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[Bert]

Firstly: amazing work from everyone in this thread.

Secondly: A little off topic, but what's the best place to start for 3D game development in general? I know several kids (11-15) who would love to get into games development or 3D design, but I'm not sure where to point them. Stuff really has to be free and have lots of resources someone of that age could access.

I've had a look at Unity, but is that a dead end? Should people be looking at something like UDK instead?

 

[EVIL]

Firstly: amazing work from everyone in this thread.

Secondly: A little off topic, but what's the best place to start for 3D game development in general? I know several kids (11-15) who would love to get into games development or 3D design, but I'm not sure where to point them. Stuff really has to be free and have lots of resources someone of that age could access.

I've had a look at Unity, but is that a dead end? Should people be looking at something like UDK instead?

The engine hardly matters.

If those kids really want to get in the games industry, (and I advise them to not even try unless they are really, REALLY passionate about game development) its best to let them experience as much different engines as possible. It will open up their chances to getting in the games industry later on. Since they are children I assume that they think game development is all fun and games, but its a pain in the ass like every profession is. It has its good and bad sides, and those bad sides often get overlooked. Allot of developers don't stay in the industry longer then 5 years and that's across the board, from programmers to artists and game-designers. You need passion to keep a good aditude and survive in the industry.

Anyway, if they want to start learning to model in 3d, then I would advise them to start reading up on it, soak up as much info as possible and most importantly, experiment! and fail allot! Joining an online community like Polycount for example will certainly help. They have a great wiki with allot of fantastic tutorials that will help them get started. Plus them posting their own work on the forums enables them to to get used to putting themselves out there! Post, get critique, apply the critiques to your work, re-post, and repeat.

 

[Blizzard]

Thanks for the kind words, people.

As for early teenagers, learning to program and/or messing with 2D games with something simpler like GameMaker or Unity seems like a much more accessible route than diving into a 3D engine, especially something as complex as the UDK. Sure with enough time and info a teenager COULD do it, but it's not easy, and like EVIL was saying, games industry = horrible etc. etc.

If they insist on doing 3D, I would guess that making maps for existing games might be an easy first step. I guess some people start out with Counterstrike maps, that sort of thing.

 

[Blizzard]

For today, I ran across a thread and tutorial for making animated skydomes. There is a PDF tutorial for the original sky, and it looks like a tutorial is in progress to make a stormy sky/environment. The tutorial(s) may reference expensive professional tools like Maya or 3ds Max, but presumably the techniques will apply to free software as well. I think the guy's work looks nice so here you go!

Sample screen:

Tutorial website: http://3dbrushwork.com/tutorials/
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaoOJ3m60s0
Storm video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk2iWdjQX00
UDK forum thread: http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=800987

 

[Mik2121]

Firstly: amazing work from everyone in this thread.

Secondly: A little off topic, but what's the best place to start for 3D game development in general? I know several kids (11-15) who would love to get into games development or 3D design, but I'm not sure where to point them. Stuff really has to be free and have lots of resources someone of that age could access.

I've had a look at Unity, but is that a dead end? Should people be looking at something like UDK instead?

Jumping straight into making the 3D models and shit might be a bit overload for them. If they got enough time (and they are kids, so they surely do), have them learning from the basics. Learning how to draw, how to understand perspective, etc... if they wanna program, then dunno but there's probably some process to slowly get them into all that stuff. For game designers and shit.. well, have them play games and understand what's fun about them.

As for the engines, stuff like Unity3D isn't a dead end. I mean, there's so much you can do in that engine, but you can apply many of the things you learn working there, in other more powerful engines (UDK and CryEngine when the free SDK releases in August).

But yeah, if you're going to start from the beginning, jumping into UDK is a good idea as well. The basics are, well, very basic. But it has A LOT of depth as you might imagine.


Edit - Oh and Blizz, thanks for those links. I definitely will give it all a try this weekend. Really looking forward to learning how to make good (or at least "alright-ish") skies

 

[Mik2121]

Alrighty, first sky test done!.

http://youtu.be/de2qL83sfvs?hd=1

Still gotta get myself some better textures, the ones I made are kinda ugly

 

[Bert]

The engine hardly matters.

If those kids really want to get in the games industry, (and I advise them to not even try unless they are really, REALLY passionate about game development) its best to let them experience as much different engines as possible. It will open up their chances to getting in the games industry later on. Since they are children I assume that they think game development is all fun and games, but its a pain in the ass like every profession is. It has its good and bad sides, and those bad sides often get overlooked. Allot of developers don't stay in the industry longer then 5 years and that's across the board, from programmers to artists and game-designers. You need passion to keep a good aditude and survive in the industry.

Anyway, if they want to start learning to model in 3d, then I would advise them to start reading up on it, soak up as much info as possible and most importantly, experiment! and fail allot! Joining an online community like Polycount for example will certainly help. They have a great wiki with allot of fantastic tutorials that will help them get started. Plus them posting their own work on the forums enables them to to get used to putting themselves out there! Post, get critique, apply the critiques to your work, re-post, and repeat.

Thanks a lot for the reply (and to others too ). To address a couple of your points:

Being a GAFfer I'm smarter than the average bear about games development and the kids I'm thinking of have been made well aware of the reality of games development. They have been studying the industry in Media lessons and we've looked at the development process, jobs in the industry and the pros and cons of being a developer. They've also had to produce a game design document for their own idea after studying some real life ones like Leisure Suit Larry and Bioshock that I found online. So they're a little past the "I get to play games all day" stage.

We've also spent a lot of time looking at what makes games fun, from how to reward players, how to keep them interested and setting the challenge and pace at the correct level. Mostly from articles I've watered down from the likes of Gamasutra, but also from my own knowledge as a teacher (which is surprisingly like being a games designer). My specialism at Uni was AI, so I've been going over basic things like state machines with the geekier kids.

Most are teaching themselves Java or C++, with a little help from me (I was a software engineer in a previous life) and all have used GameMaker (which we teach to 11 year olds in IT lessons) to make simple games, then taken that further with GML and modifying pre-made engines in their own time and after school clubs. Unfortunately that's where free time and experience let me down. They're past my sphere of knowledge really.

For 3D modelling I've pointed some of the graphics kids at Blender, though as a programmer by trade this is not something I know anything about, but they're happy with that. I now have a small group who want to either be level designers, programmers or 2D/3D graphics people and I want to help them get together to make something.

A couple have found online forums, but prefer to do something with friends in real life and need the equipment to practice on, which means it has to be in school and monitored by a teacher, it also means I'd have to get an engine installed on the school image.

I've looked briefly at both UDK and Unity, and form my perspective Unity seems to have more beginner resources to get started. It's good to know that it doesn't really matter in the long run, so I'm just going to get it installed and we'll see how we go.

Thanks again for all the replies

 

[Blizzard]

Good luck, Bert. Sounds like a tough route but I wish them success.

Alrighty, first sky test done!.

http://youtu.be/de2qL83sfvs?hd=1

Still gotta get myself some better textures, the ones I made are kinda ugly

Nice moving clouds. I'm glad you found the tutorial useful. Are you using some kind of outline/cartoon shader? The girders against the sky almost look cel-shaded, if that's the right term, like Borderlands. It's nice.

If you're interested, the guy already put up another one, though this one seems to require you to have a Facebook account (oh noes).
Dynamic sun tutorial: http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=802394
Video: http://www.youtube.com/v/Dak30mkGhNU?hd=1

 

[Mik2121]

UDK June released!. And packed with lots of things.

I will update the OT in a bit.

 

[Blizzard]

UDK June released!. And packed with lots of things.

I will update the OT in a bit.

NEW FOLIAGE EDITOR!!!!!!!!!!!

Okay, sorry, but that's been like an inside joke forever. It's so good to see they finally added it since they took out support for the old system a while back. I'll have to check out the rest of the stuff.

*edit* Ooh, customizable map templates for preconfigured lighting sounds awesome.

For those who care about mobile (iPad) devices, apparently the same editor and content tree can finally be used for developing both. I guess before they were separate.

Kismet debugger! That's the visual scripting system, like a flowchart, for people who haven't used it. Having a graphical debugger sounds like it could be really handy if you have a lot of Kismet.

"Major memory and performance optimizations ship with the June UDK Beta." I don't know how much things have been optimized, but it looks like there are at least some new tools for helping you optimize your own games.

It doesn't look like there were major dynamic lighting improvements, the one thing that would be super awesome, but this is a lot of great stuff to have.

*edit* There was a one-page update about cloud brushes on the sky demo, Mik and anyone else who was interested: http://forums.epicgames.com/showpost.php?p=28520581&postcount=26

 

[Blizzard]

That's one of the default templates. If you want to just dive into making a simple map, you can use the templates, and maybe even customize them or make your own.

Side note, DX9 got 120 fps on that simple scene with the cube, moon, and animated clouds in the sky. DX11 got 95 fps or so. 25 fps drop just for DX11? I don't even know of any particular DX11 effects that would happen in that scene.

*edit*
One neat thing is since they integrated the mobile and PC development environments, all of the maps are in the same place, and you can load, edit, and look at them on the PC or, emulated, how they would appear on a mobile device. This is a simple courtyard example map. I can't seem to get AA working in DX9 and MSAA in DX11 results in a black screen though.

The default gametype and setup changed to a very simple setup, which I think has moving and jumping but no weapons, instead of the Unreal Tournament 3-ish robot and similar setup. With this change, the templates, and the default 3D view with WASD controls (I'm not sure if those were default before), it really feels like Epic has been working on making the editor more streamlined and easy to use. Maybe the Crytek competition helped.

 

[Blizzard]

That Zest scifi environment modular design tutorial was finished and posted:

http://www.thiagoklafke.com/modularenvironments.html

 

[Phoenixazure]

Having learned UDK a while ago. Some of the things that have kind of held me back from practicing making levels on the engine is the availability of the current crop of static meshes that come with each new build. Besides modeling my own, any websites or packages of static meshes one could get ahold of?

 

[Blizzard]

Having learned UDK a while ago. Some of the things that have kind of held me back from practicing making levels on the engine is the availability of the current crop of static meshes that come with each new build. Besides modeling my own, any websites or packages of static meshes one could get ahold of?

This would be good to know, if anyone else has input.

You can try http://artist-3d.com/ and http://www.turbosquid.com/Search/3D-Models/free for starters. Be aware that they may not be fully UDK-ready, and most of them are probably only for non-commercial use, so be careful if you are trying to do more than play around with the editor.

 

[Blizzard]

I haven't posted anything lately. I think the Tonka 3D logo stuff refers to a website that has 3D tutorials, but it's in another language so I can't claim to be 100% sure.

Architectural visualization: http://www.vimeo.com/23881987

 

[Blizzard]

Hey Stallion, you got your wish. The guy with the really nice bathroom scene posted the original files, since he couldn't figure out how to cook it and decided he didn't mind sharing it anyway. Tomorrow I hope to try it out, and look at making the install exe myself, since apparently the frontend isn't working well on his computer(s).

http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?p=28608971

 

[Stallion Free]

Hey Stallion, you got your wish. The guy with the really nice bathroom scene posted the original files, since he couldn't figure out how to cook it and decided he didn't mind sharing it anyway. Tomorrow I hope to try it out, and look at making the install exe myself, since apparently the frontend isn't working well on his computer(s).

http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?p=28608971

Yes! Thank you so much.

 

[Blizzard]

Yes! Thank you so much.

I did a quick run with it tonight, but I think the files in the Effects directories need moved to some specific folders, and the lighting build runs so quickly I think it must be broken. The room looks very dark. I'll work on it tomorrow.

 

[Stallion Free]

I did a quick run with it tonight, but I think the files in the Effects directories need moved to some specific folders, and the lighting build runs so quickly I think it must be broken. The room looks very dark. I'll work on it tomorrow.

Take your time, I completely forgot about it so I'm fine waiting.

 

[Blizzard]

The July 2011 UDK was released today, including post-process FXAA and MLAA options, and an amusing option for activating the console on an iOS device. There are also some landscape creation improvements.

I'd have to look into what this means, but I'm interested in this change: "Materials can now use the vector transform node in the vertex shader!"

Full details here: http://udk.com/news-beta-july2011

 

[Blizzard]

I installed the April 2011 version of the UDK beta and copied in the bathroom map files, but it still appears that some resources, probably lightmaps, are missing. I replied with details to the author, so hopefully I will hear back later this week.

For anyone interested in that, please remember that it is literally a single bathroom, not any sort of map you can wander around in. The shaders, lighting, cubemaps, and detail are impressive, but it's architecture visualization, not gameplay. I think there is a towel mesh with like 30,000 polygons, lol.

Since I figure we needs new pictures of something, have some pictures from a battle chess game that's in progress:

Latest page in thread: http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=789952&page=4

 

[Tain]

In the last update, I might be crazy, but I think they fixed some issues with CSG lighting.

 

[Blizzard]

To celebrate foliage being added to the UDK, this guy was apparently going to try 40,000 plants, but it was taking forever to build lightmass. So instead he did 18,000 plants.

Cool video (wait until music starts):

 

[Blizzard]

Oh, and have a screenshot:

Considering the videos are so smooth, I imagine he may have rendered it frame by frame bullshot style, but it looks pretty darn good whatever he did.

 

[Blizzard]

August UDK release! Video with some features: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6UkNN-LRi0&hd=1

Details:

August 2011 UDK Beta Upgrade Notes

New Movie Capture System


* Integrated Matinee and in game movie capture
o Matinees can be captured to AVI via a new button on the Matinee toolbar
o A running game can be captured to AVI via the console commands "StartMovieCapture" and "StopMovieCapture"

Material Functions


* Material Functions allow snippets of material graphs to be saved separately and shared between multiple materials
o Functions can be exposed to the function library, which is a new categorized window in the material editor
o Many new material functions have been added to the engine's function library

Material Editor Improvements


* An improved error display listing the error node type and highlighting the offending node in red
* Now supports marking by shift clicking connectors, which allows making connections across large materials without dragging
* Landscape shader compiler time improvements in the material editor
o In a test case, compilation time was 2.25 times faster

Culling Foliage Instances Based on Distance


* New "StartCullDistance" and "EndCullDistance" parameters for culling foliage instances based on distance
o At "EndCullDistance", entire clusters of instances are coarsely culled using "MaxDrawDistance"
o From "StartCullDistance" a per-instance opacity value from 1-0 is generated in vertex color alpha, for use by the material to fade out the foliage

Adaptive Tessellation


* Users can now dynamically tessellate meshes based on screen space size

Editor Improvements


* New slider for Alpha in the Mesh Paint dialog
* Improved Editor Startup
o Greatly improved editor startup times due to faster Game Asset Database downloads
o No longer steals keyboard focus when starting up
o Shows better status information while starting up
* New "Cancel" button to the Slow Tasks and progress dialogs
* You can now select all Actors referenced by Kismet in All Levels
* New ability to set and jump to bookmarks to the editor viewport and Kismet toolbar dropdowns.
* Improved foliage window scrolling behavior - only the mesh list scrolls, with the painting parameters fixed
* LOD UV settings in the Static Mesh Editor are now maintained after importing a new LOD
* SpeedTrees can now be placed while in StaticMesh mode
* "Undo" and "redo" are now supported for changes to the DrawScale boxes on the status bar below editor viewports
* New option in editor preferences menu that, when enabled, causes BSP to auto-update after modifying a brush
o This option is also togglable through the "Alt+Ctrl+U" keyboard shortcut
o Geometry should still be rebuilt prior to playing the level

Unreal Matinee Improvements

* Users can now name Matinee director tracks, and optionally display these names in the game viewport
* Now includes an Export Animation Track Info option. This exports the director track and animation sequences along with all keyframe data to a simple text file.

Other Improvements

* Unreal Cascade
o New "WarmupTickTime" member allows users to specify update time for the warmup ticks
o New Initial World Offset Particle Module includes seeded and not seeded versions
o Support for 'Color' instance parameters when retrieving particle parameters via "GetColorParameter"
o Auto-activated particles are no longer reset when resetting all particles in a level
o Set particle velocity from movement generated by the orbit module
o Mobile: Removed forcibly setting particle system LOD levels to the lowest detail
* AnimSet Viewer
o New FoV slider (fully settable range 5 - 170), FoV reset button, and FoV viewport info
o New drop-downs in toolbar enable viewing specific chunks and sections of a skeletal mesh
o Removing prefix from selected AnimSequence now supported
* iCloud document saving for iOS is now supported
* Using alternate bone weights in SkeletalMeshes simplified using Simplygon now supported
* Material vertex shaders now support local to world transform translation
* The SkinXX syntax for SkeletalMeshes is now supported in the FBX pipeline with or without materials

Release thread has more info here: http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=814587

 

[Jay Shadow]

Material Functions are cool. I was simplifying a lot of older textures yesterday so that I can use those functions in new textures in the future.

The Movie capture is cool, but I don't have the compression option that the documentation says it's supposed to have. The result was a 12 second test file at 1080p that was 2.6 gigs. After I compressed it down to 2 megs(Handbrake is a pretty awesome compression utility) it did play at normal speed, even though it captured very slowly. Live walk throughs would be tough, but preset camera movements should work well.

 

[Blizzard]

Here's an ocean shader some guy is working on:

I really want to see a video once he's happy with it.

 

[Blizzard]

Thanks to the other thread for bringing it to my attention! The September UDK beta is here, and Mac support has been added! http://www.udk.com/news-beta-sep2011

Or at least, it says the September 2011 beta has a preview. Maybe more full support is still on the way. It doesn't look like there are many other new features in this beta, but Mac might be big if the (OpenGL?) performance is decent.

 

[subversus]

tesselation really kills perfomance with no visible effect sometimes. I can make the floor superbumpy and almost flat, framerate will be the same. It's also buggy, seams are visible.

currently I see no visible gains from it, it should be applied very selectively but I've tried only simple texturing stuff.

 

[Blizzard]

tesselation really kills perfomance with no visible effect sometimes. I can make the floor superbumpy and almost flat, framerate will be the same. It's also buggy, seams are visible.

currently I see no visible gains from it, it should be applied very selectively but I've tried only simple texturing stuff.

I haven't tried to do anything significant with it, but I think tessellation is known for causing performance issues in games in some cases (Metro 2033?).

Unfortunately I feel like using the DX11 UDK has resulted in worse performance in the last half a year or so. I still long for the days of Mirror's Edge level performance, where I can do 4xAA without problems, and 8xQ if I don't mind some hitching. Presumably baked lighting was the only reason that was possible on UE3, tragicially.

 

[Jay Shadow]

Probably still a few generations away before common DX11 cards can do Tessellation comfortably. Something like a floor is probably better to use a normal map anyways since you're usually not gonna see it at an angle that'll make tessellation worth the performance hit.

It's kinda funny. I recently ran Dragon Age II in DX11 mode and I was so used to straight edged column silhouettes that the added bumps looked like rendering errors to me at first.

 

[subversus]

True First Person body source and download - http://forums.epicgames.com/threads/823325-True-First-Person-demo-based-on-UTGame

video - http://forums.epicgames.com/threads/823325-True-First-Person-demo-based-on-UTGame

Bear in mind that according to the developer:

As far as I know, Far Cry 2, BulletStorm, Crysis 2 and similar games still a use the traditional first person shooter view, with an added legs/body model.

OPFor, ArmA 1/2, F.E.A.R 1(2?), Mount & Blade etc have a true first person view.

 

[subversus]

ok...

so it seems that the engine isn't good for BIG outdoor maps with lots of foliage and trees.

I think that's the main reason why we haven't got good planets in Mass Effect and they decided to kill them in the sequel. Maps in Mass Effect were pretty big compared to what I was doing but they were bare + tesselation factor for terrain seemed to be low. And when I decided to make hills a bit smoother + add some vegetation and objects on the map that was approximately 1/5 size of what I've seen in Mass Effect framerate got such a huge hit that it has become unplayable.

Everyone who says we don't need more powerful hardware is dumb and ignorant fuck (assuming that they're not talking from business perspective or consumer's perspective).

But I have to say that Cryengine 3 doesn't have this problem at all. I made a map like 5 sizes bigger than what I did in UDK and put A LOT of foliage there. Still 73 fps.

 

[DigiMish]

ok...

so it seems that the engine isn't good for BIG outdoor maps with lots of foliage and trees.

I think that's the main reason why we haven't got good planets in Mass Effect and they decided to kill them in the sequel. Maps in Mass Effect were pretty big compared to what I was doing but they were bare + tesselation factor for terrain seemed to be low. And when I decided to make hills a bit smoother + add some vegetation and objects on the map that was approximately 1/5 size of what I've seen in Mass Effect framerate got such a huge hit that it have become unplayable.

Everyone who says we don't need more powerful hardware is dumb and ignorant fuck (assuming that they're not talking from business perspective or consumer's perspective).

But I have to say that Cryengine 3 doesn't have this problem at all. I made a map like 5 sizes bigger than what I did in UDK and put A LOT of foliage there. Still 73 fps.

UDK really excels more in indoor areas as opposed to vast outdoor environments.

 

[subversus]

UDK really excels more in indoor areas as opposed to vast outdoor environments.

yes, it is very detailed but CE3 does well both indoor and outdoor environments + have better physics if we don't talk about hardware acceleration + fully dynamic lighting. I found UDK to be somehow easier to work with when it comes to interface but some things are done easier in CE3.

I guess it comes to personal preferences but for now CE3 seems like a more advanced engine to me.

 

[Mik2121]

I have not used the CryEngine SDK much yet because it got released a couple days before I came to Singapore (I'm studying here for 6 weeks) and on my MBP it won't work very well, but yeah..

I'd say what's better abut Unreal Engine is the ease of use, the broader platform compatibility and the huge amount of information and help regarding it.
CE beats it when it comes to creating wide environments but for closed environments (indoors) I think it's not really all that different.

BTW, once I get back home I'll update the thread with the new version (September). I'll be back on the 6th of October, so please wait until then!.

 

[subversus]

UDK also seems to be better equipped in terms of licences. Scaleform is already avaiable while it's impossible for now to make your own hud in CE3, Scaleform will be available in future updates only, nobody knows when. But UDK also didn't have a lot of features at launch.

 

[Blizzard]

UDK also seems to be better equipped in terms of licences. Scaleform is already avaiable while it's impossible for now to make your own hud in CE3, Scaleform will be available in future updates only, nobody knows when. But UDK also didn't have a lot of features at launch.

Yeah, I wish there were good ways to use free tools to make UI's. I've been using some free actionscript stuff to make really simple flash GUI stuff. Plus, I feel like a lot of games that presumably use Scaleform menus have unnecessarily awkward, slow, and/or laggy menus.

Side note about menus, Hard Reset was the most recent game where (scaleform or no), I really didn't like how they did the menu effects. It had this really fancy robotic arm animation, which LOOKS nice, but takes forever, which is silly if you're just trying to set up your initial options.

As for UDK and CryEngine3, two main things CryEngine3 does that I really wish UDK had are awesome dynamic lighting and good performance in huge outdoor scenes (already mentioned). Better foliage support could also be on there. I'm afraid that recent UDK versions have had worse performance, and I still don't know a way to get AA without maaaybe going DX11. I don't know if the new FXAA support works in DX9. I'm afraid performance will continue to degrade.

To be fair, however, foliage support is something added to UDK only in the last couple of months, and it seems that the UDK gets slightly improved every month, so it could always get better.

I just tried to dig up some maps that use foliage in UDK. Most of them probably don't use the new system, and many may have performance problems. All of them are also no doubt much smaller than say, a Crysis island.

From http://artofdanny.blogspot.com/2010/10/asian-forest-environment-udk.html:

 

[Blizzard]

UDK Night and Day demo map, included in the UDK by default I believe:

 

[Blizzard]

I think I posted this earlier. Jungle map from the UDK forums at http://forums.epicgames.com/threads/795861-Jungle-Environment:

 

[cooljeanius]

Thanks to the other thread for bringing it to my attention! The September UDK beta is here, and Mac support has been added! http://www.udk.com/news-beta-sep2011

Or at least, it says the September 2011 beta has a preview. Maybe more full support is still on the way. It doesn't look like there are many other new features in this beta, but Mac might be big if the (OpenGL?) performance is decent.

So as far as I understand it, Mac support only means you can now build games for Mac with it, the tools themselves don't run on Mac yet, do they?

 

[Blizzard]

So as far as I understand it, Mac support only means you can now build games for Mac with it, the tools themselves don't run on Mac yet, do they?

Correct. I am not sure if there are future plans for the tool. You can TARGET iOS devices, and Mac computers, but you can only develop on Windows PCs (or possibly Mac/Linux with bootcamp/virtualization, but I'm not sure if that works to any usable extent).

The last foliage example I have for now is something else I linked earlier without screenshots. It's an architectural walkthrough and I believe UDK was used. From http://www.vimeo.com/23881987:

 

[cooljeanius]

Correct. I am not sure if there are future plans for the tool. You can TARGET iOS devices, and Mac computers, but you can only develop on Windows PCs (or possibly Mac/Linux with bootcamp/virtualization, but I'm not sure if that works to any usable extent).

Well that's a shame. Looks like I'll be sticking with Unity for my 3D engine to mess around with in my spare time.

 

[Pachterballs]

Cool thread. Subscribed.

 

[subversus]

this looks beautiful. (Day and Night is very perfomance heavy though, especially for such a small map).

As I'm digging deeper into Cryengine 3 forums it becomes obvious that the engine's community is still in its infancy (well, the engine was released 5 weeks ago). There are many questions asked, some of them are anwswered by devs, but some of them aren't answered at all. There are some tutorials on youtube but they're all based on documentation. I haven't watched many though.

There was a question about custom rendering and it seems that you can't do it right now (well, there is no obvious ways) while UDK allows customizing through some engine tools. I haven't got there yet, so I don't know what they're talking about but it seems that CE3 has a long way to go in terms of support and flexibity. But that's only the first impression.

I wonder what Epic has in store for UE4. It should be a completely different architecture according to Rein.

 

[Blizzard]

I should also clarify that most of the shots I just posted are probably bullshots in some fashion, either from downsizing, or using tiledshot (render a huge image, and then shrink it), and/or rendering to a video from an unplayable framerate. That's not to say you can't get decent-looking graphics at a playable framerate. The jungle temple usermade map is downloadable, installable, and I think it had a reasonable framerate.

 

[M3d10n]

The issue with large open areas is that, no matter how you slice it, UDK's core rendering architecture is still based on last-gen tech.

UDK's reliance on pre-computation of all sorts is a doubled-edged sword: you can get much better performance on older hardware on small/contained scenes, but performance and memory usage will degrade quickly past a certain threshold.

 

[subversus]

Yes, that's why they should release UE4 sooner rather than later. Unfortunately Sweeney thought that Larrabee will be the future and moved the engine into multicore support (by multicore I mean A LOT of cores) territory but after the project was scraped Mark Rein started talking that we won't see the engine until the next-next gen. But as I'm not Sweeney I don't know where they are heading now and what are their plans. According to their latest interview in Forbes Sweeney is eyeing Hollywood. Don't know how this will affect heir focus though. Cryengine is used for military and physics simulations and it shows.

 

[Blizzard]

The issue with large open areas is that, no matter how you slice it, UDK's core rendering architecture is still based on last-gen tech.

UDK's reliance on pre-computation of all sorts is a doubled-edged sword: you can get much better performance on older hardware on small/contained scenes, but performance and memory usage will degrade quickly past a certain threshold.

Are you referring to BSP? Or are you referring to a problem with static meshes? Would you please elaborate since I am not very familiar with the core UDK rendering architecture?

 

[Blizzard]

The scene is simple, but here are some screenshots from something a guy did in a week since he liked Deus Ex HR:

http://forums.epicgames.com/threads/827352-Deus-Ex-UDK-Environment

Other pictures:
http://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-v2Emykp53Ok/TnoKcQBidRI/AAAAAAAAAIs/ps2ufcvc6g0/s1600/4.jpg
http://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-yPkqIY7dI8k/TnoKQrn4sVI/AAAAAAAAAIc/UGViLrebsfI/s1600/2.jpg
http://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-kIUEi3VFuao/TnoKcaDRkBI/AAAAAAAAAIo/I60vz74zBhg/s1600/6.jpg