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[Dictator93]

Whilst reading the latest plans for Unreal Tournament in the thread on GAF, my cynicism reminded me of the serious downgrades UE3 games and the engine suffered post 2004.

Watch this video!
Things to take note of:
Parallax Occlusion Mapping
Translucency
Penumbra shadows...
Real time lighting and shadowing
Complex physical interactions with level geometry

A number of these graphical features and physical interactivity were never featured in an unreal engine game, and especially not in Gears of War, Gears 2, or Unreal Tournament 3 (the headliners from epic!).

Similarly Gears ended up looking quite a bit worse than its original preview:

Here shown: per object motionblur, realtime lighting and shadows, super high poly environments. Was any of that really in the games? Not really... even the final games on PC did not have as high resolution textures...

Likewise Unreal Tournament 3:

Real time light and shadows? Superhigh poly/ high res models? etc... All these things were never put into an unreal engine 3 game, and if at all, only started showing up in the post samaritan days like with Gears of War III.

 

[Ouren]

bullshots

 

[nynt9]

consoles

 

[jediyoshi]

Similarly Gears ended up looking quite a bit worse than its original preview:

..Are all of these shots supposed to be original preview?

 

[shacklesmcgee]

consoles

ding ding ding! we have a winner!

Can't make an engine work on those PoS's without making sacrifices.

 

[JordanN]

It was unspoken? I thought everybody knew about the Gears bullshots.

Also, UE3 does support POM and translucency
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/DevelopmentKitGemsParallaxOccludedMapping.html
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/LitTranslucency.html

On the UE4 forums, I even saw big debates because there where certain things UE3 did better at translucency (because UE4 made the move to deferred rendering where transparency is harder).

ding ding ding! we have a winner!

Can't make an engine work on those PoS's without making sacrifices.

Was that really necessary?

 

[dark10x]

Interestingly things like POM were present in launch day 360 games yet didn't show up in UE3 until much later.

I actually think the most recent Thief game uses more features of UE3 than most other titles have.

 

[Leafhopper]

bullshots

consoles

.

 

[No_Style]

And yet people will be surprised when UE4 and other engines omit features this time around as well.

They're going to make tradeoffs and continue to do so until features like those mentioned don't incur a significant performance penalties on lower end hardware.

 

[shacklesmcgee]

Was that really necessary?

uh sorry? I didn't mean to offend you, compared to PC's, the 360 and PS3 just weren't up to do what engine developers had planned. This gen will have it too.

 

[Blablurn]

I remember when Sony was hyping UT3 as the second coming during their E3 shows.

And then it just disappeared lol.

 

[Dictator93]

..Are all of these shots supposed to be original preview?

Yeah, you can tell because marcus has a different face.

It was unspoken? I thought everybody knew about the Gears bullshots.

Also, UE3 does support POM and translucency
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/DevelopmentKitGemsParallaxOccludedMapping.html
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/LitTranslucency.html

That stuff was definitely added quite a bit later though.

 

[Freedom = $1.05]

people can forgive this stuff when the game comes out and it's the best looking thing theyve ever seen. That's pretty much what happened with Gears 1, nothing at the time looked that good.

It's different with stuff like Watch Dogs, since when watch dogs came out it just looked rough and not great. If watch dogs had suffered some downgrades but still looked amazing, no one would've cried about it.

 

[WarlockTheWise]

they pulled GI out of UE4 because the consoles sucked.

 

[capitalCORN]

The featureset for UE3 still supports all those higher end functions. However, finding cycles to justify them is harder.
I remember the one thing that I was most excited about UE3 was the parallax mapping possibilities. Unfortunately, the entire generation (save some PC exclusives) was a bust for that.

 

[JordanN]

they pulled GI out of UE4 because the consoles sucked.

Gross, here's comes the stupid console bashing.

The GI in UE4 was too demanding for anything, including PC.

Epic have replaced it with a new PBR/lightmass model that gets the same results (actually better, the old UE4 wasn't physically based). They've also been slowly adding new things like distance field AO that is far more efficient and easier on the GPU to use.

They've also included LPV GI that even runs on consoles (Lionhead where the first to do it when making Fable Legends).

 

[Dictator93]

Gross, here's comes the stupid console bashing.

The GI in UE4 was too demanding for anything, including PC.

Epic have replaced it with a new PBR/lightmass model that gets the same results. They've also been slowly adding new things like distance field AO that is far more efficient and easier on the GPU to use.

Similar results! Definitely not as cool stuff with emmisives or dyanism though.

But getting back on topic, I think my most missed feature in UE was the complete lack of real time lighting and shadowing in almost every title. There was an extreme difference in fidelity and lighting for worl objects vs. movable objects. It made the games look pretty bad pretty often.

 

[JordanN]

But getting back on topic, I think my most missed feature in UE was the complete lack of real time lighting and shadowing in almost every title. There was an extreme difference in fidelity and lighting for worl objects vs. movable objects. It made the games look pretty bad pretty often.

Can you post examples?

I distinctly remember Fortnite having real time shadows for everything back when it was UE3 (the game features destructible/modular environments so nothing is baked).

I also remember playing Super Monday Night Combat and you can clearly see the self shadows constantly artifiacting.

 

[ashecitism]

Wha, Fortnite started out as an UE3 title? Always thought it was supposed to debut UE4.

 

[Mooreberg]

Texture blur in on UE3 always pissed me off. Mass Effect 2 was the only game I played on any platform that seemed to have completely neutralized it. BioShock was less horrendous as usual since the whole level loaded in upon arrival. Ugh.

 

[JordanN]

Wha, Fortnite started out as an UE3 title? Always thought it was supposed to debut UE4.

They switched during development.

 

[Dictator93]

Can you post examples?

I distinctly remember Fortnite having real time shadows for everything back when it was UE3 (the game features destructible/modular environments so nothing is baked).

I also remember playing Super Monday Night Combat and you can clearly see the self shadows constantly artifiacting.

When was fortnite first shown? Like 6 or 7 years after UE3s first preview? Like I said, I am talking about games from about 2005-2011 (pre samaritan).

I am pretty sure real time shadowing (on a world scale) came in UDKs first release with the UT3 assets and the desert map.