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Unreal Engine 4 GDC feature techdemo screengrabs, unveil June [Up: New, Better Shots]

Fezan

Member
That's great because UE 3.0 titles typically have awful particle effects.

yes the world in UE3 feels so lifeless beside few exception. Most current gen games suffer from this.and i hope this thing gets the mos improvement as we are not playing screen shots. Give me better lightning and particle effects than Tessilion any day
 

tkscz

Member
After the "Samaritan Demo looks like crap" statement I had hoped for something more mindblowing.

This is the reason why we all aren't that impressed by these screens. Maybe by the animation, particles and lighting when seen in motion, but everything else doesn't blow Samaritan or CryEngine 3.4 out of the water.
 

lefantome

Member
Pitbull Studio assisting with Unreal Engine 4, also developing UE4-based games

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/05/17/epic-getting-unreal-engine-4-assistance-from-pitbull-studios-al/

pitbull-rapper-girlfriend-barbara-alba-i0.jpg


Pitbull studio is assisting EPIC? lol
 

EatChildren

Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
That mountain shots reminds me of some shots I've snapped from The Witcher 2, where the lighting, shadows, art and subtle blurs create a weird uncanny valley effect. It doesn't look 'real', but looks real enough to be something like a miniature. The mountain range looks gorgeous, but I cant unsee it being a miniature, downscaled physical model, kind of like what they use in film.
 

BurntPork

Banned
There is no current gen pc game (discounting Crysis 2's ridiculously useless tess) that has the polycount as what has been shown in some of these scenes, and the particle count is immense as well as the realistically calculated lighting. The resolution of the textures, assuming that the demo was built with console restrictions in mind, suggests a vram limitation in the next gen PS360 though, they're pretty terrible.

See, here's the problem. We need to be told what's better. That's practically the definition of diminishing returns.

Anyone saying these shots aren't a massive upgrade from current gen consoles is out of their mind.

It is a huge upgrade. The thing is, it really just looks like an upgrade, not a revolution.
 

Shaheed79

dabbled in the jelly
Can someone post some Witcher 2 1080p, max settings screenshots so we can see just how far existing engines have come?

I said in the "UE4 makes Samaritan look like crap" topic that, instead of "OMGFWTF!!" visuals, Epic should concentrate on making HD game development much easier and cheaper in order to make developing large games more feasible for smaller developers, without the threat of going bankrupt from one or two games failing to meet sales expectations. So even though that cut development time in half claim is most likely bull crap, I really do hope that it's true for the sake of the industry.

Witcher 2 level visuals are more than adequate for next-gen. I'm also hoping that those "unlimited detail" guys from Australia come through with their technology soon. If their claims are true then I can imagine Intel, nvidia and AMD doing everything they can to stop them.
 

jett

D-Member
Can someone post some Witcher 2 1080p, max settings screenshots so we can see just how far existing engines have come?

I said in the "UE4 makes Samaritan look like crap" topic that, instead of "OMGFWTF!!" visuals, Epic should concentrate on making HD game development much easier and cheaper in order to make developing large games more feasible for smaller developers, without the threat of going bankrupt from one or two games failing to meet sales expectations. So even though that cut development time in half claim is most likely bull crap, I really do hope that it's true for the sake of the industry.

Witcher 2 level visuals are more than adequate for next-gen. I'm also hoping that those "unlimited detail" guys from Australia come through with their technology soon. If their claims are true then I can imagine Intel, nvidia and AMD doing everything they can to stop them.

Witcher 2 looks as good as it does mostly because of Good Art™. It's not pushing any complex effects, the game is DX9-only.

the-witcher-2-assassins-of-kings-pc-1298020777-108.jpg
 

twobear

sputum-flecked apoplexy
That mountain shots reminds me of some shots I've snapped from The Witcher 2, where the lighting, shadows, art and subtle blurs create a weird uncanny valley effect. It doesn't look 'real', but looks real enough to be something like a miniature. The mountain range looks gorgeous, but I cant unsee it being a miniature, downscaled physical model, kind of like what they use in film.

I get this with most TW2 shots I've seen.
 
Until we get some decent ray/path tracing hardware or decent GPGPU processing power, we will be stuck with just rasterization hacks. The good thing is that people are working on real-time Path Tracing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_tracing) gaming engines such as Brigade (http://igad.nhtv.nl/~bikker/). The developers of Brigade are working with Cloud Computing company, OTOY. There is a blog of one of their employees, Sam Lapere, who is running test on the engine. They are using Nvidia chipsets with CUDA (GPGPU). They have just announced that they are going to be using Geforce GRID, which should help convergence immensely.

Here's the OTOY employee blog:
http://raytracey.blogspot.com/

Here's more information about OTOY: http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/30/otoy-cloud-video-games/

You can download Brigade from here(http://brigade.roenyroeny.com/). You need a powerful Nvidia graphics card and the latest version of CUDA to run it though.

Here's some screens from Brigade:

blinn4ed.png

usf.png

norm9.png


scifi3.png


blinnbunny1.png


animzombie.png
 

Stallion Free

Cock Encumbered
I think Epic should "leak" the video before E3. These screenshots did not make people "ooh" and "aah" like they expected, so if UE4 is really that much better in motion they have to show it. After all, if core gamers like the ones here @ GAF can't really tell the difference between UE3 and UE4, how does Epic, Microsoft and Sony expect to sell new consoles to the mainstream?

Why would they care about impressing the internet? Everyone who matters to them was already at the initial reveal of the engine or had a private showing. You know, the people who pay to license it.
 

EatChildren

Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
Completely off topic, but does anybody have a link to that thread from last week/early this week showcasing an engine tech demo that used shaders to create huge, detailed effects/environments? It was downloadable, and I couldn't grab it at the time. Now I want to.
 

dark10x

Digital Foundry pixel pusher
Why would they care about impressing the internet? Everyone who matters to them was already at the initial reveal of the engine or had a private showing. You know, the people who pay to license it.
Precisely. The leap in technology will be made obvious once people see the games produced with it.
 

lefantome

Member
Completely off topic, but does anybody have a link to that thread from last week/early this week showcasing an engine tech demo that used shaders to create huge, detailed effects/environments? It was downloadable, and I couldn't grab it at the time. Now I want to.

I WANT IT NOW! :eek:mg:
 

BigTnaples

Todd Howard's Secret GAF Account
Geeze GaF, this is embarrassing.

I love how people are jumping to all sorts of conclusions based on these screens. The games we will get using this engine will be mild meltingly good looking.


Just take any current gen UE3 game, running on 7 year old hardware. Say Batman Arkham City, or Gears of War 3, or Mass Effect 3.

Does anyone in this thread really think that those games would not look insane on (providing Epic lobbies hard enough) next gen hardware and a next gen engine?

Wait until we see a full unveil, or better yet, the first game using the engine. If the games UE4 puts out next gen (again providing MS and Sony dont gimp HW) don't impess people, I will eat a shoe.
 

drexplora

Member
People need to accept that with the goal being high quality realtime graphics, its gonna take a while to get there or even get close (diminished returns?!).

Ill take even a smallish/decent jump in graphics any day! Maybe itll mean that dev's will learn to be more efficient with the power in these machines!

I mean at some point were gonna be in a place where a new console might take twice as long to come out or a new console might only mean a doubling of its ram.

With that said these UE4 demos look great! gonna be amazing seeing the first ingame gameplay on a high spec pc!
If 8th gen consoles can output those levels of graphics with compareable image quality, where in for a treat!
And with early demo's like this we usually end up with early games that surpass the visuals in these types of demos.

Everything seems to be in line with my expectations of this coming gen.
Excited 8)

p.s
Cant wait to see the Wii U in action!
 
Someone should put together a post depicting prior generational shifts. Me? No, I'm too lazy.


Geeze GaF, this is embarrassing.

I love how people are jumping to all sorts of conclusions based on these screens. The games we will get using this engine will be mild meltingly good looking.


Just take any current gen UE3 game, running on 7 year old hardware. Say Batman Arkham City, or Gears of War 3, or Mass Effect 3.

Does anyone in this thread really think that those games would not look insane on (providing Epic lobbies hard enough) next gen hardware and a next gen engine?

Wait until we see a full unveil, or better yet, the first game using the engine. If the games UE4 puts out next gen (again providing MS and Sony dont gimp HW) don't impess people, I will eat a shoe.

Because games always look better than tech demos. WTF?
 

M3d10n

Member
The difference between The Witcher 2 and UE4 is that TW2, being a DX9 title, relies a lot on pre-baked lighting. While it can look as good as fully real-time lighting, it introduces limitations in scope, interactivity as well as increasing the time and effort required to design the environments.

One of the prime reasons Mirror's Edge looks so great is the lighting. But in ME the lighting had to be "baked" into textures, a process that could take from several minutes to hours to complete.

With fully dynamic bouncing lighting, you don't need to wait for a lightmap render to see how a change in the level will look like. Destructible geometry and dynamic objects can blend against static geometry seamlessly without the need to limit the possible light configurations. Even in engines which use deferred lighting and no lightmaps at all, artists still need to add dummy lights here and there to make up for the lack of light irradiation.

CryEngine 3 did great strides into dynamic lighting (on the PC) and UE4 seems to be a step forward.

This screen is a good example:
ue4_042fd3vgtf9t.jpeg


The golden statue is reflecting light from the fireplace. The silver statue is reflecting light from the golden statue. You can even see that the ground is reflecting light from the golden statue too. In current-gen engines, you'd need to manually place lightprobes or bake reflection maps for the statues which would only look correct if they never moved and the fireplace couldn't be extinguished.
 

i-Lo

Member
Hahahahaha no. Polycount? No. Animation? No. Lighting? No. Particle effects? No.

More like:

Polycount- Unknown
Animation- Close but no
Lighting- Very close
Particle effects- Close

Comparing a tech demo to a full scale optimized game is unwise.

actually no it doesnt

The thing that's amazing about that CG is the character models, faces, animation, etc. Those still havent really been touched this gen, even if we got closer than I would have expected to other parts.


I think the real question is how close can GG get to this target render this gen. One of the biggest differentiator is not the graphical fidelity outright, rather the quality of animation. To that end, I wonder what UE4.0 has to offer.
 
Yeah, looks great. All I care about though is whether this is gonna run as well on the PS4 as on the Xbox Whatever, because the currently similar discrepancy is irritating as hell.
 

EVIL

Member
The difference between The Witcher 2 and UE4 is that TW2, being a DX9 title, relies a lot on pre-baked lighting. While it can look as good as fully real-time lighting, it introduces limitations in scope, interactivity as well as increasing the time and effort required to design the environments.

One of the prime reasons Mirror's Edge looks so great is the lighting. But in ME the lighting had to be "baked" into textures, a process that could take from several minutes to hours to complete.

With fully dynamic bouncing lighting, you don't need to wait for a lightmap render to see how a change in the level will look like. Destructible geometry and dynamic objects can blend against static geometry seamlessly without the need to limit the possible light configurations. Even in engines which use deferred lighting and no lightmaps at all, artists still need to add dummy lights here and there to make up for the lack of light irradiation.

CryEngine 3 did great strides into dynamic lighting (on the PC) and UE4 seems to be a step forward.

This screen is a good example:
ue4_042fd3vgtf9t.jpeg


The golden statue is reflecting light from the fireplace. The silver statue is reflecting light from the golden statue. You can even see that the ground is reflecting light from the golden statue too. In current-gen engines, you'd need to manually place lightprobes or bake reflection maps for the statues which would only look correct if they never moved and the fireplace couldn't be extinguished.
or you can render out a parallel scene with much less detail and use that as a source for reflections. similar how the water reflections where done in portal 2.
 
The difference between The Witcher 2 and UE4 is that TW2, being a DX9 title, relies a lot on pre-baked lighting. While it can look as good as fully real-time lighting, it introduces limitations in scope, interactivity as well as increasing the time and effort required to design the environments.

One of the prime reasons Mirror's Edge looks so great is the lighting. But in ME the lighting had to be "baked" into textures, a process that could take from several minutes to hours to complete.

With fully dynamic bouncing lighting, you don't need to wait for a lightmap render to see how a change in the level will look like. Destructible geometry and dynamic objects can blend against static geometry seamlessly without the need to limit the possible light configurations. Even in engines which use deferred lighting and no lightmaps at all, artists still need to add dummy lights here and there to make up for the lack of light irradiation.

CryEngine 3 did great strides into dynamic lighting (on the PC) and UE4 seems to be a step forward.

This screen is a good example:
ue4_042fd3vgtf9t.jpeg


The golden statue is reflecting light from the fireplace. The silver statue is reflecting light from the golden statue. You can even see that the ground is reflecting light from the golden statue too. In current-gen engines, you'd need to manually place lightprobes or bake reflection maps for the statues which would only look correct if they never moved and the fireplace couldn't be extinguished.

or use... cubemaps?

I dont get the baked lighting hate. It's still the best looking approach, and I hope to see a lot more hybrid baked lighting and realtime global illumination next generation.
 
Yeah, looks great. All I care about though is whether this is gonna run as well on the PS4 as on the Xbox Whatever, because the currently similar discrepancy is irritating as hell.

Only way thats gonna happen is if Epic stops making xbox exclusive games and I am sure MS will do there best to not end that relationship.

Heck its probably gonna get worse with MS now teaming up with Crytek for that gladiator looking game.

Its just logical then the studio will devote more time to that system since thats the system they release games on and that results in a better over all engine on that console and better games from the other developers that use that engine.


Its Sony's fault really. They should be more aggressive money hatting key third party dev's like the big engine makers.
 

EVIL

Member
or use... cubemaps?

I dont get the baked lighting hate. It's still the best looking approach, and I hope to see a lot more hybrid baked lighting and realtime global illumination next generation.

cubemaps are very limiting. they only look good on the exact spot where they are generated. once you walk around you can see the reflection shift in comparison to your location
 
or use... cubemaps?

I dont get the baked lighting hate. It's still the best looking approach, and I hope to see a lot more hybrid baked lighting and realtime global illumination next generation.

This issue is that baked lighting is time-consuming. The changes to the toolset in Unreal and it getting a real-time lighting WYSIWYG editor similar to Unity and Cryengine will make a world of difference in additional to the Kismet overhaul. This will help games come out faster. Also, it will help the Unreal Engine dominate next-gen since one of the main advantages of the previous mentioned competing engines is the WYSIWYG editors. Developers and artist won't have to migrate to other engines.
 

RSTEIN

Comics, serious business!
As a game developer, what I'm looking forward to most is UE4's solution to real time osmorphic dithering. Lots of cool stuff, tho. The new 'geo-phasing' tool, which promises to unite autocorrelative aspect rending with lockdown framerate buffering has me extremely excited. Real-time terraforming and pre-phased shaders (seen on the mountain shot) should help with open world games. Plus I know they're working on a sub module for synchronous bipedal modelling which is going to revolutionize character wireframes. I'm optimistic.
 

Stallion Free

Cock Encumbered
I dont get the baked lighting hate. It's still the best looking approach, and I hope to see a lot more hybrid baked lighting and realtime global illumination next generation.
I think baked lighting is a fantastic concept and it does wonders for performance on console games, but working with it is annoying as hell. Bake times are such a pain in the ass.
 
More like:

Polycount- Unknown
Animation- Close but no
Lighting- Very close
Particle effects- Close

More like:

Polycount - no (you can clearly see it on characters in the first in-engine trailer; besides, we're talking CGI vs. polycounts optimized for real-time animation), but it's perfectly fine
Animation - not even close
Lighting - pretty much achieved, maybe even better
Particle effects - not even close
 
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