13 ms·

Unreal Engine 5 enters Early Access

183 points by meheleventyone 5y ago

fsiefken 5y ago
I am curious about Unreal Verse, I hope there's a book or tutorial included. It's not on the official UE5 documentation page. https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/verse-the-new-unreal-scripting-language/156617 https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/verse-the-new-unreal-scrip...
- offtop5 5y ago
  I'm a bit vague on what this is, is this apart of UE5 ? Is it a side project ? My main problem with UE is C++, I don't want to even try to download files or read json in a blueprint.
nrjames 5y ago
The sample project is 100Gb... I think I am going to need a new hard drive.
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  What are they storing that the project is that big?
  - jayd16 5y ago
    Source high res texture and model assets are quite large.
  - hn8788 5y ago
    Graphics and audio are almost always the culprit for large sized games.
  - Yizahi 5y ago
    It's a Chia mining plot and a few megabytes of demo project :)
- defaultname 5y ago
  100GB of rocks. I love the notion of their nanite engine and basically removing concern about LoD (though we've heard that pitch over many generations of engines), and it looks like they're finally improved on what was a terrible, clunky, extremely dated UI. What I don't love is that it leans into going crazy with assets. Already games are getting simply ridiculous, with new games hitting 300GB, many with an unending stream of enormous patches (looking at CoD Warzone). Instead of 100GB of rock meshes and textures, isn't there a benefit to procedural on-demand generation for stuff like this?
  - Valgrim 5y ago
    In a way procedural generation can be tought of as extreme compression!
  - ArkanExplorer 5y ago
    Since everything is just from megascans, it might make more sense to have 300gb of photorealistic assets stored on every next-gen device, and (UE5) games can just commonly load from them.
    - t0mbstone 5y ago
      Yeah, at a certain point, it probably makes sense to have a giant library of universal assets like rocks and grass and trees. There's no reason for each outdoor game to keep reinventing the universe.
      - contriban 5y ago
        So basically you’re asking for a node_modules for games!
        typon 5y ago
        More like a /usr/lib shared across games on the same console
- wronglebowski 5y ago
  Can you compile and run the sample project and have something to walk around in?
  - Animats 5y ago
    Yes. Your first compile may take an hour. It took about an hour and a half to get to a running sample game. You get all the source code for what goes on the target machine. It's here, on Github.[1] I tried to load the demo used for the UE5 videos, but that's only loadable through the "Epic Games Launcher", which is Windows-only. It's apparently possible to bash that into running under Wine, but I don't have time to make that work right now. For those who don't know what the deal is with Unreal Engine, there's no charge until you get the first million dollars in revenue. Then they take 5%. The nature of the game industry is that the top 50 or so titles generate almost all the revenue. So, rather than bothering with restrictive licenses for all the little guys, Epic just waits until a successful game starts getting media coverage and shows up on the industry charts, then has their billing department contact the game company. [1] https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/releases/tag/5.0.0-early-access-1 https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/releases/tag/5.0.0...
    - arunoda 5y ago
      You don't need the source code to make a executable version of the Game. And it won't take 1 hour on a decent machine.
Thaxll 5y ago
The joy of testing a new version of an engine, spoiler: everything breaks.
wronglebowski 5y ago
Is there a demo you can "build" with UE5 or just UE projects in general? As someone in DevOps I'm wondering what the build process and pipeline looks like for games.
- jayd16 5y ago
  Varies between engines but its usually the same as a normal code build but with way more tooling around dealing with large art assets, importing them, compressing them, etc.
- uncoder0 5y ago
  Initial build on a UE4 AAA title typically takes 24-36 hours from what I've seen without intermediate or pre-processing on the art assets. You've gotta build the engine, editor, game and then all the art and lighting.
golergka 5y ago
I don't know about the engine, but this website renders at about a single frame per second on my 2020 Macbook Pro with 2,3 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9 processor.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- geswit2x 5y ago
  The Macbook Pro in order to render things is a bit mediocre.
  - golergka 5y ago
    I also have a stationary PC with 3070 video card, do you think it'll be up to the task?
optimalsolver 5y ago
Showcase trailer for anyone who missed it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC5KtatMcUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC5KtatMcUw
sombremesa 5y ago
Critical comments on this thread are receiving an unusual amount of downvotes in my opinion.
- sombremesa 5y ago
  Including that one, which was downvoted three times in 0 minutes. Is that natural? I suppose it is. It'd be more shocking if companies weren't shilling on these platforms. I have to admit I haven't been countering this with upvotes on my part, which is a fairly simple solution. In retrospect astroturfing [0] is not the appropriate term, previous discussion on that here [1]. Shilling on the other hand is the correct term - but there doesn't appear to be a meaningful way to distinguish between paid and unpaid shills as an observer. Perhaps my comment should've been more along the lines of "there are dissenting voices that have been buried," which on Reddit would be a callout that says "sort by controversial". Unfortunately, neither is useful for comments that aren't top-level. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19418177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19418177
  - GordonS 5y ago
    I presume the OPs comment is getting down voted because they made an unsubstantiated accusation of shilling - pretty sure that's against the HN rules, but in any case HN users tend to take a dim view of this behaviour.
  - dang 5y ago
    You broke the site guidelines with this comment too. Please read them to the end: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- frakkingcylons 5y ago
  If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and they'll look at the data.
zemo 5y ago
all I wanted to see was the new UI and they show it, so I'm glad. Definitely looks like they took some inspiration from the Blender 2.8 UI. It looks really nice.
atum47 5y ago
Just saw the video on youtube. Amazing. Las year when I was between jobs I took a shot at creating my own 3D engine and I know how much work it is. Congratulations.
honkycat 5y ago
I've used both Unreal and Unity for hobby projects, and as a developer I prefer Unreal Engine. Unfortunately, I've been unable to use Unreal for game jams. The reason? Collaboration! I tried to get my team set up with Unreal Engine and git, but it ended up being a disaster where the team didn't have the time to figure it out. I also don't want to host my own subversion or perforce, and I also don't want to pay an arm and a leg for a hosted version. On Unity, I pay $30/mo. You scroll to the "collaboration" tab, hit "sync" and your changes are in the cloud. It works great, my artist were immediately able to start syncing their changes. I think in general Unreal is a more "professional, big teams" tool, and does not target the smaller market.
- zemo 5y ago
  most game studios don't use git to manage their games. It's becoming more common but it is by no means a standard in games. The git integration in UE4 is very, very bad. It uses perforce terminology to describe git concepts, often to very confusing ends.
  - honkycat 5y ago
    Yep, and perforce is expensive!
  - Negitivefrags 5y ago
    For good reason. Git is not well suited for games. Yes there are solutions to work around it’s issues but it’s not a natural fit at all.
    - binthere 5y ago
      Git LFS is not bad if that's the only thing you're referring. I've used Git for plenty of games, never had a single issue.
    - jayd16 5y ago
      With git LFS it works fine for game dev. The main thing it still fails at is the artist workflow. Git's solution to check out single files or ignore folders is still experimental and no GUI supports it yet. I love git but P4 is still better if your workflow is on large single files.
typon 5y ago
Is there any research published detailing how the Nanite "virtualized geometry" system works?
- Agentlien 5y ago
  There is this now, someone trying to explain it after looking at it in RenderDoc: http://www.elopezr.com/a-macro-view-of-nanite/ http://www.elopezr.com/a-macro-view-of-nanite/ There's a little bit to be learned from the official documentation, too: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/RenderingFeatures/Nanite/ https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/RenderingFeatures/Na...
snarfy 5y ago
Will there be ever be another Tournament or are we stuck with Fortnite?
- some-guy 5y ago
  I have a group of friends that I play Xonotic[1] with occasionally. Free-software, easy to get started, cross-platform. It scratches the UT/ Quake3 itch without having to deal with CD-keys and backwards compatibility with friends. [1] https://xonotic.org/ https://xonotic.org/
- jimbob45 5y ago
  UT2k4 has virtually anything you could possibly want out of a UT game.
  - snarfy 5y ago
    People still play that old game?
    - recursive 5y ago
      Only if they don't want to be stuck with fortnite.
- adamrezich 5y ago
  there was gonna be but it didn't work out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Tournament_(cancelled_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Tournament_(cancelled_v... the "arena shooter" genre is kind of dead these days, sadly
  - doublerebel 5y ago
    I've been playing Hyper Dash on Quest and it is actually really fun. Maps are well laid out and the movement mechanics are unique yet intuitive. Good community as well. It's the first arena shooter in years that has made me want to play again and again.
  - 5y ago
101008 5y ago
What's the MVP equivalent of a game? If you want to make a startup, even if you are planning in two years to have a whole team of devops, etc, you can start small doing a MVP with one person (or two), etc. I always tried to do something similar but it seems impossible in videogames, unless you are aiming a 2D mobile game.
- iaml 5y ago
  Early access? Some of the games released this way are very rough, but have at least a level or two worth of gameplay.
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  We are working on a 3d mobile game and we have both the concept of mvp and vertical slices. Vertical slice is the product we show to management.It's crude and only has the most core elements. No music very few sounds no introduction. Something similar to a prealpha product that you can play with. MVP in our company is like beta products that you put on the stores, those early access ones. You get full audio, polished visuals, full FTUE and the means of payment, etc. Basically a full game but with a bery limited amount of gameplay contents. Say Doom but only with e1m1 and e1m2. Then we grow from there and add a lot of things if it looks good. We first push the MVP (early access) to Tier-3 countries and then gradually open access to all countries if the revenue looks good. We kill it if it doesn't pose a positive return after some tweaking. The majority of programming frameworks are done at this stage but new contents still need code here and there. Eventually you are planning new major features e. g. pvp that needs new frameworks but that's probably months after MVP.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  Really depends on who you are selling to. If you look at things as a startup you are selling to both investors and your customers. From a games perspective the customer is actually much more picky than investors and the market is hard to get discovered in. Your MVP is a finished game. For industry investors (publishers) it depends on your pedigree and connections to a large extent. No name, first time indies will find it hard to get a bad publishing deal without a nearly complete game. Well connected industry veterans will have a deal worth millions based on a pitch alone even prior to starting a studio. For more traditional startup investors you need pedigree, an idea of how you'll scale, some evidence that you can actually build the thing and to be in a segment hitting the zeitgeist. For example over the last few years doing something with mobile GaaS, VR/AR, blockchain, cloud streaming/native and so on.
pella 5y ago
release notes: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/ReleaseNotes/ https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/ReleaseNotes/
trishume 5y ago
I really hope we get more technical information on how Lumen and Nanite work, and additionally that Epic doesn't patent the techniques in either of them. A patent on either would make me so sad, 20 years is really long in software, absent Epic's amazing work I expect we would have something else like it in like 3 years given what we've seen in things like http://dreams.mediamolecule.com/ http://dreams.mediamolecule.com/.
- flipgimble 5y ago
  A lot of information has been released here: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/RenderingFeatures/Nanite/ https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/RenderingFeatures/Na... and here https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/RenderingFeatures/Lumen/TechOverview/ https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/RenderingFeatures/Lu... There is also a source code release if you want to dive into that level of detail: https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/releases/tag/5.0.0-early-access-1 https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/releases/tag/5.0.0... I don't think the released details are that surprising to those working on realtime computer graphics, but the engineering details and tradeoffs are certainly interesting. Epic has the budget and business case to allocate a team, including some of the best graphics engineers in the industry, to do R&D for over a year to make this a reality.
  - jayd16 5y ago
    So Nanite is just traditional LOD baking implemented in a wholistic and automatic way? The major difference seems to be they've done the work end to end to handle all the occlusion corner cases as well as a sophisticated mesh and texture streaming implementation that targets modern SSDs.
    - flipgimble 5y ago
      I’m not an expert on this, but there seems to be a custom GPU renderer optimized for dense triangle meshes, with its own occlusion pass. The LOD is also calculated based on clusters, multiple per-mesh with way to fix seams between cluster at different levels. This works best with very dense meshes such as those from photogrammetry or zbrush sculpted.
zionic 5y ago
Between virtualized geometry and raytracing the amount of work to make a game is steadily going down. Artists can simply make objects at full quality (no more manual LOD creation!) and put stuff in a scene and the lights _just work_.
- incrudible 5y ago
  I'll believe it when I see it. In my experience, anything Unreal takes a long time to download, forever to build and then another eternity to cook the assets.
- needle0 5y ago
  …and then management asks you to make a Nintendo Switch version.
- flohofwoe 5y ago
  Some specific workflows may improve and be more efficient here and there, but it would be the first time in history if this would mean games are cheaper to produce, instead the scope will increase. As for LOD creation, there are things like https://www.simplygon.com/ https://www.simplygon.com/ already.
- ksec 5y ago
  My understanding is that this shorten the time in some cases, but most Artist being perfectionist meant they will continue to use their time refining other things or more work being assigned. Basically quality may go up in this case, but cost isn't going down at all. I have been wondering for a long time if there are tools or massive innovation that bring the cost of building games down by a significant amount.
- jayd16 5y ago
  Its a good think but this increases work. The amount of detail that needs to be created continues to skyrocket. And it never "just works."
- caladei 5y ago
  I'm not an artist and I still can't wait to get a closer look at their new geometry renderer tech. The UE5 early access branch is already on github, this is gonna be wild. I also saw they are planning to deprecate raytracing and... use lumen for everything? Wonder what Nvidia says to that. But with the next-gen consoles not using RTX cards I guess this is a reasonable move by epic.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
runawaybottle 5y ago
Lol, why is their mobile site so fucked up?
MR4D 5y ago
Glad to see that the Epic/Apple war hasn't boiled over to this. From the website: "What platforms does UE5 Early Access support?" "Unreal Engine 5 Early Access broadly supports the same platforms as UE4—next‑generation consoles, current‐generation consoles, Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android..."
- ramshanker 5y ago
  Apple initially banned the UE too, but court gave preliminary injunction to decouple UE from Epic since both are under different Developer Account, under two differently registered companies.
  - kingsleyopara 5y ago
    Same payment information though(!)
- theandrewbailey 5y ago
  It almost did: "The motion centers on iOS support for the Unreal Engine, which Apple has threatened to revoke as part of Epic’s broader loss of developer privileges. Epic has asked the court to restrain Apple from revoking that access while the case is ongoing." https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/23/21397369/epic-apple-fortnite-lawsuit-ios-microsoft-developer-tax https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/23/21397369/epic-apple-fortn...
- Eduard 5y ago
  30 percent revenue cut is still better than 100 percent missed sale.
wdb 5y ago
Do they use Unreal Engine 5 for Mandolorian?
- vernie 5y ago
  I believe they used UE4 for season 1 and switched over to an internally-developed engine for season 2.
- packetslave 5y ago
  They used UE4 to run The Volume in season 1. For season 2, ILM developed their own real-time render engine (Helios).
  - ksec 5y ago
    Thx. I didn't know that and did a search on it [1], some more details here [2], [3] but they still dont explain why they dropped Unreal and made their own in technical details. I guess partly to protect their IP partly to protect Unreal's PR. I am also wondering how much did it cost for them to develop their own Rendering Engine. Or could it be Epic was too busy with Unreal 5 they dont have the manpower to help ILM for their specific feature request. [1] https://80.lv/articles/a-look-at-ilm-s-work-on-the-mandalorian-s-sequel/ https://80.lv/articles/a-look-at-ilm-s-work-on-the-mandalori... [2] https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/mandalorian-season-2-virtual-production-innovations/ https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/mandalorian-season-2-virt... [3] https://www.engadget.com/the-mandalorian-season-two-stagecraft-2-0-225548912.html https://www.engadget.com/the-mandalorian-season-two-stagecra...
    - packetslave 5y ago
      I found an article in Variety [1] that says "Additionally, ILM has a proprietary real-time engine dubbed Helios, based on technology developed at Pixar" which sounds like they adapted it from Renderman rather than build something entirely new from scratch. Pixar has been working on adding real-time/GPU capability to Renderman forever (supposedly it's finally coming to the public in RM24. We'll see). [1] https://variety.com/2019/biz/features/video-game-engines-visual-effects-real-time-1203214992/ https://variety.com/2019/biz/features/video-game-engines-vis...
foxhill 5y ago
looking through the release info, it states that linux doesn't (currently) have nanite or lumen support. nanite might be tightly coupled to the IO subsystem on windows (a bit rough, but it's.. understandable, almost..), but i'm a bit perplexed as to why their lighting engine is a windows only product. oh, they've totally released the source code for it - guess we can find out!
- HellDunkel 5y ago
  lumen seems to do light accumulation by raytracing which in turn requires Direct 3d/RTX, hence windows (for now)
  - incrudible 5y ago
    Neither Nanite nor Lumen use raytracing. Source: they said so, somewhere.
    - HellDunkel 5y ago
      I am very confident lumen uses raytracing to accumulate global illumination. Notice the delay when light direction changes. No Rays, no GI.
      - incrudible 5y ago
        I've looked it up [1]: Lumen uses ray tracing to solve indirect lighting, but not triangle ray tracing," explains Daniel Wright, technical director of graphics at Epic. "Lumen traces rays against a scene representation consisting of signed distance fields, voxels and height fields. As a result, it requires no special ray tracing hardware. So, it technically does use a kind of raytracing, but not the hardware triangle raytracing that requires DXR. [1] https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-unreal-engine-5-playstation-5-tech-demo-analysis https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-unrea... Distance-field raytracing isn't a new thing in UE either, they've been using it for shadows and AO for a while.
sixQuarks 5y ago
Does Unreal let you develop any kind of game you want using their engine? Are there any restricted subjects?
- geswit2x 5y ago
  There is no restrictions. You can use the Blueprints (a kind of drag&drop visual programming) or C++ language.
- unusual-name 5y ago
  For gambling games you need a custom license, but other than that I don't think there are any other restrictions.
- MattRix 5y ago
  They used to not allow gambling products, which required a specific license, but that restriction was removed from UE4 at some point in the past couple years. On the other hand, Unity does still require a specific gambling license.
ImprobableTruth 5y ago
Does anyone know how they texture those monstrous meshes? Available 3D packages certainly couldn't handle it directly.
- thu2111 5y ago
  Quixel Megascans are based on photogrammetry. So they're taking lots of photos of real world objects and generating the meshes from laser scans. They aren't built by hand.
  - ImprobableTruth 5y ago
    The golem from the sample project isn't just stitched together scans, it's definitely built by hand.
    - thu2111 5y ago
      The video says that parts of the golem's armor are in fact megascans, iirc. But yes obviously some parts of it are manually modeled. I don't see why that's a problem - people have been making film quality assets for many years. The only thing that's new is it can run in real time now without a lot of work.
      - ImprobableTruth 5y ago
        No, they just mention that it's made out of nanite meshes (the entire golem, that is). >I don't see why that's a problem - people have been making film quality assets for many years. Because there is no software in existence that allows you to UV a 20 million poly model. Automatic methods will crash and for manual methods the software will just be unusably slow. The only way to texture such a large mesh is to either 1) split it up and uv small parts individually. This would take ages, requiring at least a magnitude more time than the usual approach. This just isn't economical even for your average hero asset. 2) Create a low poly mesh (and not just by decimating, or you'll get bad UVs), but they're marketing Nanite as if you _don't_ have to do this ("straight from zbrush") and if you have to do this, while still very impressive obviously, it won't revolutionize the workflow like people think it will.

I am curious about Unreal Verse, I hope there's a book or tutorial included. It's not on the official UE5 documentation page. https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/verse-the-new-unreal-scripting-language/156617 https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/verse-the-new-unreal-scrip...

offtop5 5y ago
I'm a bit vague on what this is, is this apart of UE5 ? Is it a side project ? My main problem with UE is C++, I don't want to even try to download files or read json in a blueprint.

nrjames 5y ago

The sample project is 100Gb... I think I am going to need a new hard drive.

TchoBeer 5y ago
What are they storing that the project is that big?
- jayd16 5y ago
  Source high res texture and model assets are quite large.
- hn8788 5y ago
  Graphics and audio are almost always the culprit for large sized games.
- Yizahi 5y ago
  It's a Chia mining plot and a few megabytes of demo project :)
defaultname 5y ago
100GB of rocks. I love the notion of their nanite engine and basically removing concern about LoD (though we've heard that pitch over many generations of engines), and it looks like they're finally improved on what was a terrible, clunky, extremely dated UI. What I don't love is that it leans into going crazy with assets. Already games are getting simply ridiculous, with new games hitting 300GB, many with an unending stream of enormous patches (looking at CoD Warzone). Instead of 100GB of rock meshes and textures, isn't there a benefit to procedural on-demand generation for stuff like this?
- Valgrim 5y ago
  In a way procedural generation can be tought of as extreme compression!
- ArkanExplorer 5y ago
  Since everything is just from megascans, it might make more sense to have 300gb of photorealistic assets stored on every next-gen device, and (UE5) games can just commonly load from them.
  - t0mbstone 5y ago
    Yeah, at a certain point, it probably makes sense to have a giant library of universal assets like rocks and grass and trees. There's no reason for each outdoor game to keep reinventing the universe.
    - contriban 5y ago
      So basically you’re asking for a node_modules for games!
      - typon 5y ago
        More like a /usr/lib shared across games on the same console
wronglebowski 5y ago
Can you compile and run the sample project and have something to walk around in?
- Animats 5y ago
  Yes. Your first compile may take an hour. It took about an hour and a half to get to a running sample game. You get all the source code for what goes on the target machine. It's here, on Github.[1] I tried to load the demo used for the UE5 videos, but that's only loadable through the "Epic Games Launcher", which is Windows-only. It's apparently possible to bash that into running under Wine, but I don't have time to make that work right now. For those who don't know what the deal is with Unreal Engine, there's no charge until you get the first million dollars in revenue. Then they take 5%. The nature of the game industry is that the top 50 or so titles generate almost all the revenue. So, rather than bothering with restrictive licenses for all the little guys, Epic just waits until a successful game starts getting media coverage and shows up on the industry charts, then has their billing department contact the game company. [1] https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/releases/tag/5.0.0-early-access-1 https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/releases/tag/5.0.0...
  - arunoda 5y ago
    You don't need the source code to make a executable version of the Game. And it won't take 1 hour on a decent machine.

Thaxll 5y ago

The joy of testing a new version of an engine, spoiler: everything breaks.

wronglebowski 5y ago

Is there a demo you can "build" with UE5 or just UE projects in general? As someone in DevOps I'm wondering what the build process and pipeline looks like for games.

jayd16 5y ago
Varies between engines but its usually the same as a normal code build but with way more tooling around dealing with large art assets, importing them, compressing them, etc.
uncoder0 5y ago
Initial build on a UE4 AAA title typically takes 24-36 hours from what I've seen without intermediate or pre-processing on the art assets. You've gotta build the engine, editor, game and then all the art and lighting.

golergka 5y ago

I don't know about the engine, but this website renders at about a single frame per second on my 2020 Macbook Pro with 2,3 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9 processor.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
geswit2x 5y ago
The Macbook Pro in order to render things is a bit mediocre.
- golergka 5y ago
  I also have a stationary PC with 3070 video card, do you think it'll be up to the task?

optimalsolver 5y ago

Showcase trailer for anyone who missed it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC5KtatMcUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC5KtatMcUw

sombremesa 5y ago

Critical comments on this thread are receiving an unusual amount of downvotes in my opinion.

sombremesa 5y ago
Including that one, which was downvoted three times in 0 minutes. Is that natural? I suppose it is. It'd be more shocking if companies weren't shilling on these platforms. I have to admit I haven't been countering this with upvotes on my part, which is a fairly simple solution. In retrospect astroturfing [0] is not the appropriate term, previous discussion on that here [1]. Shilling on the other hand is the correct term - but there doesn't appear to be a meaningful way to distinguish between paid and unpaid shills as an observer. Perhaps my comment should've been more along the lines of "there are dissenting voices that have been buried," which on Reddit would be a callout that says "sort by controversial". Unfortunately, neither is useful for comments that aren't top-level. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19418177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19418177
- GordonS 5y ago
  I presume the OPs comment is getting down voted because they made an unsubstantiated accusation of shilling - pretty sure that's against the HN rules, but in any case HN users tend to take a dim view of this behaviour.
- dang 5y ago
  You broke the site guidelines with this comment too. Please read them to the end: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
frakkingcylons 5y ago
If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and they'll look at the data.

zemo 5y ago

all I wanted to see was the new UI and they show it, so I'm glad. Definitely looks like they took some inspiration from the Blender 2.8 UI. It looks really nice.

atum47 5y ago

Just saw the video on youtube. Amazing. Las year when I was between jobs I took a shot at creating my own 3D engine and I know how much work it is. Congratulations.

honkycat 5y ago

I've used both Unreal and Unity for hobby projects, and as a developer I prefer Unreal Engine. Unfortunately, I've been unable to use Unreal for game jams. The reason? Collaboration! I tried to get my team set up with Unreal Engine and git, but it ended up being a disaster where the team didn't have the time to figure it out. I also don't want to host my own subversion or perforce, and I also don't want to pay an arm and a leg for a hosted version. On Unity, I pay $30/mo. You scroll to the "collaboration" tab, hit "sync" and your changes are in the cloud. It works great, my artist were immediately able to start syncing their changes. I think in general Unreal is a more "professional, big teams" tool, and does not target the smaller market.

zemo 5y ago
most game studios don't use git to manage their games. It's becoming more common but it is by no means a standard in games. The git integration in UE4 is very, very bad. It uses perforce terminology to describe git concepts, often to very confusing ends.
- honkycat 5y ago
  Yep, and perforce is expensive!
- Negitivefrags 5y ago
  For good reason. Git is not well suited for games. Yes there are solutions to work around it’s issues but it’s not a natural fit at all.
  - binthere 5y ago
    Git LFS is not bad if that's the only thing you're referring. I've used Git for plenty of games, never had a single issue.
  - jayd16 5y ago
    With git LFS it works fine for game dev. The main thing it still fails at is the artist workflow. Git's solution to check out single files or ignore folders is still experimental and no GUI supports it yet. I love git but P4 is still better if your workflow is on large single files.

typon 5y ago

Is there any research published detailing how the Nanite "virtualized geometry" system works?

Agentlien 5y ago
There is this now, someone trying to explain it after looking at it in RenderDoc: http://www.elopezr.com/a-macro-view-of-nanite/ http://www.elopezr.com/a-macro-view-of-nanite/ There's a little bit to be learned from the official documentation, too: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/RenderingFeatures/Nanite/ https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/RenderingFeatures/Na...

snarfy 5y ago

Will there be ever be another Tournament or are we stuck with Fortnite?

some-guy 5y ago
I have a group of friends that I play Xonotic[1] with occasionally. Free-software, easy to get started, cross-platform. It scratches the UT/ Quake3 itch without having to deal with CD-keys and backwards compatibility with friends. [1] https://xonotic.org/ https://xonotic.org/
jimbob45 5y ago
UT2k4 has virtually anything you could possibly want out of a UT game.
- snarfy 5y ago
  People still play that old game?
  - recursive 5y ago
    Only if they don't want to be stuck with fortnite.
adamrezich 5y ago
there was gonna be but it didn't work out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Tournament_(cancelled_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_Tournament_(cancelled_v... the "arena shooter" genre is kind of dead these days, sadly
- doublerebel 5y ago
  I've been playing Hyper Dash on Quest and it is actually really fun. Maps are well laid out and the movement mechanics are unique yet intuitive. Good community as well. It's the first arena shooter in years that has made me want to play again and again.
- 5y ago

101008 5y ago

What's the MVP equivalent of a game? If you want to make a startup, even if you are planning in two years to have a whole team of devops, etc, you can start small doing a MVP with one person (or two), etc. I always tried to do something similar but it seems impossible in videogames, unless you are aiming a 2D mobile game.

iaml 5y ago
Early access? Some of the games released this way are very rough, but have at least a level or two worth of gameplay.
markus_zhang 5y ago
We are working on a 3d mobile game and we have both the concept of mvp and vertical slices. Vertical slice is the product we show to management.It's crude and only has the most core elements. No music very few sounds no introduction. Something similar to a prealpha product that you can play with. MVP in our company is like beta products that you put on the stores, those early access ones. You get full audio, polished visuals, full FTUE and the means of payment, etc. Basically a full game but with a bery limited amount of gameplay contents. Say Doom but only with e1m1 and e1m2. Then we grow from there and add a lot of things if it looks good. We first push the MVP (early access) to Tier-3 countries and then gradually open access to all countries if the revenue looks good. We kill it if it doesn't pose a positive return after some tweaking. The majority of programming frameworks are done at this stage but new contents still need code here and there. Eventually you are planning new major features e. g. pvp that needs new frameworks but that's probably months after MVP.
meheleventyone 5y ago
Really depends on who you are selling to. If you look at things as a startup you are selling to both investors and your customers. From a games perspective the customer is actually much more picky than investors and the market is hard to get discovered in. Your MVP is a finished game. For industry investors (publishers) it depends on your pedigree and connections to a large extent. No name, first time indies will find it hard to get a bad publishing deal without a nearly complete game. Well connected industry veterans will have a deal worth millions based on a pitch alone even prior to starting a studio. For more traditional startup investors you need pedigree, an idea of how you'll scale, some evidence that you can actually build the thing and to be in a segment hitting the zeitgeist. For example over the last few years doing something with mobile GaaS, VR/AR, blockchain, cloud streaming/native and so on.

pella 5y ago

release notes: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/ReleaseNotes/ https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/ReleaseNotes/

trishume 5y ago

I really hope we get more technical information on how Lumen and Nanite work, and additionally that Epic doesn't patent the techniques in either of them. A patent on either would make me so sad, 20 years is really long in software, absent Epic's amazing work I expect we would have something else like it in like 3 years given what we've seen in things like http://dreams.mediamolecule.com/ http://dreams.mediamolecule.com/.

flipgimble 5y ago
A lot of information has been released here: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/RenderingFeatures/Nanite/ https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/RenderingFeatures/Na... and here https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/RenderingFeatures/Lumen/TechOverview/ https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/RenderingFeatures/Lu... There is also a source code release if you want to dive into that level of detail: https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/releases/tag/5.0.0-early-access-1 https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/releases/tag/5.0.0... I don't think the released details are that surprising to those working on realtime computer graphics, but the engineering details and tradeoffs are certainly interesting. Epic has the budget and business case to allocate a team, including some of the best graphics engineers in the industry, to do R&D for over a year to make this a reality.
- jayd16 5y ago
  So Nanite is just traditional LOD baking implemented in a wholistic and automatic way? The major difference seems to be they've done the work end to end to handle all the occlusion corner cases as well as a sophisticated mesh and texture streaming implementation that targets modern SSDs.
  - flipgimble 5y ago
    I’m not an expert on this, but there seems to be a custom GPU renderer optimized for dense triangle meshes, with its own occlusion pass. The LOD is also calculated based on clusters, multiple per-mesh with way to fix seams between cluster at different levels. This works best with very dense meshes such as those from photogrammetry or zbrush sculpted.

zionic 5y ago

Between virtualized geometry and raytracing the amount of work to make a game is steadily going down. Artists can simply make objects at full quality (no more manual LOD creation!) and put stuff in a scene and the lights _just work_.

incrudible 5y ago
I'll believe it when I see it. In my experience, anything Unreal takes a long time to download, forever to build and then another eternity to cook the assets.
needle0 5y ago
…and then management asks you to make a Nintendo Switch version.
flohofwoe 5y ago
Some specific workflows may improve and be more efficient here and there, but it would be the first time in history if this would mean games are cheaper to produce, instead the scope will increase. As for LOD creation, there are things like https://www.simplygon.com/ https://www.simplygon.com/ already.
ksec 5y ago
My understanding is that this shorten the time in some cases, but most Artist being perfectionist meant they will continue to use their time refining other things or more work being assigned. Basically quality may go up in this case, but cost isn't going down at all. I have been wondering for a long time if there are tools or massive innovation that bring the cost of building games down by a significant amount.
jayd16 5y ago
Its a good think but this increases work. The amount of detail that needs to be created continues to skyrocket. And it never "just works."
caladei 5y ago
I'm not an artist and I still can't wait to get a closer look at their new geometry renderer tech. The UE5 early access branch is already on github, this is gonna be wild. I also saw they are planning to deprecate raytracing and... use lumen for everything? Wonder what Nvidia says to that. But with the next-gen consoles not using RTX cards I guess this is a reasonable move by epic.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

runawaybottle 5y ago

Lol, why is their mobile site so fucked up?

MR4D 5y ago

Glad to see that the Epic/Apple war hasn't boiled over to this. From the website: "What platforms does UE5 Early Access support?" "Unreal Engine 5 Early Access broadly supports the same platforms as UE4—next‑generation consoles, current‐generation consoles, Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android..."

ramshanker 5y ago
Apple initially banned the UE too, but court gave preliminary injunction to decouple UE from Epic since both are under different Developer Account, under two differently registered companies.
- kingsleyopara 5y ago
  Same payment information though(!)
theandrewbailey 5y ago
It almost did: "The motion centers on iOS support for the Unreal Engine, which Apple has threatened to revoke as part of Epic’s broader loss of developer privileges. Epic has asked the court to restrain Apple from revoking that access while the case is ongoing." https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/23/21397369/epic-apple-fortnite-lawsuit-ios-microsoft-developer-tax https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/23/21397369/epic-apple-fortn...
Eduard 5y ago
30 percent revenue cut is still better than 100 percent missed sale.

wdb 5y ago

Do they use Unreal Engine 5 for Mandolorian?

vernie 5y ago
I believe they used UE4 for season 1 and switched over to an internally-developed engine for season 2.
packetslave 5y ago
They used UE4 to run The Volume in season 1. For season 2, ILM developed their own real-time render engine (Helios).
- ksec 5y ago
  Thx. I didn't know that and did a search on it [1], some more details here [2], [3] but they still dont explain why they dropped Unreal and made their own in technical details. I guess partly to protect their IP partly to protect Unreal's PR. I am also wondering how much did it cost for them to develop their own Rendering Engine. Or could it be Epic was too busy with Unreal 5 they dont have the manpower to help ILM for their specific feature request. [1] https://80.lv/articles/a-look-at-ilm-s-work-on-the-mandalorian-s-sequel/ https://80.lv/articles/a-look-at-ilm-s-work-on-the-mandalori... [2] https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/mandalorian-season-2-virtual-production-innovations/ https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/mandalorian-season-2-virt... [3] https://www.engadget.com/the-mandalorian-season-two-stagecraft-2-0-225548912.html https://www.engadget.com/the-mandalorian-season-two-stagecra...
  - packetslave 5y ago
    I found an article in Variety [1] that says "Additionally, ILM has a proprietary real-time engine dubbed Helios, based on technology developed at Pixar" which sounds like they adapted it from Renderman rather than build something entirely new from scratch. Pixar has been working on adding real-time/GPU capability to Renderman forever (supposedly it's finally coming to the public in RM24. We'll see). [1] https://variety.com/2019/biz/features/video-game-engines-visual-effects-real-time-1203214992/ https://variety.com/2019/biz/features/video-game-engines-vis...

foxhill 5y ago

looking through the release info, it states that linux doesn't (currently) have nanite or lumen support. nanite might be tightly coupled to the IO subsystem on windows (a bit rough, but it's.. understandable, almost..), but i'm a bit perplexed as to why their lighting engine is a windows only product. oh, they've totally released the source code for it - guess we can find out!

HellDunkel 5y ago
lumen seems to do light accumulation by raytracing which in turn requires Direct 3d/RTX, hence windows (for now)
- incrudible 5y ago
  Neither Nanite nor Lumen use raytracing. Source: they said so, somewhere.
  - HellDunkel 5y ago
    I am very confident lumen uses raytracing to accumulate global illumination. Notice the delay when light direction changes. No Rays, no GI.
    - incrudible 5y ago
      I've looked it up [1]: Lumen uses ray tracing to solve indirect lighting, but not triangle ray tracing," explains Daniel Wright, technical director of graphics at Epic. "Lumen traces rays against a scene representation consisting of signed distance fields, voxels and height fields. As a result, it requires no special ray tracing hardware. So, it technically does use a kind of raytracing, but not the hardware triangle raytracing that requires DXR. [1] https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-unreal-engine-5-playstation-5-tech-demo-analysis https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-unrea... Distance-field raytracing isn't a new thing in UE either, they've been using it for shadows and AO for a while.

sixQuarks 5y ago

Does Unreal let you develop any kind of game you want using their engine? Are there any restricted subjects?

geswit2x 5y ago
There is no restrictions. You can use the Blueprints (a kind of drag&drop visual programming) or C++ language.
unusual-name 5y ago
For gambling games you need a custom license, but other than that I don't think there are any other restrictions.
MattRix 5y ago
They used to not allow gambling products, which required a specific license, but that restriction was removed from UE4 at some point in the past couple years. On the other hand, Unity does still require a specific gambling license.

ImprobableTruth 5y ago

Does anyone know how they texture those monstrous meshes? Available 3D packages certainly couldn't handle it directly.

thu2111 5y ago
Quixel Megascans are based on photogrammetry. So they're taking lots of photos of real world objects and generating the meshes from laser scans. They aren't built by hand.
- ImprobableTruth 5y ago
  The golem from the sample project isn't just stitched together scans, it's definitely built by hand.
  - thu2111 5y ago
    The video says that parts of the golem's armor are in fact megascans, iirc. But yes obviously some parts of it are manually modeled. I don't see why that's a problem - people have been making film quality assets for many years. The only thing that's new is it can run in real time now without a lot of work.
    - ImprobableTruth 5y ago
      No, they just mention that it's made out of nanite meshes (the entire golem, that is). >I don't see why that's a problem - people have been making film quality assets for many years. Because there is no software in existence that allows you to UV a 20 million poly model. Automatic methods will crash and for manual methods the software will just be unusably slow. The only way to texture such a large mesh is to either 1) split it up and uv small parts individually. This would take ages, requiring at least a magnitude more time than the usual approach. This just isn't economical even for your average hero asset. 2) Create a low poly mesh (and not just by decimating, or you'll get bad UVs), but they're marketing Nanite as if you _don't_ have to do this ("straight from zbrush") and if you have to do this, while still very impressive obviously, it won't revolutionize the workflow like people think it will.