12 ms·

Unreal Engine 4.11 Released

215 points by mattiemass 11y ago

stesch 11y ago
Same link as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11400124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11400124 but with now 11 points? How is this possible? EDIT: I'm asking because the dupe check seems to be broken.
- zongitsrinzler 11y ago
  Unreal
- maaaats 11y ago
  Why shouldn't it be possible? Edit: Ahh, I see now that you posted the previous link.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    People think HN has some dupe detection. People expect it to catch identical URLs.
    - stesch 11y ago
      HN has a dupe detection. That's why I'm wondering what's going on. It seems to be a bug. When I submit something that is already there the systems gives an upvote and doesn't register it as a second post. But not this time.
      - dang 11y ago
        The comments at these links should explain: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20random%20traction https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20duplicate https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20dupe https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
- sheepdestroyer 11y ago
  Bad timing ; interested people missed your link but were there when this one popped up. Try again next time.
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    Also link sharing, people who submit stuff might often also send it to their friends.
  - stesch 11y ago
    No, HN normally recognizes dupes.
    - qznc 11y ago
      Afaik the dupe checker checks against whatever is currently cached in memory. It does not check dupes against items on disk. Effectively, it is a dupe heuristic. If someone recently accessed the previous submission, the dupe checker detects it.
pestaa 11y ago
The amount of changes in each minor release is... unreal.
- ddorian43 11y ago
  It's like the best programmers aren't working on ads but on games
  - mrec 11y ago
    Even more impressively, it's like they actually base their version numbers on compatibility semantics rather than marketing.
    - rlefebvre 11y ago
      It may be worth noting that minor versions are not strictly compatible but generally require some dev work.
- beefsack 11y ago
  I've heard Epic operate in constant crunch mode and significant overtime is expected.
  - shasta 11y ago
    That's impossible. Everyone here knows crunch mode doesn't work and you're most productive working 20 hours a week.
animuj 11y ago
I wonder what is the size of whole unreal engine team.
- redtuesday 11y ago
  They mentioned that in some of their twitch streams relatively short after Unreal 4s initial release. I don't remember the number, but it was smaller than what I thought it would be. Plus of course the people not working for epic who contribute to the source code on github.
  - Strom 11y ago
    Do you at least remember how big you thought it would be? Currently I have no idea of even the magnitude of the team.
    - redtuesday 11y ago
      I believe it was around 70-80 engineers, and the number mentioned in the twitch stream was lower (keep in mind I have no experience when it comes to writing large 3d engines. maybe my expectation was ridiculous to begin with). I actually tried to hunt down the video in which they mentioned that, but Epic is just too productive when it comes to producing videos, and I gave up. :D
      - Strom 11y ago
        I would say 70 is definitely very high for an engine. Most games don't even have that many programmers overall. Although I guess this also comes down to definitions. Like do the IDE/tool builders also go under the engine team? Then 70 isn't too high.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
pjmlp 11y ago
My favourite items: - Improved GC - DX 12 support for PC and XBox ONE - Metal as default render for El Capitan onwards
lossolo 11y ago
Another great example of positive impact of open sourcing. They open sourced unreal engine some time ago, thanks to that we see 92 changes from community alone in this release.
- brador 11y ago
  It's open source with a pay x% once you get big enough to make $y thousand a year. It's proven effective and I hope more open sourcers copy the business model. Imagine if Mozilla was supported like this instead of being paid for customer data. It would be a game changer.
  - mrec 11y ago
    What would be the browser equivalent of "once you get big enough to make $y thousand a year"?
    - brador 11y ago
      X number of employees? The principle of the model is make em pay once they can afford it. So having X employees would usually mean the company can afford to pay say $10 per employee per year to use it.
      - TrevorJ 11y ago
        I understand what you are getting at, but that particular example sounds like a great way to convince companies to adopt a 'no OSS software on work machines' policy.
        brador 11y ago
        And what else would they use? You have regular paid software, or OSS software that scales with your business at a reasonable price. I know which i'd take.
  - Mizza 11y ago
redtuesday 11y ago
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 prefer Unreal for ease of use, documentation etc. but I also read often that they like the technology of Cryengine better (real time GI (SVOTI), better performance, better skin and eye shader for example), so I would have thought that the free source code release would stir things up. Yes, Unreal released the full source code long ago, so they (Crytek) are late to the party, and the marketing of Crytek is... not the best (to put it kindly), but why is it that the Cryengine 5 release was not really discussed on HN? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11294763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11294763 [1 comment --> I myself] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11300017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11300017 [0 comments] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11313695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11313695 [0 comments] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11295419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11295419 [0 comments] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11297215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11297215 [0 comments]
- stesch 11y ago
  I'm guessing it's more an inherit problem of how Hacker News works. Good posts get ignored all the time. Just take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newest And not every Unreal post gets to the front page. The exact same link was submitted way earlier and if the dupe check would have worked this wouldn't be on the front page because nobody would have seen it.
  - redtuesday 11y ago
    Ok, I should have made that clearer. What I meant was that at least one post on a minor release of Unreal gets to the front page (at least when I'm browsing HN, maybe later or earlier in the day the postings are not on the front page). Out of curiosity I checked my above claim and it was wrong (hehe), but many releases hit the front page: 4.11 - now 4.10 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10548139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10548139 [75 comments] 4.9 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10147368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10147368 [50 comments] 4.8 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9694885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9694885 [98 comments] 4.7 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9103050 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9103050 [88 comments] ??? (when they released UE4 for free) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9132815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9132815 [240 comments] 4.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7429774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7429774 [163 comments] But it's probably as you say. Not every interesting post (which also depends on the readers interests, of course) get's to the front page. Coupled with the bigger mindshare of Unreal, and the not so interesting Cryengine releases in the past (especially compared to Unreal) we get more Unreal postings on HN.
mrec 11y ago
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. This is pushing up against the limits of what offline renderers could do not so very long ago.
- spyder 11y ago
  Here is the video about it: https://youtu.be/toLJh5nnJA8?t=2774 https://youtu.be/toLJh5nnJA8?t=2774
  - iamcreasy 11y ago
    Now they only need their subsurface scattering to get better. Despite a lots of improvements it still looks like plastic.
  - magicalist 11y ago
    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.
stesch 11y ago
Has anybody tested this version on a late 2012 iMac with 3.4 GHz i7? I've tried the previous versions and the CPU temperature is rising very quickly. A 2012 iMac is ancient. Are current systems getting hot as well?
hacker_9 11y ago
Unreal has Unity beat in my mind simply because the Unreal developers are actually building games with their engine (Paragon), which really puts the code through it's paces and makes for a far better testing environment than an artificial demo or two from Unity, that doesn't represent what a full game really uses resource wise per frame. This can definitely be seen in the usability of the software alone, where Unity suffers some poor interface issues alongside poor performance problems.
- kayoone 11y ago
  By now a lot of high profile games get made with Unity, so i don't think it's really a downside that Unity Technologies don't build their own games. Unity is far less resource heavy and still the king for 2D or mobile games and the latest 3D rendering capabilities are getting close to Unreal as well (see Adam tech demo). I enjoy working with C# and have been using Unity since 2009 in one form or another. I'd like to try Unreal but it feels like it only makes sense for big projects and does not even run remotely well on my macbook.
  - larryweya 11y ago
    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.
    - kayoone 11y ago
      The last time i tried running the engine it would constantly put load on the GPU (even if the game view is paused) resulting in high temps and noisy fans. I also barely got 10fps in the gameview on a 13" Macbook Pro with Iris 5000 graphics. Did they fix this for OSX ?
      - shadowmint 11y ago
        Did they fix this for OSX ? No.
Keyframe 11y ago
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.
- hacker_9 11y ago
  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 digging round in internals (assuming you have access, looking at you Unity) to find out what when wrong and why banding is appearing only when you use stencil shadows and apply SSAO factor X.. basically, it's still complicated, and you still have to know your stuff. Another problem with these engines is they force you into a particular way of working. 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. Finally you underestimate how much code is the actual game logic, which is also the hardest part to write. In this case the engines don't help at all, Unity even just throws you into Visual Studio and lets that deal with you. Additionally I've yet to see a good solution for figuring out why my AI are running through walls on their way to a target, without writing a ton of custom visualization stuff myself. Many algorithms take place over time (units moving, animating, etc), so you can't just step though code in a debugger as that's like looking at a landscape through a keyhole.
  - inDigiNeous 11y ago
    Writing a 3D graphics engine is one of the most complex things you can do in software. It requires so much understanding of data structures, efficiency, close to the metal programming, 3D math, vectors, translations, what have you. Of course it gets "easier" once you've done it a couple of time and understand the basics, but really doing it for the first time is a hard edge to climb. Been writing my first 3D C++/OpenGL engine for the last 2 years, one of the most taunting tasks I've taken in my career. And just to cover a very specific use case of graphics rendering, not to do cover an overly generalized case like Unreal Engine is doing. Unreal engine is also over at least 20 years old, so I think you're overly simplifying the task required. Graphics engine is so much more than just figuring out the graphics pipeline, ultimately it's about flexible data management in a way that lets you achieve what you want, with performance.
MrBra 11y ago
How does it compare with Unity?
- TrevorJ 11y ago
  It really depends on the game you want to make. There's no 1 right answer, it could be that for the given functionality, writing your own engine from scratch might be the best way to go, just depends on the needs of the project.
liquidise 11y ago
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.
- Sarkie 11y ago
  Isn't it the community also?
mortenjorck 11y ago
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.
needusername 11y ago
> Faster garbage collection Does anybody has more information on this or know where I can read up on it?

215 points by mattiemass 11y ago

Same link as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11400124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11400124 but with now 11 points? How is this possible? EDIT: I'm asking because the dupe check seems to be broken.

zongitsrinzler 11y ago
Unreal
maaaats 11y ago
Why shouldn't it be possible? Edit: Ahh, I see now that you posted the previous link.
- DanBC 11y ago
  People think HN has some dupe detection. People expect it to catch identical URLs.
  - stesch 11y ago
    HN has a dupe detection. That's why I'm wondering what's going on. It seems to be a bug. When I submit something that is already there the systems gives an upvote and doesn't register it as a second post. But not this time.
    - dang 11y ago
      The comments at these links should explain: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20random%20traction https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20duplicate https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment&query=by:dang%20dupe https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
sheepdestroyer 11y ago
Bad timing ; interested people missed your link but were there when this one popped up. Try again next time.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  Also link sharing, people who submit stuff might often also send it to their friends.
- stesch 11y ago
  No, HN normally recognizes dupes.
  - qznc 11y ago
    Afaik the dupe checker checks against whatever is currently cached in memory. It does not check dupes against items on disk. Effectively, it is a dupe heuristic. If someone recently accessed the previous submission, the dupe checker detects it.

pestaa 11y ago

The amount of changes in each minor release is... unreal.

ddorian43 11y ago
It's like the best programmers aren't working on ads but on games
- mrec 11y ago
  Even more impressively, it's like they actually base their version numbers on compatibility semantics rather than marketing.
  - rlefebvre 11y ago
    It may be worth noting that minor versions are not strictly compatible but generally require some dev work.
beefsack 11y ago
I've heard Epic operate in constant crunch mode and significant overtime is expected.
- shasta 11y ago
  That's impossible. Everyone here knows crunch mode doesn't work and you're most productive working 20 hours a week.

animuj 11y ago

I wonder what is the size of whole unreal engine team.

redtuesday 11y ago
They mentioned that in some of their twitch streams relatively short after Unreal 4s initial release. I don't remember the number, but it was smaller than what I thought it would be. Plus of course the people not working for epic who contribute to the source code on github.
- Strom 11y ago
  Do you at least remember how big you thought it would be? Currently I have no idea of even the magnitude of the team.
  - redtuesday 11y ago
    I believe it was around 70-80 engineers, and the number mentioned in the twitch stream was lower (keep in mind I have no experience when it comes to writing large 3d engines. maybe my expectation was ridiculous to begin with). I actually tried to hunt down the video in which they mentioned that, but Epic is just too productive when it comes to producing videos, and I gave up. :D
    - Strom 11y ago
      I would say 70 is definitely very high for an engine. Most games don't even have that many programmers overall. Although I guess this also comes down to definitions. Like do the IDE/tool builders also go under the engine team? Then 70 isn't too high.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

pjmlp 11y ago

My favourite items: - Improved GC - DX 12 support for PC and XBox ONE - Metal as default render for El Capitan onwards

lossolo 11y ago

Another great example of positive impact of open sourcing. They open sourced unreal engine some time ago, thanks to that we see 92 changes from community alone in this release.

brador 11y ago
It's open source with a pay x% once you get big enough to make $y thousand a year. It's proven effective and I hope more open sourcers copy the business model. Imagine if Mozilla was supported like this instead of being paid for customer data. It would be a game changer.
- mrec 11y ago
  What would be the browser equivalent of "once you get big enough to make $y thousand a year"?
  - brador 11y ago
    X number of employees? The principle of the model is make em pay once they can afford it. So having X employees would usually mean the company can afford to pay say $10 per employee per year to use it.
    - TrevorJ 11y ago
      I understand what you are getting at, but that particular example sounds like a great way to convince companies to adopt a 'no OSS software on work machines' policy.
      - brador 11y ago
        And what else would they use? You have regular paid software, or OSS software that scales with your business at a reasonable price. I know which i'd take.
- Mizza 11y ago

redtuesday 11y ago

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 prefer Unreal for ease of use, documentation etc. but I also read often that they like the technology of Cryengine better (real time GI (SVOTI), better performance, better skin and eye shader for example), so I would have thought that the free source code release would stir things up. Yes, Unreal released the full source code long ago, so they (Crytek) are late to the party, and the marketing of Crytek is... not the best (to put it kindly), but why is it that the Cryengine 5 release was not really discussed on HN? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11294763 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11294763 [1 comment --> I myself] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11300017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11300017 [0 comments] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11313695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11313695 [0 comments] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11295419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11295419 [0 comments] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11297215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11297215 [0 comments]

stesch 11y ago
I'm guessing it's more an inherit problem of how Hacker News works. Good posts get ignored all the time. Just take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newest https://news.ycombinator.com/newest And not every Unreal post gets to the front page. The exact same link was submitted way earlier and if the dupe check would have worked this wouldn't be on the front page because nobody would have seen it.
- redtuesday 11y ago
  Ok, I should have made that clearer. What I meant was that at least one post on a minor release of Unreal gets to the front page (at least when I'm browsing HN, maybe later or earlier in the day the postings are not on the front page). Out of curiosity I checked my above claim and it was wrong (hehe), but many releases hit the front page: 4.11 - now 4.10 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10548139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10548139 [75 comments] 4.9 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10147368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10147368 [50 comments] 4.8 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9694885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9694885 [98 comments] 4.7 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9103050 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9103050 [88 comments] ??? (when they released UE4 for free) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9132815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9132815 [240 comments] 4.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7429774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7429774 [163 comments] But it's probably as you say. Not every interesting post (which also depends on the readers interests, of course) get's to the front page. Coupled with the bigger mindshare of Unreal, and the not so interesting Cryengine releases in the past (especially compared to Unreal) we get more Unreal postings on HN.

mrec 11y ago

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. This is pushing up against the limits of what offline renderers could do not so very long ago.

spyder 11y ago
Here is the video about it: https://youtu.be/toLJh5nnJA8?t=2774 https://youtu.be/toLJh5nnJA8?t=2774
- iamcreasy 11y ago
  Now they only need their subsurface scattering to get better. Despite a lots of improvements it still looks like plastic.
- magicalist 11y ago
  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.

stesch 11y ago

Has anybody tested this version on a late 2012 iMac with 3.4 GHz i7? I've tried the previous versions and the CPU temperature is rising very quickly. A 2012 iMac is ancient. Are current systems getting hot as well?

hacker_9 11y ago

Unreal has Unity beat in my mind simply because the Unreal developers are actually building games with their engine (Paragon), which really puts the code through it's paces and makes for a far better testing environment than an artificial demo or two from Unity, that doesn't represent what a full game really uses resource wise per frame. This can definitely be seen in the usability of the software alone, where Unity suffers some poor interface issues alongside poor performance problems.

kayoone 11y ago
By now a lot of high profile games get made with Unity, so i don't think it's really a downside that Unity Technologies don't build their own games. Unity is far less resource heavy and still the king for 2D or mobile games and the latest 3D rendering capabilities are getting close to Unreal as well (see Adam tech demo). I enjoy working with C# and have been using Unity since 2009 in one form or another. I'd like to try Unreal but it feels like it only makes sense for big projects and does not even run remotely well on my macbook.
- larryweya 11y ago
  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.
  - kayoone 11y ago
    The last time i tried running the engine it would constantly put load on the GPU (even if the game view is paused) resulting in high temps and noisy fans. I also barely got 10fps in the gameview on a 13" Macbook Pro with Iris 5000 graphics. Did they fix this for OSX ?
    - shadowmint 11y ago
      Did they fix this for OSX ? No.

Keyframe 11y ago

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.

hacker_9 11y ago
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 digging round in internals (assuming you have access, looking at you Unity) to find out what when wrong and why banding is appearing only when you use stencil shadows and apply SSAO factor X.. basically, it's still complicated, and you still have to know your stuff. Another problem with these engines is they force you into a particular way of working. 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. Finally you underestimate how much code is the actual game logic, which is also the hardest part to write. In this case the engines don't help at all, Unity even just throws you into Visual Studio and lets that deal with you. Additionally I've yet to see a good solution for figuring out why my AI are running through walls on their way to a target, without writing a ton of custom visualization stuff myself. Many algorithms take place over time (units moving, animating, etc), so you can't just step though code in a debugger as that's like looking at a landscape through a keyhole.
- inDigiNeous 11y ago
  Writing a 3D graphics engine is one of the most complex things you can do in software. It requires so much understanding of data structures, efficiency, close to the metal programming, 3D math, vectors, translations, what have you. Of course it gets "easier" once you've done it a couple of time and understand the basics, but really doing it for the first time is a hard edge to climb. Been writing my first 3D C++/OpenGL engine for the last 2 years, one of the most taunting tasks I've taken in my career. And just to cover a very specific use case of graphics rendering, not to do cover an overly generalized case like Unreal Engine is doing. Unreal engine is also over at least 20 years old, so I think you're overly simplifying the task required. Graphics engine is so much more than just figuring out the graphics pipeline, ultimately it's about flexible data management in a way that lets you achieve what you want, with performance.

MrBra 11y ago

How does it compare with Unity?

TrevorJ 11y ago
It really depends on the game you want to make. There's no 1 right answer, it could be that for the given functionality, writing your own engine from scratch might be the best way to go, just depends on the needs of the project.

liquidise 11y ago

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.

Sarkie 11y ago
Isn't it the community also?

mortenjorck 11y ago

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.

needusername 11y ago

> Faster garbage collection Does anybody has more information on this or know where I can read up on it?