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A first look at Unreal Engine 5

• lumens 6y ago
  Extremely impressive. 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.
  • aaanotherhnfolk 6y ago
    I got the uncanny valley sense from the footage and had to watch it a few times to understand why. As you say, there are still subsystems whose fidelity don't meet the quality bar that the texture and lighting set. 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.
  • xsmasher 6y ago
    The more accurate the rendering is, the more accuracy you expect of everything else. 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.
  • ben7799 6y ago
    For sure, the physics once she starts rock climbing are horrific and super uncanny. 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.
  • naikrovek 6y ago
    Hair is nowhere near realism, yet. 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.
• aswanson 6y ago
  holy...This is crazy. I really want to learn game engine architecture. Anyone have any links/recommendations for starting developers?
  • kmfrick_ 6y ago
    Read the Game Engine Black Books by Fabien Sanglard at fabiensanglard.net ! They are among the most beautiful books on game engine I've ever read. I read the PDF and then bought them both to support him because he really, really deserves it. The other articles on his website are also really well-written and super interesting!
    • aswanson 6y ago
      Thank you.
• SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
  Everyone should just keep in mind the first look at Unreal Engine 4 all those years ago before getting too too excited. Big step forward, absolutely, but it won't be as seen here.
  • technovader 6y ago
    Should I not be impressed then? I thought this was cool.
    • SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
      It is cool, absolutely, and really neat tech, but it always looks cooler in the demo than in the games that are produced by it.
  • the_pwner224 6y ago
    I'm not sure whether your comment was about a time delay before release of the engine, or whether you're implying that computer hardware won't be fast enough anytime soon. 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...
    • seba_dos1 6y ago
• trynewideas 6y ago
  buried lede, perhaps: retroactive to Jan. 1, "Unreal Engine royalties waived on first $1 million in game revenue" > 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.
  • deerIRL 6y ago
    This is a huge jump from the previous $3000 per quarter being royalty-free when they initially made UE4 free. It will be interesting to see if it helps them capture more of the indie studios from Unity.
    • metalforever 6y ago
      Yeah I would personally use this instead of Unity because I don’t want to pay royalties on a tiny indie video game that I’m barely making any money on. My games aren’t ever going to gross a million dollars. The licensing model at Unity is vague regarding whether tech workers need to pay for Unity Plus if it’s a side thing for them also (I recall there being a 100k cap).
      • avolcano 6y ago
        Well, it's worth noting Unity doesn't have royalties - you just pay per seat on a monthly cost, and it's free indefinitely* if you make/raise less than $100k a year. * (this also means no official support and a few missing features, not sure if UE4 offers everything for free)
        • metalforever 6y ago
          It is unclear whether you have to pay the monthly fee if you don’t have a registered business and are working on something in your free time, and have a day job making 100k+. I don’t like how the motivations are out of whack here . Unity makes more money if I don’t finish my game .
• ksec 6y ago
  In the past, I have always looked at Demos from Games and thought this is very good and getting close to movie quality. But that "close to" remained "close to" for quite some time. Even though It is improving every year but you can still tell it is gaming graphics. Even if some of the shots are not real time and pre rendered, they are still gaming like. 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.
  • guilamu 6y ago
    Well, I may be wrong, but I was under the impression that the Unreal Engine will also work on the next XBOX (and any PC) and that the PS5 was less powerfull than the next XBOX.
    • ksec 6y ago
      Yes, it isn't specific to PS5. I was only mentioning PS5 because it is not the most powerful machine of all and we are already capable of that.
    • skohan 6y ago
      It remains to be seen how the PS5 and the new XBox compare in terms of performance. The specs of the new XBox are slightly higher on paper, but the PS5 is doing some really interesting things in terms of optimization. Basically the XBox is going for high constant clock speeds, and the PS5 is shifting priority between the CPU and GPU components of the SOC so each gets boosted performance when it's most relevant. Both consoles are doing very interesting things with asset streaming and decompression of assets directly from the SSD to video memory which are going to open up new opportunities not only in visual quality, but in terms of how flexibly game worlds can be designed. Probably we will have to wait and see how all of this plays out in terms of real-world performance.
      • rowanG077 6y ago
        Highly dangerous of the PS people to build non-deterministic performance into their console. Developers who try to push every ounce of power out of it will hate it. edit: Maybe deterministic isn't the correct word. What I mean is that you can design a physics system that you can ensure runs on the PS5 CPU. But then the graphics boys make an upgrade and suddenly some power is diverted to the graphics and the physics system is no longer working correctly. This is still deterministic. But a nightmare to work with when optimizing for hard-real time requirements. The only way this can be done sanely is if the developers can fix this power budget and thus restore "determinism".
• OctopusSandwich 6y ago
  That looks so good! I hope they add few VR related features. I tried running the default VR scene with Unreal 4 and couldn't get it to work. Unreal looks better than Unity but I found it difficult to get started.
  • IshKebab 6y ago
    I've got the default VR scene running on my Quest. It works pretty well - there's just a slight bug with the teleport texture. 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.
  • etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
    It took a good deal of fiddling but I was able to get this starter project working with Valve Index: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/steamvr-input-for-unreal https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/steam... 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.
• crangos 6y ago
  Looks impressive, especially the reduced friction for artists. The demo hints at several shortcomings of the engine, though, especially the nanite componet. Stepping through the feature highlight (whatever the youtube compression lets through), during dense scenes geometry often gets washed out, looking less detailed then an authored model would probably look. Hard edges often appear fuzzy, and the fuzziness is not temporally stable.
• deleted 6y ago
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• robmerki 6y ago
  I am always skeptical of tech demos like this, but if Epic has truly created a way to show full quality assets at runtime without manual LOD / optimization, then this is going to be a huge process improvement for game development. Same goes for this lighting. Baking lights is such a burden, if they can simply do all of this at runtime then making beautiful games just became that much easier. 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.
  • _bxg1 6y ago
    I'm normally skeptical of tech demos, but normally they don't actually talk about the tech. Assuming the actual promises aren't misleading, this is extremely impressive. > 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.
    • jakearmitage 6y ago
      You don't have to use C++, you have Blueprints, which can control not only shaders, but also game logic and levels.
      • _bxg1 6y ago
        If you're a programmer who wants to write code, you have to use C++
        • speedgoose 6y ago
          I'm a programmer and I love unreal's blueprint. Unreal's c++ on the other hand, I hate it.
• aeturnum 6y ago
  It's great to see that graphics continue to improve, but I think the pipelining of reproducing physical space characteristics is most interesting to me. One of the things they mention in the video is using tools to measure how real spaces echo and then reproducing those echo characteristics in virtual spaces. Techniques like that have enormous potential for allowing us to use virtual space and actual space collaboratively. We'll always have games, but I'm excited to see how, in the next twenty or thirty years, technology that started in games starts to allow us to interact and socialize in new ways.
  • frabert 6y ago
    This has been done for ages in the audio production space, it's called "convolution reverb". It's quite nice, but it doesn't allow you to tune it very much, besides basic filtering and stretching/cutting.
    • aeturnum 6y ago
      Yah, they said "convolution reverb," so I think they expected audience to know what it was. Often it's not about creating new technology, but making existing technology accessible to new audiences and new creators.
      • neotriple 6y ago
        Honestly, convolution reverb is already highly accessible. It’s a feature in $50 (and probably free) reverb plug-ins for anybody that does audio. They’re relatively easy to implement and have probably been around for a decade+. As the OP said, the audio things they mentioned aren’t new or adding any accessibility imo
        • thewebcount 6y ago
          They were doing it in the 80s for music when samplers first became big.
          • 6y ago
• wildpeaks 6y ago
  It's a total game changer. Time for everyone to learn Unreal, Houdini, and Mari.
  • Pfhreak 6y ago
    It'd be my default engine if it had language bindings other than C++.
• underdeserver 6y ago
  Holy forking shirtballs, that looks amazing. 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.
  • AlunAlun 6y ago
    I agree the water was weak point, which is why they didn't spend much time looking at it!
  • mthoms 6y ago
    Watch the characters' hand. When she first reveals the ball, it glows in every direction. Then she moves her hand position to "focus" the light forward.
    • underdeserver 6y ago
      Yeah, but I don't see 100% sync between where she moves her hand and where the ball glows.
• fxtentacle 6y ago
  Wow, we'll soon be down to only one game engine. 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.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • _bxg1 6y ago
    For a while we pretty much only had UDK (Unreal 3). Unity sort of invented the idea of an omni-platform game engine that's affordable and accessible for indies. Then Unreal slightly shifted its strategy to compete with that rising market, and Crytek... jumped in too. 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-replaced-with-a-robust-solution-for-baked-and-real-time-giobal-illumination/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=engine_global_generalpromo_2019-07-03_enlighten&utm_content=blog https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/07/03/enlighten-will-be-repla...
    • runevault 6y ago
      You aren't wrong about features, but the fact it's now free until $1 million USD in sales means by the time you own Epic a cent you've made a LOT of money, in Indie terms. Depending on how tight you think your budget will be that could be important.
  • swalsh 6y ago
    There's a possibility Valve might release Source 2
• mcphage 6y ago
  > Unreal Engine 5 will be available in preview in early 2021, and in full release late in 2021, supporting next-generation consoles, current-generation consoles, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android. I wonder if they consider the Switch a current-generation console.
  • badRNG 6y ago
    I'd sure hope so if iOS and Android are on the list.
    • mcphage 6y ago
      I'm pretty sure that most high-end iOS and Android devices are significantly more powerful than the switch—I mean, they generally cost hundreds of dollars more.
      • sk0g 6y ago
        High end smartphones now cost around the same as the new Xbox and PlayStation combined would, or about as much as a solid mid range gaming PC...
      • BiteCode_dev 6y ago
        Yes but they don't have specialized hardware and have the highest power consumption constraints.
  • hombre_fatal 6y ago
    Too bad. I'm always curious about gains in cross-platform target productivity. The dream being that you build a high fidelity game and just need to drag a slider down to create a build that runs at 30fps+ on the, for example, Switch. 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 https://developer.nvidia.com/gtc/2020/video/s22697
• neogodless 6y ago
  Somewhat tangential - I was hoping I could download and run a demo to see how things look on my hardware. What are your favorite downloadable graphics demos?
  • deleted 6y ago
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• cosmotic 6y ago
  Even with all the amazing lighting and polygon counts, they still have screenshake from a 2001 game, only now even more uncanny. "Is this a video game or real li.... never mind"
• VMG 6y ago
  does it run on linux?
  • kgraves 6y ago
    which one?
  • acomjean 6y ago
    Unreal engine 4 does, so I suspect yes. You'll probably have to compile it yourself, but it isn't hard. (I did it). https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Platforms/Linux/BeginnerLinuxDeveloper/SettingUpAnUnrealWorkflow/index.html https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Platforms/Linux/Beginner...
• atum47 6y ago
  I just saw the tech demo on the ps5, really really impressive, the dynamic light, the zbrush import, the huge amount of polygons... I'm saying this with some experience as a 3d artist (zbrush) and a programmer.
• rubber_duck 6y ago
  The environment demo is very impressive - wonder why they didn't put a bit more effort in to the character, it would have been insanely impressive if the character detail was next-gen.
  • colordrops 6y ago
    Yes the character stuck out as much less realistic than the environment. I thought it was an engine limitation but I suppose it could be improved with additional effort.
  • goldcd 6y ago
    I'd just assumed it was a "hey, wouldn't this be great if Lara Croft was standing here instead" place-holder.
• CarVac 6y ago
  The only things I can possibly criticize is the global illumination lagging behind environment changes (presumably because it's iterative) and the water simulation not being movie-quality. Otherwise it's simply astonishing.
  • vmception 6y ago
    that water simulation was pretty bad and blurred out, I went over it a few times. I don't think this is a limitation of the engine because I have seen plenty of games use Unreal Engine 4 and do it differently.
• petercooper 6y ago
  I really, really, really want an Unreal Tournament 2021. It's a shame they haven't pushed that series as a showcase for the engine anymore.
  • ww520 6y ago
    Still playing UT99. The original Unreal Tournament is just something done right.
    • bloodorange 6y ago
      UT2004 was brilliant too.
  • ThrowawayR2 6y ago
    Came here to say the same thing. Hopefully, we'll at least get UT5 as a tech demo like UT4 was.
  • Danieru 6y ago
    Unreal Tournament 2021 exists, it is Fortnite. 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.
• rydre 6y ago
  Looks impressive. Lets see what Unity has upcoming.
  • rasz 6y ago
    Who knows, maybe they will finally fix freezes in Escape from Tarkov (confirmed by devs as engine problem) after 4 years of promises.
• gigatexal 6y ago
  This is insane. The next decade of gaming is going to be amazing.
• throwawaysea 6y ago
  I've always been excited to see these demos over the years, from childhood until now. Although they may not be what is actually implemented in a real game, Unreal, id, Nvidia, etc. have always managed to spark that feeling of giddy euphoria, a glimpse into the future, with these demos.
• klmadfejno 6y ago
  Can someone help me articulate my issue with this? Looking at a lot objects, they seem unnaturally detailed. Like the bugs, or the statue at around 6 minutes. Something about it makes me really uncomfortable feeling physically. Is this like a weird infinite depth of field kind of thing?
  • freeone3000 6y ago
    There's no distance blur and the entire shot is "in focus". These shots would be impossible to take with a camera. In addition, if you game a bunch, you'd expect LOD to drop with distance, but here it doesn't.
    • Jnr 6y ago
      You can take a shot with small aperture and have it all in focus. The problem here is probably some sharpening filter.
  • kart23 6y ago
    it's too sharp for me. I don't think there's much antialiasing going on.
  • friendlybus 6y ago
    There's limited places for your eyes to rest. The end scene with heavily detailed architecture surrounded by smooth desert, does it feel more comfortable than the earlier footage?
  • zokier 6y ago
    There are all sorts of weird (temporal?) artifacts in the demo, I think especially visible in the climbing scene. Look at this cropped capture for example: https://ibb.co/PrYT6pq https://ibb.co/PrYT6pq 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.
• hpoe 6y ago
  So I don't care much for graphics quality, I started moving towards the terminal and CLI for most everything in my life about ten years ago, ultimately I feel that graphics falls under unnecessary fluff and eyecandy that distracts from "real" data, gameplay, etc. 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.
  • dx87 6y ago
    Graphical quality can be a way of conveying "real" data. Here's a video where they cover the importance of graphics in fighting games, such as allowing characters to have larger move sets because the better graphics allows moves to be visually distinct to players. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSxk7THBnxY&t=2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSxk7THBnxY&t=2s
    • hpoe 6y ago
      You kids are spoiled nowadays with all your fancy graphics that substitute flash for performance, I played Warcraft Orcs and Humans for weeks, in all of it's beautiful pixelated, 8 bit glory. Now get off my lawn, zug zug. mild \s
• mathnode 6y ago
  Epic Online Services; this is the big take away for UE5, graphics will always improve, but user experience is key to long term success. 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.
• vmception 6y ago
  so PC gamers, with 8K textures and UE5, what would you like to see aside from pushed framerates?
  • ebg13 6y ago
    My #1 desire for the future of game graphics is universal support for foveated rendering.
    • vmception 6y ago
      why do you want that, out of curiosity. The description seems to mimic human eye and reduce load on rendering processor, but it seems like less information for the player at once
      • ebg13 6y ago
        It's not less information if you have eye tracking VR hardware, because you literally cannot see where you aren't looking. If anything it gives you the ability to dedicate more resources where it actually matters.
  • ThrowawayR2 6y ago
    Better physics. It's 2020 and still doors, walls, and even windows can be struck by a rocket without anything other than a scorch decal left behind.
    • vmception 6y ago
      there have been a couple games over the decades that do this well, I too am surprised how this isn't built right into the engines for everyone to independently opt for doing that
    • tiborsaas 6y ago
      It's not a technical limitation, but more like a game design limitation. If you can punch holes in any wall, then the designers suddenly have an infinite cases to handle. It could still cause problems with open world games. I'm with you btw, 100% destructible world is my childhood dream for games.
• soygul 6y ago
  I wonder if the background in the flight scene is pre-rendered. If not, then PlayStation 5 (which the demo is running on) is going to be a beast of a console.
• theandrewbailey 6y ago
  I have to wonder how much of this requires ray tracing hardware. I've noticed for many, many years that the quality of models and textures has been 'good enough', but lighting, for the most part, still sucked. Ray tracing seems to solve a lot of lighting problems.
• skohan 6y ago
  The real-time GI is amazing. Ray tracing is going to be a game changer, not only in terms of visual quality, but also because it's one of those rare times in computer graphics where the more advanced solution is actually making it easier on graphics programmers by replacing a bag of dirty tricks with a unified, physically based solution. 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.
  • _bxg1 6y ago
    I tried to figure out whether the new GI used raytracing, and it doesn't seem like it is? If it is using raytracing hardware it isn't nearly as impressive. If it isn't, then it's sheer magic.
    • skohan 6y ago
      I'm almost certain they are. HW raytracing is of the big selling points of the new console generations, and if they achieved these kinds of results without it, then I would have to reconsider my skepticism of the occult.
      • paavohtl 6y ago
        It was confirmed[1] in a Digital Foundry interview that the demo is NOT using HW raytracing. [1] https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-this-is-next-gen-unreal-engine-running-on-playstation-5 https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-this-...
        • skohan 6y ago
          That's incredible. I look forward to learning more about how they do it
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• LinuXY 6y ago
  Any chance we can get a scalable network backend to go along with the render enhancements? Fan-out workers on actors and a KCP implementation would great!
• DenisM 6y ago
  For all the advancements the demo is still essentially monochromatic. 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.
  • jeffbee 6y ago
    That my reaction to this recent UE4 demo. The whole world is monochromatic, and this seems to be an adaptation to the limits of the technology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKu1Y-LlfNQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKu1Y-LlfNQ
• willis936 6y ago
  I think it is interesting that the first thing they talk about is LOD. UE4 is famous for its bad LOD implementation. Look at FFVII Remake [0]. It's an insanely high budget game made in UE4 with top-of-the-line assets, yet some textures never load in to their high resolution versions. UE4 has earned this stain. Since they're talking LOD first and foremost, maybe Epic actually fixed their UE LOD issues this time around. 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyGl5C3Uwak&t=10m40s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyGl5C3Uwak&t=10m40s
• arminiusreturns 6y ago
  After the many fiascos of UE4 and the shit Sweeney and Epic have pulled I dont really care, I'm sticking with blender and godot.
  • Pfhreak 6y ago
    Many fiascos? Are you talking about how epic didn't pay dancers for their dances in fortnite? Or the crunch they pushed on their workers to ship fortnite content? I'm trying to think of others, maybe you could expand a bit?
    • arminiusreturns 6y ago
      Just a bit of background first. I bought in heavily to the ue4 ecosystem as soon as UE4 was released, back when it was $20/mo. After about 3 years I had enough and moved to godot and blender and being away from that ecosystems it's deficiencies grow ever more glaring. It started with promises that the editor would treat linux as a first class client. Those were lies, as not only did a community fork do more work than epic for years because they refused PRs, but the launcher still hasn't been made available for linux, requiring people to use Windows just to get marketplace assets. Now I get it, linux is a small subset of the community and it's their choice, etc, so I moved on with only a few hundred in marketplace assets lost, my personal choice and not a huge deal... Then there was paragon (at least I got a refund). Then they completely changed fortnite. Then it was just one thing after another. For example, epic was bad enough with exclusives, but they actually even pulled Metro Exodus from steam even after it was taking pre-orders! They promised they wouldn't do it again, and then did it again with Anno 1800. Then they started buying studios to remove old games from steam. They even started "bribing" crowdfunded games that magically moved away from steam despite originally promising steam release. (Shenmue 3, Outer Wilds, Pheonix Point) Their security was breached multiple times, with one single breach being over 9mil accounts. Multiple people with credit card issues who chargedback'ed immediately got a refund and then had their accounts suspended. (epic getting around chargeback fees). Epic is ~%40 owned by Tencent and has been found to do questionable things on systems. https://www.reddit.com/r/PhoenixPoint/comments/b0rxdq/epic_game_store_spyware_tracking_and_you/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PhoenixPoint/comments/b0rxdq/epic_g... https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-steam-data-reddit/ https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-steam-data-reddit/ They bought easy anti cheat (EAC) and then completely stopped all efforts to support linux (Valve had been in talks with them and discussing the linux issue). (a pretty big deal for the linux community as it affects many games present and future) They started paying off mods at the fortnitebr reddit sub which caused a mod exodus and a lot of hubub. Tim Sweeney on linux: "Installing Linux is sort of the equivalent of moving to Canada when one doesn’t like US political trends. Nope, we’ve got to fight for the freedoms we have today, where we have them today." Tim Sweeney doesn't understand the difference between first and third party: "Steam’s the largest PC store and already has PC exclusives such as DOTA2, Counterstrike, and Portal. Valve has every right to make deals with developers and publishers to secure more exclusives, just as Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and Epic Games do!" They bought "views" on youtube at least a few times (see Shenmue 3 trailer) There is no gifting in the epic game store, and if you use the same payment on other accounts (like family) they will lock that payment method. They killed Rocket League on linux and macos. The epic games store barely functions, with no user reviews and plans for the devs to "opt in" reviews so they can select only the reviews they like. They did enable OpenCritic reviews though. Broken or no cloud saves, achievements, mod support, forums, or wishlists. This is only a partial list! It wasn't until 2019 that the Fortnight dev crunch thing came up, and honestly just calling it a "crunch" doesn't seem to do the issue justice when contractors were under a culture of fear to work 70-100 hr work weeks! When someone has a repeated pattern of abuse and lies and gaslighting, you can be sure thats what they will continue to do in the future, and that is what both Epic and Tim Sweeney have and are going to continue to do. Anybody who buys into the UE4 or UE5 ecosystem is probably going to regret it... unless Epic pays them off like they have plenty of times before.
• rydre 6y ago
  https://youtu.be/00gAbgBu8R4 https://youtu.be/00gAbgBu8R4 - did Epic manage to pull off what Euclideon Holographics could not?
• seanwilson 6y ago
  What's going on behind the scenes to explain the jump in graphics quality? Hardware? Algorithmic? Does this involve some breakthrough somewhere or is this incremental?
  • random_ind_dude 6y ago
    The graphics look good because of two things: Quixel and global illumination. Quixel is Swedish company that Epic acquired in 2019. Quixel does high-resolution scans of actual physical objects(photogrammetry) and makes them available as textures in Unreal Engine. The sheer rock faces that you see in the demo are Quixel megascans of actual rocks. 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.
    • seanwilson 6y ago
      What makes this stuff possible now though? New global illumination algorithms? Better scanning techniques? Or mostly better hardware? I don't know how it compares to other games to be honest. If it's a big jump though, I'd be interested to know what's being done different and why it's being done now.
      • random_ind_dude 6y ago
        It was possible to use Quixel assets in UE4 as well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fC20NWhx4s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fC20NWhx4s The assets used in the UE5 demo are available in Quixel's website. https://quixel.com/megascans/collections?category=environment&category=natural&category=limestone-quarry&size=size-gte-1-lt-2 https://quixel.com/megascans/collections?category=environmen... The 8K cinematic assets that Epic used in the demo are between 1 and 2MB in size. So I suspect it's more to do with PS5's SSD which has a bandwidth of more than 5GB/s and 16GB of GDDR6 RAM, which allows more textures to be streamed from the hard drive and held in the RAM. PS5's GPU supports raytracing, which Epic said they didn't use in the demo. So the dynamic lighting must be something new they've developed for UE5.
• Thaxll 6y ago
  For people not working in video games in might seems super impresive but I can assure you that major publisher have similar rendering visual in there in-house engine. Super cool none the less!
• brauzi 6y ago
  Wow, how soon until AR/VR is the standard in gaming?
  • nineteen999 6y ago
    As soon as the majority of the audience clamor for it? Ie. possibly never. 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.
• flipgimble 6y ago
  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 window, projecting beautiful patterns. Soon after a deal was signed to use the engine throughout the entire studio. In retrospect that was a good decision and I have a lot of respect for Unreal Engine and Epic in general. Edit: found the video of the demo levels that shipped with very early UE3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m7T5ay_8DI 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.
  • dazzawazza 6y ago
    Remember the PS1 dinosaur demo? Yeah the whole industry is famous for this. Games are more than tech demos.
    • Mirioron 6y ago
      To be fair, Epic wanted to have real-time global illumination for UE4. They even had a lot of the work done, but it just never quite made it. The performance impact was too great. I imagine several years later they've been able to deal with most of the issues, especially since we have a lot more computational power available.
    • danbolt 6y ago
      I always wondered if that dinosaur was using the 2MB of memory in the final retail unit, or 4MB often seen in arcade boards using the the PS1's technology.
• alkonaut 6y ago
  Are there any technical details available for nanite and lumen works?
• VikingCoder 6y ago
  I've been wondering for a while Unreal doesn't just make the Unreal Browser. 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?
  • vvilliam0 6y ago
    Not unreal engine, but you might be interested in https://aframe.io/ https://aframe.io/
  • freeone3000 6y ago
    How do you make money from this? Who would buy it? Why would anyone use it? Is there a point beyond "this is a cool thing", which is pretty well captured by Roblox and Second Life and VRChat
    • VikingCoder 6y ago
      1) How do you make money from this? How do you make money from anything on computers? With Ads, with Paid Memberships, Paid Access to content. 2) Who would buy it? Why would anyone use it? Isn't that kind of like asking "who would buy the internet? Why would anyone use the internet?" Remember when Chromebooks were announced and everyone laughed because it's "just a browser?!" Well, imagine if you were browsing, except it looked like Unreal engine when you got to 3D content. Rather than looking like crappy WebGL content. 3) Is there a point beyond "this is a cool thing", which is pretty well captured by Roblox and Second Life and VRChat Do you think Roblox, Second Life, and VRChat look as good as Unreal Engine 5? Would you enjoy playing content in Unreal Engine 5 without having to install an entire game first?
      • hobofan 6y ago
• ngz00 6y ago
  That is pretty impressive, but I was distracted by the lack of anti-aliasing and the rough edges on all the models when back-lit.
• zarkov99 6y ago
  This is stunning, but scary. Even if my descendants survive plagues, nuclear war, climate change and malevolent AI's, they might not have a chance against the allure of these simulated worlds.
  • stjo 6y ago
    underrated comment
  • lotyrin 6y ago
    On the other hand, I think this probably is the least-scary answer to the mystery of the great filter.
    • keenmaster 6y ago
      If there are other civilizations out there, I think we’re more likely to be visited by super-intelligent AI than we are to meet their creators. Think of a small sentient spaceship going the speed of light with a million IQ hive of replicators on board. They wouldn’t have to bother about life preservation or oxygen or any of that noise. Their creator species would stay in their galaxy until their AI finds another ideal planet to colonize, or they could be dead and their legacy lives on in the AI. The existence of extraordinarily compelling virtual worlds wouldn’t have much of an impact in my opinion.
  • remir 6y ago
    If these graphics are impressive today, imagine what will be possible in 500 years. We'll hit a point where simulated worlds will be indistinguishable from the real world. 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.
  • pradn 6y ago
    We've had super fun & addicting games for quite a while now, and, though gaming is not a niche interest anymore, a good chunk of the population prefers to do other things, like watch TV. If anything, the fear of alluring entertainment sapping people's will to do other things is borne out with television. The average American watches something like 5 hours of TV a day. That's just incredible. In my mind, switching from that to video games is a lateral move - you gain the sociability of video games, but lose out on the often more complex stories of television. (Great video games get up to the level of prestige TV, but most have narratives only as good as basic cable.)
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• rplnt 6y ago
  > you can download and use Unreal Engine to build games for free as you always have 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.
  • asutekku 6y ago
    It’s been six years already. While not necessarily “always”, that still pretty much covers the current generation.
• knorker 6y ago
  Here it is on youtube, so that you can play it without it stalling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC5KtatMcUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC5KtatMcUw
• one2know 6y ago
  I'm sorry but an unreal engine 5 video needs to start with graphics, tim sweeney, or not start at all.
• choeger 6y ago
  Hundreds of billions of triangles? How much main memory has the PlayStation 5?
  • bluegreyred 6y ago
    i believe the latest rumors suggest 16GB unified GDDR6, but the relevant tech here might be sophisticated caching technology that also leverages a fast PCIe 4.0 SSD
    • choeger 6y ago
      PCIe 4.0 is in the order of Gigabytes per second. Hundreds of billions of triangles would demand hundreds of Gigabytes. There is no way they can calculate this stuff in real time (and tbf, they never claimed that they did). So presumably, the engine now does that kind of stuff at load-time. The bottleneck is then the place on the SSD and the scene change pace. This fits quite nicely with the repetitive statures, but it leaves a question mark for that final flight.
• muststopmyths 6y ago
  This looks nice, but I'm not sure what the practical gameplay consequences for the new tech are. I sure as shit am not going to ship a terabyte of original-quality assets in my game. It would help me produce cinematics more easily though, I suppose. Real-time global illumination looks dope. No more overnight lighting builds :)
  • randyrand 6y ago
    why not? PS5 can download/delete as you go.
    • muststopmyths 6y ago
      Bandwidth ? someone has to pay for it. users might have bandwidth caps and/or have to pay as well. Not to mention that streaming high-quality assets from the network is not going to be fast.
  • quotemstr 6y ago
    If I understand the geometry images paper correctly, you don't have to ship the original assets. The technique uses fancy topology to encode a mesh as an image --- x, y, z of each vertex being the r, g, and b channels of the image --- and pages the images into the GPU on demand. You can downsample the images as much as you want
• gautamcgoel 6y ago
  What a magical demo! That made my day. I had largely written off console gaming as a never-ending sequence of brain-dead first person shooters. I'm glad to see real innovation in the graphics space - coupled with advances in AI and NLP, I think we could see a crop of incredibly realistic and meaningful games in the next few years. 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.
  • wlesieutre 6y ago
    It certainly won't be running games that look like this, but the Oculus Quest is doing neat things with hand tracking. Recent demo shown on Adam Savage's TESTED: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0KhC1GpLSQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0KhC1GpLSQ
  • m12k 6y ago
    To play devil's advocate - games with this kind of production value require a huge investment in asset production, which means they tend to be very conservative when it comes to gameplay, because they want to be damn sure it doesn't flop. So until the production of something like this comes way down in price, the games that look like this are likely to be clones of existing successful games, e.g. Uncharted, brain-dead first person shooters, etc.
    • Panoramix 6y ago
      This demo looks more like a somewhat interactive movie than a videogame.
    • dvtrn 6y ago
      I thought Horizon Zero Dawn hit the right balance across gameplay, visuals and story narrative in this current generation of gaming and received all the praise it deserved. Now, I’ll say in my opinion, not one thing was overwhelmingly novel in comparison to the rest, but the attention to detail given to each of those elements elevated the collective experience in that particular title, the result was a game that felt incredibly fresh and easily replayable.
• forgot_again 6y ago
  I guess this might sound unreal, but I literally have not looked at AAA game graphics in over 10 years, so this looks absolutely stunning. 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.
• bovermyer 6y ago
  And now I need to pick my jaw up off the floor... That is some seriously impressive tech. The developers should be VERY proud of themselves.
• dt3ft 6y ago
  This is history in the making. Just leaving my trace here :)
• gok 6y ago
  Demos are always beautiful but how about fixing some of the stuff that makes playing UE games unpleasant? The ridiculous load times, the random stutters and pop-ins, crazy high memory usage...
• Razengan 6y ago
  Graphics tech has been good enough for a while. I wish developers would start giving more love to improving other areas like physics, AI, and speech synthesis, that can make a game actually feel and play more realistic than just eye candy would. 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCeEvQ68jY8
  • Wesxdz 6y ago
    Woah! The AI and physics in Far Cry 2 is an order of magnitude better. It makes me wonder how the games regressed to be so bad (maybe devs just don't care as much anymore?), given that Dunia Engine is used by both games. 'the game's director, Clint Hocking, noted that internally, much of the design of Far Cry 2 was haphazard'
    • Razengan 6y ago
      > It makes me wonder how the games regressed to be so bad (maybe devs just don't care as much anymore?) Console limitations might be one reason. Apparently everything has to run on every platform under the sun or you might die impoverished in a dark alley, a mindset that has inflicted other horrors, like Electron, upon us.
      • Wesxdz 6y ago
        I remember I liked Electron on first glance, but then realized it was a drag how slow it was. I really hope this doesn't get worse to the point where we need to consider x platform x proprietary GPU architecture. It will make centralized engines like Unreal the only commercially viable options for big projects with less money or exclusivity than say BOTW.
• ben7799 6y ago
  It mostly looks amazing but also very uncanny valley. 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.
  • impalallama 6y ago
    I Noticed that they panned up within seconds of showing water because (I assume) of how wacky the fluid dynamics look.
  • xxs 6y ago
    Similar feeling but starting off with the initial leap. The animation of the interaction/grab with the cliff edge looked very off - climbing without the feet touching the rocks. 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.
  • starpilot 6y ago
    The environment looks great, the anime-eyes character with porcelain skin definitely looks UV. The climbing motion is uhhh a little floaty? In any real rock climbing video, you can see that the effort is much more labored.
• surfsvammel 6y ago
  For someone with zero insight into these kinds of things. What happened with Id software delivering game engines? Do they have competing software or are they not doing that sort of thing?
  • alibert 6y ago
    They are still doing in house engine. id Tech is now at version 7 and is used by their latest game Doom Eternal (running on Vulkan exclusively). Extremely well optimized for any configuration spec and run great especially on AMD GPU.
• micheljansen 6y ago
  Interesting how these demos used to be about how awesome everything looks. That still matters, of course, but previous gen engines already achieved cinematic photorealism. Now it’s all about ease of use and workflow. No more need to worry about poly counts, normal maps etc.
• guevara 6y ago
  I really liked the fluid simulations. It's always been something hard to get right in games. Albeit, it did look pretty janky in the demo but I hope we can get some quality fluid simulations in games soon.
• agumonkey 6y ago
  It's a tech demo so I cannot expect more but it feels bland to me. More like a live interactive movie. I see no potential for gaming.. the visual and geometric complexity dwarfs the usual gameplay IMO.
  • ohitsdom 6y ago
    > no potential for gaming 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.
    • agumonkey 6y ago
      But I fail to distinguish what more this new gen will give to the latest TR game. At this point it's gpu porn, more rocks that one can ever count.
• jerome-jh 6y ago
  I am quite disappointed she does not leave footprints in the sand, at 1:30.
• johncoogan 6y ago
  Does anyone have any theories as to how Nanite actually works? I've never heard of virtualized micropolygon geometry before and it sounds a bit buzzwordy. Do we think they are just loading the full model into GPU memory, or are they baking down various LODs and normal maps at compile time through some automatic process? Either way, it's a huge workflow improvement. It's just unclear what's actually happening...
  • alkonaut 6y ago
    “Micropolygon” I assume means Reyes rendering, I.e that the polygons are created on demand from underlying geometry. Instead of various LODs you tessellate when rendering, specifically for the view so each pixel has ~1 vertex. Walk closer to the statue and it gets more triangles in tesselation.
    • Miraste 6y ago
      But how is it running so quickly? I've seen adaptive rendering implementations before, but they couldn't run in real time. If they are really using billions of polys they can't store them all in VRAM. Is the PS5 SSD fast enough to recalculate polys for every model in the scene every frame (Or even every few frames)?
      • alkonaut 6y ago
        No details yet, but hopefully that will follow soon. I don’t think the SSD but rather the GPU would be doing the tesselation... Here is a good presentation on micropolygon rendering (note: nothing says nanite works like this at all): https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15418-s12/www/lectures/25_micropolygons.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15418-s12/www/l...
        • Miraste 6y ago
          > I don’t think the SSD but rather the GPU would be doing the tesselation... Ha, I phrased that badly. I meant that, if the high-poly models can't all be stored in VRAM at once, is the SSD fast enough to load them back onto the GPU every frame?
• cdolan 6y ago
  Is it just me or does water still look terrible? 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4eFg-lnpDM
  • nailer 6y ago
    I'd say the Halo 5 video is better, but it's likely due to the artist.
    • cdolan 6y ago
      The artist at Epic using UE5 didnt do the best job on the water, you mean?
      • nailer 6y ago
        Yes. - The UE5 demo is showing off the deformation in the water but has a poor quality material that looks a bit like blue hair gel. - Halo doesn't have any deformation, just a really lovely material.
• vasili111 6y ago
  All this for sure looks amazing. But I do not think it will bring anything new to gameplay. There is no big gameplay changes in past 15 years. All shooters, all MMORPG, all strategy games and etc are based on the ideas of 2003-2005 years. Graphics are improving but most games have similar gameplay. I think the biggest next impact to gameplay and game industry will be engine that will be able to have huge zoom ability + ability to handle more than 30 000 players on the same map (of course that also depend on server software and not only game engine). Like traveling from space on ship to planet and after landing and play as a regular 1st person game but all of this with lots of players on the same world (more than 30 000). I think that is next big thing that will change game industry.
  • jayd16 6y ago
    This ignores AR, VR, and other recent genres. We just had No Man's Sky come out doing exactly what you describe. Other procedural infinite space games exist.
    • vasili111 6y ago
      > This ignores AR, VR, and other recent genres. They sounded promising but they did not made actual revolution in games. They are not mass product used by most players. > No Man's Sky come out doing exactly what you describe. Other procedural infinite space games exist. I said "able to have huge zoom ability + ability to handle more than 30 000 players on the same map". There are no games that have those both at the same time. Only those 2 in one game is what I am saying.
      • keenmaster 6y ago
        Play Half Life: Alyx and you might change your mind about VR. I think it convincingly shows that VR is the future. My setup: - OG Vive with deluxe audio kit and the wireless kits. (Both kits completely change the Vive and are in my opinion critical) - GTX 1080 Strix (factory overclocked) - 7th 6700k If I’m having this much fun on first gen hardware, then imagine next gen headsets with higher resolution, wider FOV, eye tracking, foveated rendering (enabling graphical fidelity more similar to big budget 2D games), a better developer ecosystem, more extensive haptics, built in wireless, more players (for social experiences and multiplayer), and increased comfort.
• liamcardenas 6y ago
  Game Devs: Is Unreal Engine the premiere game engine at this point? UE has been a popular engine for a long time and with the recent massive success of Epic Games, I have a hard time imagining Unity or even in-house engines are able to match the engineering that goes into this. That said, I am not familiar with this at all — which is why I’m asking.
  • jayd16 6y ago
    When you say "At the point" do you mean now with UE4 or what we think UE5 will bring? Unity will probably be a bit behind because they seem to focus on mobile more but they're not usually significantly behind. 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.
• gfxgirl 6y ago
  So I'm going to join the naysayers here and say while the graphics look absolutely phenomenal the game itself looks the the same game I've been playing for 20-25 years. 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.
  • dougmwne 6y ago
    This is a tech demo. Epic will be able to demonstrate their engine more effectively in a familiar genre. If they were to showcase this using a completely original game genre concept it would distract from where the focus should rightly be, the pretty graphics. As far as I know, this is not a game that's being developed or released. If you are not interested in 3rd person action games, don't buy them.
  • redxdev 6y ago
    This seems like a silly complaint to me. Epic's engine team isn't the one coming up with game mechanics - that's largely up to teams actually making games. Unreal may have some functionality related to commonly implemented mechanics but anything truly unique isn't coming from the code in a generic engine anyway - it's coming from the studios building on top of it. 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.
  • unnouinceput 6y ago
    this is a demo. and i prefer graphics at engine level and let the games win or lose due to their quest/lore/immersion of storyline rather than a poor choice of graphics that looks clunky.
  • thysultan 6y ago
• soulofmischief 6y ago
  Whatever the tech actually delivers, as braggadocios as the claims are (they would render hundreds of utilities and workflows obsolete), I am astounded by their licensing update. 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.
• Priem19 6y ago
  While this is completely amazing, a caveat: graphics are way less important than we think it is. I still remember every nook and cranny from Tomb Raider 3's jungle level, and when I think about it I imagine being deep inside a real jungle. It didn't matter that everything looked jagged; my imagination could go wild. 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.
  • antonios 6y ago
    Exactly why I find good roguelikes to offer the most immersive gaming experiences. Just the input you need to let your imagination go wild. But not many friends share that sentiment, unfortunately.
  • hutzlibu 6y ago
    Yeah, when all graphic is blocky, your imagination does the rest. But when you have blocky graphics together with shining water animation like in Morrowind (I think) it breaks immersion. 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.
  • rland 6y ago
    I have a sister opinion to this take, which is that artstyle is far more important than graphics, and there is a very important difference between the two that is often ignored by large game studios. \* 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.
• crazygringo 6y ago
  Wow. It seems like real-time lighting and detail are getting to the point where they're so indistinguishable from reality... ...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?
  • sterlind 6y ago
    All sorts of rendering tricks had to be played before RTX. Now that we have real-time ray tracing, models are becoming more important than shaders (see e.g. Minecraft. It looks like a real world made of Legos - the blocks make it look artificial.) 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?
    • GuiA 6y ago
      It's going to be at least a solid 3-5 years until one can say "now that we have real-time ray tracing" as far as most consumer devices are concerned, and even then it likely won't mean that all games will use raytracing for all rendering - more likely just for select special effects etc. I wouldn't give it less than at least a decade or two before we can have a mainstream fully raytraced game; and even then, I'd guess that good game artists will keep using smoke and mirrors to make effects even more stunning than what they can make by the brute force ray tracing approach. There are a few indie devs trying to make "finer resolution" Minecraft; e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQv1OEm_www https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQv1OEm_www
• seemslegit 6y ago
  "Virtualized micropolygon geometry" sounds like a laundry detergent ad.
• Geee 6y ago
  The tech here is impressive but so is the content they have created or it. Even more so. It's kind of insane that game art isn't usually given the credit it deserves. Everyone seems to think that the engine just produces these images somehow. Look, the artists had to actually design all this architecture and statues etc. It's not an easier job than actually being an architect... Producing content at such level of detail is very expensive and time-consuming and it just doesn't come automatically with the engine.
• PossiblyKyle 6y ago
  Multiple comments here agree that the water is not the engine’s strong suit, but the thing that bothers me the most these days is not the water, but the wetness (or lack thereof). Why can’t nobody do wetness well? In most games you’ll play, you can dive deep into the water and when you go out your model will stay completely dry. If Naughty Dog managed to do it well on a PS3, so can the game engine as a feature on the PS5.
• jerome-jh 6y ago
  OK there are N=10^6 triangles and that shows the raw GPU power. True indirect lighting would be N^2: this is both impossible and not worth the cost in terms of realism. So maybe they do it on a low LOD geometry or even a dirtier trick. A low LOD is probably also used for collision detection. Keep in mind that these people's job is to trick you, to the letter. Maybe there is not much more than a larger GPU and an simplified creation process in this demo.
• apelin 6y ago
  I guess we'll have to see if Unity will havea response on that. Have to say thou, having billions of triangles without sacrificing FPS is exciting.
• madrox 6y ago
  The lede seems somewhat buried here. The tech they spend most of their time talking about has more to do with development iteration than graphics. Not having to optimize LODs or light maps mean more time spent generating models and iterating on a scene. As with other kinds of software development, game dev quality is all about how quickly you can iterate. As for the rest, this demo says more about the PlayStation 5 than Unreal. 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.
• cryptozeus 6y ago
  What a Demo ! Hopefully PS5 delivers this level of gaming.
• LockAndLol 6y ago
  I hope they name the authors of the theses that they used to achieve this. It's inconceivable to me that some dude sat down and decided how everything should be coded.
• gonational 6y ago
  Was anyone else unimpressed by the water simulation (when she walks in it)? 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?
• ketzo 6y ago
  No one seems to be talking about the announcement at the end of the page: > 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.
• dzonga 6y ago
  people that make games n game engines are fucking incredible. with tools like these the future is bright for film-makers on a limited budget. which is beneficial for a diversified high quality movie industry. imagine something like game of thrones, instead of actual humans. just have it all entirely done via unreal 5. you'll still need good writers though.
• tumidpandora 6y ago
  I definitely got one thing out of the demo.. PS5 is so freaking awesome!!!
• kidintech 6y ago
  Very late to the discussion but I might be missing something; a majority of you are bashing this by saying "it's just a demo"/"games never end up looking like that": 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?
  • Jnr 6y ago
    You are correct. I am personally excited that this technology exists, but I am also sad that we will have to wait a few years to see an actual game to utilize this. 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.
• rayalez 6y ago
  As a newcomer to Unreal, I have a question. Is C++ really that verbose and difficult to use, or does it get better as you gain more experience? 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.
  • voppe 6y ago
    I've been using UE4 for VR development as a hobby for the last year or so. I have to say that I was against Blueprints and had quite to fight with myself to give them a chance, but once you get used to it it's not that bad. IMO still worse than pure code and sometimes much slower to write (complex arithmetic operations are painful), but at least it's not C++. Also, sometimes a visual representation of what your code is doing helps you simplify your code architecture when it gets too convoluted.
• leonfs 6y ago
  Does anyone know in what language was the engine developed? Is it still C++?
  • capableweb 6y ago
    You can access the source code via GitHub if you follow these steps: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ue4-on-github https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ue4-on-github 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
• kriro 6y ago
  I haven't looked into UE in quite some time as I use Unity for most of my stuff (not a game developer, just building quick prototypes for AI, simulations, dabbling in AR etc.) but the demo looks pretty stunning. 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.
• holoduke 6y ago
  Amazing graphics. No other words. This level alone must have 40gb of game asset data. Expect first games getting over 1tb soon.
• danielscrubs 6y ago
  It's impressive, but personally the Far Cry 5 engine is more so. Why? Because it focuses on the Achilles heels of game engines: humans and forests.
• revel 6y ago
  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
• perseusprime11 6y ago
  The Demo was unreal!
• chermanowicz 6y ago
  Just for fun, somewhat unrelated, here's what is possible on an 8 year old engine (if you want to melt your GPU/CPU a bit) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8kEIOBoRGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8kEIOBoRGk
• hrdwdmrbl 6y ago
  Did anyone else think that their water wasn't very good? It seemed very thick.