minecraft came out.
I'm in awe of the tech demo here, but bluntly I'd rather see all those billions of polygons being used for actual game-relevant elements, not just mostly background eye candy.
Not complaining though!
Still though, that demo was impressive (even though there were maybe some tiny things not perfectly balanced with the shining other effect)
I want to play games that look like that, now.
IMHO, a key innovation that still needs to occur is a shift away from flunky and unintuitive hand-held controllers to a more natural and vibrant method of input. I really liked the scene in the movie Her, for example, where the protagonist is playing a video game and uses hand gestures to control his avatar, all without a physical controller. Wii and Kinect were the first few steps in this direction - I'm not sure what the next steps are.
I think voice input and NLP is an incredibly fruitful space to explore - imagine what video games would be like if you could actually talk to the characters, instead of merely punching and shooting them.
Recent demo shown on Adam Savage's TESTED: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0KhC1GpLSQ
I would absolutely love to play a game like this, combining the sensibilities of indie walking-sims with the epic scale of triple-A productions.
> Unreal Engine End User License Agreement for Publishing: This license is free to use and incurs 5% royalties when you monetize your game or other interactive off-the-shelf product and your lifetime gross revenues from that product exceed $1,000,000 USD.
I think this has the potential to be a huge shift if enough developers build games targeting Fortnite players. There's an ecosystem right there to be tapped into, and Epic just happens to be giving you the tools to do it.
Reverb is really just thousands of echoes, and echoes are just the original sound delayed back to you. So what you can do is use the impulse response in a FIR filter, convolve it with the original signal, and you've recreated the same reverb with a different sound.
This technique has been quite accessible to audio engineers (and mechanical engineers) for a few decades now. But you really only go out and sample impulse responses when you really need a very accurate model of the reverb. In most cases someone will just use a precanned impulse response.
Forget all of the little hacks. Sound processing is cheap. In 2020 it is unnecessary to select from a set of pre-baked filters and applying them to some predefined volume (ie this room is echoey, this room is absorbant, etc.)
This is one area where software has regressed then stagnated [0]. It doesn't make any sense, other than it wasn't prioritized. I think it's only a matter of time before engines go back and finally complete the audio simulation problem.
One interesting note: they say the GI is "instant" but you can actually see that they are using temporal stabilization to achieve this effect, and there's a slight lag between when the light changes and when the GI finds its resting point. I suspect removing this lag will be one of the things which makes graphics feel "next gen" when GPUs can handle enough rays per pixel to handle GI in one or two frames instead of a few dozen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNRp9Y33xWE Can you spot the difference worth >2-3x performance drop?
For some tasks, ray tracing already outperforms traditional rasterization.
All "photorealistic" 3D renderers are trying to produce output on par with a true ray tracing renderer, and because the computation required is so high, tons of bodges and hacks are employed to approach that level of quality. The resulting complexity of a traditional rasterizer is astronomical compared to the complexity of a ray traced renderer.
Ray traced graphics has been the goal the entire time computer graphics have been a thing; for the past 40 years, at least. That's always been the goal. I can't remember a time when it wasn't.
It's only now that hardware fabrication technology has put us in a place where we're able to slightly open the door to the rendering techniques we've desired for so long. It's an exciting time.
It is not a scam. It may not perform well in most situations currently, but I can promise you, that will change significantly as time goes on.
Just like how early CPU hardware was slow and expensive, early ray tracing hardware is slow and expensive. Over time, CPU hardware has gotten cheaper and faster, and the same will happen with ray tracing hardware.
Highly dynamic environments are where the technology shines, because it can achieve results which traditional solutions simply can’t. I think ray-traced Minecraft is the best current example of the potential of this technology.
I don't know how that RTX tech is working, but from what I've seen of the port of Quake2, it looked much more convincing - did you see it before making that judgement?
Contrast the GPU with the newest generation of x86 CPUs. They have more cores than you can typically use, provide ridiculous amounts of pipelined throughput, and have specialized vector instructions which can dramatically accelerate common 3D graphics tasks (i.e. matrix multiplication).
Most practical ray tracing algorithms are trivially parallelized (e.g. just throw each scanline at a thread) and also exhibit properties which can leverage the deep stack depths and OoO execution enabled by modern CPUs. Ray tracing is inherently a recursive activity with a profound number of potential branching opportunities. x86 has absolutely no problem dealing with this kind of scenario. This is exactly what it was built for. GPUs on the other hand require yet more specialized hardware that has its limitations baked-in at the transistor level. x86 does not have these same kind of limitations.
Consider the hypothetical benefits of having your entire graphics pipeline implemented within 1 cache-coherent memory domain and on top of a single instruction set. Imagine no Direct3D/OpenGL/Vulkan/drivers/etc are involved to ruin your day. What if you could fit all of your required scene, texture and model data into L3 cache? How many times can you fill L3 from RAM per second on a 3950x with reasonable memory configuration? How many times per frame at 60fps? I feel we need to take some time to look at the emerging opportunities with the new hardware that is coming to market.
I worry that the developer community is so out of touch with the hardware aspect (e.g. 22ms hello world) that we are basically saying "lol no just use GPU magic graphics rectangle" and calling it a day. I feel like specialization of ASICs is fundamentally taking us in the wrong direction now that we are able to put so many general purpose cores onto a single package/die in a very cost-effective manner. Maybe this is why AMD is taking so long to bring a proper Nvidia killer to market. At some point there has to be a certain # of cores where someone raises their hand and asks "why do we still need a separate GPU?".
That said, I am struck by how the inaccuracies in physics modeling start sticking out like a sore thumb the closer the visuals get to realism. After gawking at the ground and falling rocks in the first scene, I kept getting stuck on the weird movement of her ponytail. Also the landing of the first jump across the chasm.
Picking nits for sure; incredible work here.
A game with cartoonish or simplified rendering can get away with one attack animation, one "working" animation etc; but once the rendering becomes realistic, you need better animations and physics, etc.
Forearms need to be parallel to the gravity vector almost all the time. Arms need to be kept straight almost all the time. The only exceptions for these are the actual top of a motion to move up to the next hold.
All stuff you would never notice if the graphics weren't amazing.
I think I'm so used to seeing unrealistic pony tails and clothes I don't even notice.
Other than Uncharted I don't recall playing games with climbing.. I've spent enough real world climbing time since then it's noticeable now.
Little things like the player model's hands interacting with an invisible flat surface above the incredibly intricate rock textures.
Yes, nits. With the player model acting as a locus for these uncanny interactions, I wonder if there will be a wave of first person games that can take full advantage of the photorealism.
This is masked by using hairstyles which are either not intended to move or which are intended to display limited movement.
Her hair isn't in a true ponytail, anyway. Even with more restricted movement of the hairstyle she has, it still doesn't look right at all.
A 3rd person character who walks through caves, canyons, ruins, slides through tight places where the camera moves in close, can only climb on areas painted with the "you can climb here color" and then pushes or pulls a few knobs for "puzzles"
It could be the original Tomb Raider (1996) or God of War (2005) or any Uncharted or all the other similar games in between. I'm sure others can name the same game that's been skinned over and over and over.
I love pretty graphics but I'd really like to see the tech used to give me a new game, not just an old game with prettier images.
This is a demo showing off tech. Any "game" that exists in the demo is purely to sell the realtime aspect and making it in a familiar environment or with familiar mechanics is just to show how the tech might be implemented in an otherwise known area.
These flat “3D” experiences are like Duck Hunt to the kids in the retro bar in Back to the Future 2.
You download and install it.
Then you give it a URL, and it streams down a map, and downloads DLLs containing behavior custom to that map. While you're in a map, you can walk through a portal to another map. Or you can just keep moving in a direction, which streams more and more map.
If you're in a multi-player environment, you connect to a server for that environment. If you're in a solo area, you're just running locally.
Isn't this what the Oasis (from "Ready Player One") is supposed to be like? What stops them from doing this?
Yes you can make unending worlds in UE4.
At the same time, nothing is motivating them to do this either.
There's still some weirdness - I found the water movement (around 4:10) a bit odd, and the lightball in the cave seemed to be directional even though it was a ball. But my god, that's beautiful.
The end scene with the flying reminded me of the (fully rendered) Avatar ride at Disney World. I stood in line for two hours for that.
As a consumer, I'm expecting to see a graphics jump in the next generation of games (as you would expect) and some fun new lighting details (yo, RTX!), but not much beyond that. However, this will likely lower the cost of developing cinematic games like Uncharted or RDR.
But I guess those other technologies depend more on the CPU/RAM etc. which consoles lack in, so they don't want to bother with that.
Here's an example of how games have actually been going backwards in almost all other areas except graphics:
Far Cry 2 vs. Far Cry 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCeEvQ68jY8
The development process improvements sound most promising.
I was amazed until the the character started climbing the rocks.
Seems like no one at Epic has ever climbed a rock in their life.. it sent the whole demo back to PS1 land. It doesn't even look like a super hero rock climbing, just looks totally wrong. Almost no part of the body ever looks angled correctly to reflect gravity being a thing, like the physics engine switches off.
That and her ankles are fused and never plantar flex so the walking looks bizarre. Again, it's all amazing but now it becomes uncanny valley cause you notice the weird remaining stuff.
Creating a scenery with a lot of details depth is fine but it doesn't even come close to having proper animation/character models and especially realistic physics.
But then, if simulated worlds can reach this level of fidelity, that means we could be in such a world right now and there would be no way to know it.
In the video they said it was running on a PlayStation 5. There was a section in the demo where they had interactive gamepad controls so it appears it might have actually been running real-time on a PS5?
I never thought I would be saying this but storage might actually end up being a bigger issue than CPU/GPU performance. The new MS Flight Simulator has to stream the world over the internet because the entire map is 10 petabytes. In the UE5 video they said the demo scene was 13 or 16 billion triangles... I imagine that will take up a huge amount of disk space.
Modern AAA games are already 50-150 gigabytes each, and this is only going to grow as models and scenes become increasingly detailed.
Edit: finding holes in their demo - this may be a video compression artifact, but the big open scene at the end appeared to be of much lower quality. This is something current AMD GPUs can do where if you move around it dynamically lowers the resolution to prevent FPS from decreasing. Perhaps they also dynamically lower resolution in the big open areas? IDK how much of a benefit that would make, but you can never trust these marketing videos...
(Just a reminder, this was back when Fortnite was not a Battle Royale game, and nobody in the world knew about the it. That game was in development / early access for ages before it became the biggest thing in the world.)
A lot of it actually looks subpar 2020 standards.
Back in 2009 my 360 died. I had been an avid console gamer before that, but I never replaced the Xbox and in 2010 went off to college, where I mainly played N64 with friends as well as games on my phone.
After I graduated I was busy with work and life and never got back into the gaming cutting edge. Sure I played StarCraft once in a while for old times' sake as well as different old Total War games cause they're awesome, but never the sort of major AAA release I used to play all the time as a kid.
I also never really looked at modern graphics since I didn't have friends who played modern games and never watched videos showcasing what games looked like.
So coming from 2009, this is absurdly good.
Crytek has financial worries. Plus it's the most difficult to use, because it's almost all C++.
Unity is very accessible thanks to C# scripting, but has bug issues (and no source code).
Unreal Engine looks amazing, is cheap or free for indie studios, and has source code included.
If they can make UE slightly easier to develop for, they'll dominate the market.
I think Unity is too valuable to low-medium end indies to go anywhere (you really don't need most of these new features if you aren't going for a photorealistic look anyway), but we could see a partitioning of the market as Unity takes over the low-mid and Unreal takes over the high-end. Unity actually no longer has the (partially) realtime global illumination they were so proud of just a couple years ago, because of licensing woes: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/07/03/enlighten-will-be-repla...
Plenty of proprietary engines are in use today. And you've got FOSS options like Godot and Blender. UE's definitely the biggest, but other options aren't going away any time soon.
Unity source code is partially available on github, and full available on commercial license, which is fair.
Then there are plenty of other engines out there, for example Cocos2d-x is number one in Asia for 2D mobile games.
Both engines have bugs, and one of the biggest complaints about Unreal Engine is that any feature not used by Fortnite is half-baked until Fortnite uses it. With Unity, the biggest complaints are about the relatively transitory lifetimes of some of their biggest-marketed features, like rendering pipelines or networking code.
a) If this demo is runnable at real time fps on ps5 hardware ($400-500 WITH markup)...that's a technologically phenomenal feat in itself.
b) If the engine IS capable of running something like this...they are not lying. The responsibility for "good looking games" then falls on to game studios to deliver instead of halfassing something just to hit a deadline.
Where am I wrong?
The engine releases sometime in 2021 and then it will probably take a few years for some other studio to develop a decent AAA title using this. That is, unless Epic Games releases something awesome on their own soon.
But that flight scene at the end of the demo, how realistic it was, how it was seamless, how detailed it produced a physical reaction in me, a feeling of like "WOW" throughout my entire body as I watched it. That was amazing.
As I recall this is done to avoid the difficulties of rendering how two adjacent differently colored objects bleed their colors onto each other. No color - no bleeding.
I'd prefer color over pixel accuracy.
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.
Dont't see it? The Unreal Tournament is the team which released the Battle Royale version of Fortnite. Hence why Fortnite has bouncy, fast, area-ish gameplay.
Sure it is different, but if you do not want any changes from the old Tournament games, just go play those.
Otherwise it's simply astonishing.
Does this involve some breakthrough somewhere or is this incremental?
The other thing that makes the graphics look impressive is global illumination, which provides real time dynamic lighting of the environment, instead of baked in (pre-rendered) lighting. The demo seems to only have a single light source - sunlight in the cave, light from the crystal looking thing in her hand while inside the room. I am not sure how well it look like in actual games when there are multiple light sources.
The rest of the stuff doesn't look too different from current gen games.
I wonder if they consider the Switch a current-generation console.
Of course what we normally see is a lot of work to port down games. A good example being all the work that went into getting Witcher 3 to run on the Switch: https://developer.nvidia.com/gtc/2020/video/s22697
I'm relatively new to gamedev, I've spent several months learning Godot, and now I'm trying out Unreal. Unreal has many exciting things, but from what I can see so far, C++ looks like nightmare. It seems like everything I'm trying to do takes me 5x lines of code and 10x the time compared to doing this in Godot. Also the code looks far less readable and way more confusing. Granted I'm new to Unreal and C++, but I didn't have the same problems with other programming languages I've been using.
So my question is - does this get better/faster/easier when you get used to it and gain more experience? Or is this something you struggle with every day?
I know that Unreal has Blueprints, but they also seem pretty slow and limiting. I've been watching a tutorial where a guy has spend 40 minutes explaining how to do a thing in Blueprints which would take me like 3 minutes and 15 lines of code to do in Godot.
I really want to use all the sexy exciting features unreal has, but C++/Blueprints are really holding me back.
I'd long migrated to Unreal for technical and workflow reasons as well as having an open engine, but this just seals the deal. A lot of indie studios could get their big break self-publishing this way.
It would help me produce cinematics more easily though, I suppose.
Real-time global illumination looks dope. No more overnight lighting builds :)
> Friends, matchmaking, lobbies, achievements, leaderboards, and accounts: we built these services for Fortnite, we launched them across seven major platforms - PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android. Now we’re opening up Epic Online Services to all developers FOR FREE in a simple multiplatform SDK!
> Mix and match these services together with your own account services, platform accounts, or Epic Games accounts, which reach the world’s largest cross-platform social graph with over 350 million players and their 2.2 billion friend connections across half a billion devices.
Free SDK for online game services? That's an insane boon to any small studio / solo development of a multiplayer game.
UE5 has better water than this, but not by much in my opinion (Halo 3, a 10 year old game): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4eFg-lnpDM
UE sort of seems to have a technical advantage on some platforms and Unity sort of has more of an outreach to smaller teams. Most games are not trying to be on the cutting edge though.
You can ship a game on either engine just fine. In my experience, licensing plays the biggest role in the decision.
That's a very stretched-out definition of always. Unreal used to be one of the most expensive, if not the most expensive, game engines you could license. It's been only few years they adopted this free model.
Is this like a weird infinite depth of field kind of thing?
The region below her arm is much sharper/detailed (missing dof/motion blur?) than surrounding area. It seems to be somehow related how stuff is revealed, as her arm was moving up in this bit, so the overly sharp region was covered in previous frames.
Also the shadow (e.g. her fingers) has very sharp pixelated edges which can contribute to the feeling of oversharpness. There are some other lesser artifacts also abound, so yeah, its obvious that the engine cuts corners. But of course that is to be expected, realtime graphics is all about compromises.
You'll probably have to compile it yourself, but it isn't hard. (I did it).
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Platforms/Linux/Beginner...
Did it just look fake just because it was too clean / blue, or did the motion and its reaction look like something from Morrowind 18 years ago?
My tiny, 12 year old, N64-powered brain would explode watching this video
That is some seriously impressive tech. The developers should be VERY proud of themselves.
We can now all sit back and watch Epic eat Valve’s and Microsoft’s Lunch right in front of them, like some kind of sordid picnic.
I look forward to seeing the pricing details and revenue options based on player base and time.
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
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Time for everyone to learn Unreal, Houdini, and Mari.
Only a minority of gamers/audiences really want to experience VR or binocular 3D and are a prepared to wear cumbersome headsets or 3D glasses right now. I think the hardware has to improve a lot for it to become accepted as standard.
I'm very confused by this. This demo gameplay is pretty representative of a few genres of games like Tomb Raider. It also translates well to different types of gameplay, so I don't get your dismissal.
I've played open world games like the Witcher 3, or Assassin's Creed Odissey; and damn they're impressive games. Assassin's creed in particular was really amazing, you could wander through ancient Greece and just enjoy the sights, visit the cities.
With the kind of things demoed here it will be even more amazing.
But the games feel somehow lifeless, as if you're the only one really living in there. Sure there are some NPCs, but they are all reactive, not active. You can roam the countryside for a while and come back to civilization, nothing will have changed, except maybe the town will be governed by blue instead of red.
There's some premises, on Odissey, you have some patrols for both sides moving around, and if they encounter each other they start fighting. But that's small scale, and partly scripted at that, there will always be the same patrols going through the same paths.
What's missing is that you cannot walk on a battle in progress unless it is in the story. You won't see a city patching up its walls after a siege, merchants running a real economy, people going on with their lives in general. But meaningfully, not just walking around the town and going back to their house at night.
I assume it's really difficult though. First technically, it's a lot of CPU power. And a lot of work to create AI that meaningfully impact the world.
Then it's how to design a game in a world you cannot really predict. It could be purely open box, a la mount and blade, but I think it could be more, with an underlying story line that would adapt to the changing world.
Of course you don't need to do everything at once. In this case, simply having the 2 armies stateful (e.g. a set number of troops with some replenishments, but not always the same soldiers in the places), with troops moving across the countryside, and 2 AIs vying for power across the land would be fantastic
Unreal looks better than Unity but I found it difficult to get started.
It included teleporting and picking up objects, full hand tracking and finger positioning.
Overall, it seemed like a decent foundation but clearly needed a LOT of work to be ready for a full game. The skillset and toolset is very different than what web/app devs and backend devs use.
The Unreal Editor was not as easy to use as I thought it might be, but it isn't too bad. I wish it didn't take an hour to recompile shaders all the time though.
I'm trying to think of others, maybe you could expand a bit?