16 ms·
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 ver
by 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 agoRemember the PS1 dinosaur demo? Yeah the whole industry is famous for this. Games are more than tech demos.
- Mirioron 6y agoTo 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 agoI 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.
- Jare 6y agoI recall seeing it live in a devkit but I can't for the life of me remember the devkit specs. Note that that demo catered very expertly to the strengths of the PS1 hardware, it should run jut fine in a retail unit.
- danbolt 6y agoYeah, the sort of things pictured in the dinosaur demo don't always match what's seen in retail PS1 games. I'd love to see a dissection of it.
- Jare 6y agoSome things I can think of: - Dinos were so in vogue and so suggesting of technological innovation. Jurassic Park came out what, 2-3 years earlier? - Very limited z-sorting requirements, could likely be done with a simple bsp if sorting individual polys proved too taxing. - Polys of fairly regular dimensions, not overly long in one direction. Helps with less visible sorting and clipping artifacts. - No problem with lack of perspective correction, because textures are already shimmering due to the organic skin animation. - That black fog has always been very effective. We love terrifying things emerging from the dark, which Doom3 tech proved again, and more recently VR.
- flatiron 6y agoI could swear I “played” it when I was a kid off a PlayStation magazine or Pizza Hut demo disk on a retail (well modded) unit
- dazzawazza 6y agoI think it came out on a demo disk at some point. You got to move the dino about and maybe the light source? It's been a long time!
- ccktlmazeltov 6y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7Lk7idveeU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7Lk7idveeU
- proverbialbunny 6y agoIt looks like PS2 graphics.
- jansan 6y agoI guess they go completely to the limit in their demos, so in actual games you will see it only after the next version of their engine has been released.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- philipov 6y agoTell that to the VR scene.
- tamrix 6y agoLook up E3 game demo's and their launched comparison on YouTube. You'll learn all the game trailers with 'real game play footage' are all fake. The whole industry is filled this.
- stevefan1999 6y agoi don't think this is fake https://youtu.be/QiinO9JPUGw https://youtu.be/QiinO9JPUGw
- chedabob 6y agoI'm playing through Doom 2016 at the moment, and if anything, it looks even better than that. Could be Youtube compression, or they've added in graphical tweaks with the Vulkan update.
- adamrezich 6y agohttps://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/09/12 https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/09/12
- CodeCube 6y agoWhat a classic :) I was working at EA Tiburon when this came out (not on the Madden team). Good times.
- conradfr 6y agoA classic: https://youtu.be/4KxRp8jeliQ https://youtu.be/4KxRp8jeliQ
- artsyca 6y agoDude I spent a large portion of my early career as a web developer making rounded corners on divs using all sorts of kludges
- gridlockd 6y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdqjcMmjeaA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdqjcMmjeaA
- ordinaryradical 6y agoRead the parent again with this playing in the background for peak webdev irony.
- Apofis 6y agoRounded corners using tables and gifs?
- debaserab2 6y agoThat reminds me of the old trick of using a 1x1 pixel in an empty table cell to ensure that internet explorer would actually expand the table cell to whatever width you set it to (height still needed another trick if i recall correctly). would work, too, but then the minimum height of the cell would be whatever the line height was set to, and the line-height property didn't behave the same across browsers. It's funny how old tricks make a comeback. I see a lot of 's in React codebases to preserve whitespace around JSX tags.
- cmsefton 6y agoAnd the old trick of a 2x2 pixel gif with one colour transparent, and the other a non-transparent colour which, when set as a background to the table cell, provided an illusion of colour transparency with the main background behind the table.
- Jetrel 6y ago
- Lorin 6y agoCIG's customizations to the Lumberyard engine have been pretty impressive - believe they're working on SDF now
- Krasnol 6y agoYeah it looks nice but the price is that it's broken everywhere else and will probably be overtaken by newer engines until it reaches a release. That is...if it ever does. Otherwise, not many games made it to release on that engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Lumberyard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Lumberyard
- ascagnel_ 6y agoLumberyard is a fork of the CryEngine, and quite a few games have shipped on either CryEngine or one of its forks (particularly Dunia, which Ubisoft uses extensively).
- Krasnol 6y agoSo what is the reason the Lumberyard fork is so "unpopular"?
- tekknik 6y agoBecause it’s new?
- ascagnel_ 6y agoI wouldn't say unpopular, just relatively new. The only games I can think of running that engine haven't released yet -- RSI's Star Citizen and Amazon's Crucible. Star Citizen's long development cycle and various funding sources have been well-documented, and it still lacks a concrete release date; on the other hand, Crucible comes out next week.
- tekknik 6y agoIt’s a pretty new engine (it’s still beta) and is being used by Amazon Game Studios mostly: https://amazongames.com/games/index.html https://amazongames.com/games/index.html
- backtracking 6y agoIt's say current UE4 games don't match the details of the UE4 demos they showed on release.
- rowanG077 6y agoFF 7 remake comes extremely close though. That's the best looking UE4 game I know. It's expected that real games do not have demo levels of visual fidelity.
- crammyRL 6y agoI will say its Gears 5. Coalition has been incredible with their usage of Unreal since the original Gears of War back in Xbox360 days. They peaked with Gears 5.
- Jare 6y agoThe original Gears was developed by Epic and was a very good showcase (and probably a driver and validator as well) for the Unreal Engine tech Epic developed in parallel. They describe how this is still their dynamic when they mention their goal to have Fortnite running on UE5 before they consider it ready for the masses.
- vmception 6y agoFF7 Remake is such mixture of amazing graphics and not amazing graphics, but then the level of detail in scenes makes up for it (pretty much all of the midgar slums), I don't know what to think so I revert to "am I having fun?" which is a resounding YES! I think the Decima engine would have worked better (Horizon Zero Dawn), because the bar for 'amazing' is so high. Final Fantasy 7 requires impressive visuals for its story to have impact in its original release, in all of its spinoffs, and that bar is so high now.
- diskmuncher 6y agoFinal Fantasy 7's "cutscenes" are mostly rendered in real time. I wonder why the combat screens are not as good? Someone's hack of the save files: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfZbFXSLLtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfZbFXSLLtk
- lmilcin 6y agoJust looking at demoscene, it is possible to create amazing results with very little resources if you have right people and infinite time and resources to polish couple of seconds of it. This rarely transfers to a product that has a lot of content to be built, an actual budget, good but not star developers and conflicting requirements.
- mycall 6y agoIs Unreal Engine at all related to Future Crew's Unreal in 1992?
- pas 6y agoWho knows, they had a hard time coming up with the name. https://web.archive.org/web/20010814190955/http://www.gamespot.com/features/makeunreal/the.html https://web.archive.org/web/20010814190955/http://www.gamesp...
- bane 6y agoNo. However, the original Unreal game had some well known demosceners providing the music. - Andrew Sega in particular was a particularly famous scene musician who went under the name "Necros" and is about as legendary as you can get for people who weren't part of the Future Crew team who made Unreal. - Alexander Brandon (Siren) is still in the game industry and has done soundtracks for a ton of really well known games such as Jazz Jackrabbit. - Daniel Gardopée went by Basehead and was part of FM and the KFMF demo groups (both big deals at the time) and I think is still in gaming. - Michiel van den Bos (MCA) is the only non-American scener (Dutch) who provided music and is also still in gaming. At the time it was kind of funny and completely cool to fire up Unreal and hear some well known Necros, Basehead, and Siren songs in the game which had been circulating in BBS and early demoscene ftp sites for a while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_(1998_video_game)#Audio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_(1998_video_game)#Audio
- mrdoob2 6y agoNo
- bilekas 6y agoTheir early demos are usually really good, but the early versions rarely ship with all of them, over time though to their credit they do arrive, and often exceed the demonstrations. Some of the new lighting features in UE5 are interesting and should be cheaper than RTX overall, but will be interesting to see the mix and match which developers will achieve. Looking forward to having a play around with it.
- ksec 6y agoNot in the industry, so pure speculation. Unreal Engine's old business model were exactly that, get you excited with demos and sign up ( paid ) for their engine. And it was the same with UE 3 and UE 4. But in 2015 all that changed. It was open sourced on Github, it has a very sustainable revenue model due to the explosion of Mobile Gaming, the Gaming industry as a whole is now bigger than Movies and Music industry combined. I think it is fair to say EPYC no longer has the incentive to do that with UE 5. And because it is / will be open source, they can now actively work with many different partners ( Hardware such as Sony and Microsoft and other publishers ) to make sure those technology works as intended.
- gfxgirl 6y agoFYI though, It's not open source. Open source has a meaning and Unreal doesn't fit that meaning. https://www.google.com/search?q=open+soruce+definition https://www.google.com/search?q=open+soruce+definition
- skohan 6y agoIt would technically be "source available", no?
- tanilama 6y agoIt is open source in the sense the source code is available for you to see. But probably not on the usage part.
- wolco 6y agoIt is not open source in any sense. You can see it so that part is shared but if you try to use it you fall under a very different licease. If you try to modify and sell you can't. Modify and use you must pay. Use you must pay. Bait open source might be a better term.
- tekknik 6y agoThis isn’t true, they encourage you to run source builds instead of the editor and you are free to modify the engine for your projects as needed. In fact they’re even generous enough to allow you to post up to 30 lines of engine code in public forums. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/publishing https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/publishing
- zamalek 6y ago> To my knowledge that tech demo was never incorporated into the engine and never shipped. I'm not sure when it shipped (it certainly may have not launched with the first version of the engine), but it is currently called "Light Propagation Volumes."
- IvanAchlaqullah 6y ago> I'm not sure when it shipped (it certainly may have not launched with the first version of the engine), but it is currently called "Light Propagation Volumes." That's actually a different things. Light Propagation Volumes (LPV) is real-time global illumination first used in Cryengine 3 in 2009. http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2009/Light_Propagation_Volumes.pdf http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2009/Light_Propagatio... SVOGI (Sparse Voxel Octree Global Illumination) which is first demoed by Unreal 4, yet it never shipped due performances problems. Meanwhile Cryengine manage to get it working with minimal performances penalty (only 10%) and have shipped games with it (Kingdom Come: Deliverance) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEfqtOYjolE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEfqtOYjolE
- zamalek 6y agoYou're right, I got my wires crossed.
- vmception 6y agowow they've been convincing 3D artists that they could use handpainted imported models for 15 years one more time ya'll
- tekknik 6y agoyou can use hand painted, imported models. Painting has to do with texturing which is different than poly count. This allows you to import directly from zbrush and not have to prebuild the LODs. This tech is already in a more basic form in UE4
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- risyachka 6y agoYou just described practically any game engine demo ever made.
- trynewideas 6y agoThat video's amazing because the part of the UE5 demo I can't wrap my head around is where Nanite magically turns 1 billion triangles of source art to 20 million triangles of rendered art, per frame. And then I get a minute into the UE3 video from 2004 and what do I hear? "The scene you're seeing here is about 1 million polygons of in-game assets, which came from about 200 million polygons of source art." Then, deja vu, right into a realtime lighting demo.
- glenvdb 6y agoSo... UE5 is Malibu Stacy with a new hat?
- dtech 6y ago> And then I get a minute into the UE3 video from 2004 and what do I hear? "The scene you're seeing here is about 1 million polygons of in-game assets, which came from about 200 million polygons of source art." I know little about game development so might be wrong, but I think what that 2004 demo means is they had a 200M art asset geometry which was pre-rendered/transformed into a 1M in-game asset. This kind of reduction has been the standard for decades. What they are indicating in this UE5 demo is that the engine dynamically adjusts the LoD of the source geometry so the engine can render it, the engine directly uses the art asset.
- muro 6y ago+1 I also think they have multiple levels of detail and render the appropriate one based on distance/view. Should have said so though, as is, it's full of misleading statements (often by omission).
- rsp1984 6y agoThat video's amazing because the part of the UE5 demo I can't wrap my head around is where Nanite magically turns 1 billion triangles of source art to 20 million triangles of rendered art, per frame. I was wondering about that too. My best guess is that they put the heavy geometry items in an acceleration data structure and then ray trace / cone trace these in a first pass to get the points where the camera rays intersect the geometry. Then generate triangles on the fly from these points in every frame. This would be quite similar in flavor to GigaVoxels [1] or the (IMO unjustly much hated) "Unlimited Detail" engine [2], except that instead of shading / visualising the intersections directly they just use it to generate triangles as another input to their overall pipeline. If you look at the video closely all the heavy geometry items are static, i.e. they don't deform. This matches with a classic limitation of ray tracing as deformations invalidate the acceleration data structures used for making ray tracing efficient. [1] http://gigavoxels.inrialpes.fr/ http://gigavoxels.inrialpes.fr/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM6QkPsA2ds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM6QkPsA2ds