• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

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

T

Thunder Monkey

Banned
USIGSJ said:
One more new pic

ue4elementalsnowyvista-copyjpg-0b51a2_800w.jpg
Click to expand...

Now that is damn lovely.

edit: I'm crazy aren't I?
 
G

gofreak

GAF's Bob Woodward
Thunder Monkey said:
Now that is damn lovely.

edit: I'm crazy aren't I?
Click to expand...

In the difference between that and the first mountain pic you can already see how important lighting and changes in light will be to the overall effect. Which makes me want the video all the more. I think that will look quite 'wow'.
 
M

Metroid-Squadron

Banned
Thunder Monkey said:
And that is all you are getting. Until I've got a video I'm not going wow either way. I will argue that this isn't something to be used as a reason for the tech to exist. Until we've seen it in action. Right now I'm seeing menial jumps. Impressive in their own right, but until I see differing colored lights playing with one another, these particles breaking down, and flowing in the wind, or their interesting approach to liquids I can't say this is a huge technical breakthrough.
Click to expand...
Even if it was purely static, it's huge win development wise because what would usually take hours to bake now takes fractions of a second.

Thunder Monkey said:
Because those screens look like something that can be approximated in a 2005 engine.
Click to expand...
No engine in 2005 had HDR rendering as good as this. Not even close. Only the Wreckless programmer tech demo but that's it.

Thunder Monkey said:
The common depiction is of separate colored spheres altering the light bouncing from one to the other. But we approximate that through prebaked lightmaps. Until altered in realtime we could just be looking at one of those approximations.

This is my only argument. So yes, technically I'm bitching that we haven't seen it in motion.
Click to expand...
You of don't have to be impressed by these screenshots. But dismissing them is stupid. Just knowing that will get that quality and it won't be pre-calculated but dynamic is huge.
 
T

Thunder Monkey

Banned
gofreak said:
In the difference between that and the first mountain pic you can already see how important lighting and changes in light will be to the overall effect. Which makes me want the video all the more. I think that will look quite 'wow'.
Click to expand...
If it's any consolation to those toes I've been stepping on I'm fully willing to admit I'm wrong when the vid is released.

I just don't think stuff we've been approximating a good chunk of the generation should be used in a static screen to show anything off. I realize Epic didn't release them, but talk about underwhelming.

They just need to release the video that way I can start either nutlicking or gloating.

Metroid-Squadron said:
Even if it was purely static, it's huge win development wise because what would usually take hours to bake now takes fractions of a second.


No engine in 2005 had HDR rendering as good as this. Not even close. Only the Wreckless programmer tech demo but that's it.


You of don't have to be impressed by these screenshots. But dismissing them is stupid. Just knowing that will get that quality and it won't be pre-calculated but dynamic is huge.
Click to expand...
Funny enough I'm talking about UE3 in 2012 when I talk about engines developed in 2005.

What?! They're the ones that keep adding to it as tech increases.

Okay I'm done. I'll stop bitching. I know all of these effects are realtime in UE4, but I really don't like the idea of using static screens to showcase them because of how good we've gotten at approximating effects completely out of the range of our current consoles.
 
P

pottuvoi

Banned
gofreak said:
In the difference between that and the first mountain pic you can already see how important lighting and changes in light will be to the overall effect. Which makes me want the video all the more. I think that will look quite 'wow'.
Click to expand...
The new pic shows GI on the mountains quite nicely as well, much more apparent than on the previous one.
 
P

pottuvoi

Banned
Thunder Monkey said:
They've actually been pretty forthcoming with the tech side. Just don't want anyone to see it motion until the next Xbox is revealed at E3.
Click to expand...
Really?
The Wired article didn't have single detail about the implementation methods used for rendering pixels to the screen, nor did it have about the GI.

If there has been anything else shared to public I would love to know.. :)
 
T

Thunder Monkey

Banned
pottuvoi said:
Really?
The Wired article didn't have single detail about the implementation methods used for rendering pixels to the screen, nor did it have about the GI.

If there has been anything else shared to public I would love to know.. :)
Click to expand...
To the public very little as of yet.

Sorry, kind of scatterbrained today. Which might be why it's taken me pages to explain my point to shadowlark. Far as I know me and him rarely disagree outright. A few combative viewpoints, but we seemed positively angry for a moment there.
 
M

Majanew

Banned
Some blurry, compressed screens. I expect Epic will want to get some better quality screens out, with these pics being seen. A vid would be epic, Epic.
 
P

pottuvoi

Banned
Thunder Monkey said:
To the public very little as of yet.

Sorry, kind of scatterbrained today. Which might be why it's taken me pages to explain my point to shadowlark. Far as I know me and him rarely disagree outright. A few combative viewpoints, but we seemed positively angry for a moment there.
Click to expand...
No prob. :)

I have been waiting for tech snippets on UE4 for years.. so little anxious to hear the dirty little details.
It seems that we will have some very interesting renderers and lighting solutions in future games.. (OiT, cone tracing and many different kinds of data structures. etc.)
 
C

charsace

Member
A lot of people aren't going to see a difference because of the poly counts in the games and texture res. I think that when you have anything over 20000+ poly's and 2048 texture res most people won't be able to see a difference. 20000+ poly characters look rounded and 2048 texture res is where textures start to look good.
 
Darkangel

Darkangel

Member
Personally I'm disappointed. Doesn't look very different than Unreal Engine 3 to me. I've seen modded Crysis screenshots that look more visually stunning.

I hope the lighting makes it looks better in motion.
 
B

beril

Member
Marketing speak and some highpoly demos running on unspecified hardware... doesn't really say a whole lot about how much the engine has evolved or what we can expect from next gen

in the past, game developers employed a trick known as staged lighting to give the impression that light in a game was behaving as it would in the real world. That meant a lot of pre-rendering—programming hundreds of light sources into an environment that would then be turned on or off depending on in-game events. If a building collapsed in a given scene, all the light effects that had been employed to make it look like a real interior would remain in place over empty space. Shadows would remain in the absence of structure; glares that once resulted from sunlight glinting off windows would remain floating in midair. To avoid this, designers programmed the light to look realistic in any of that scene’s possible situations—one situation at a time. “You would have to manually sculpt the lighting in every section of every level,” Bleszinski says. “The number of man-years that required was astounding.” UE4 introduces dynamic lighting, which behaves in response to its own inherent properties rather than a set of preprogrammed effects. In other words, no more faking it. Every light in a scene bounces off every surface, creating accurate reflections. Colors mix, translucent materials glow, and objects viewed through water refract. And it’s all being handled on the fly, as it happens. That’s not realistic—that’s real.
Click to expand...

So in non-marketing-speak I'm guessing this means dynamic shadows and deferred rendering. Haven't most other engines been doing that for years?

Then the twist: Willard reveals that both the cinematic scene and the following tech demo haven’t been running off a game file but in real time from within UE4′s game editor. It’s like finding out that the actors on TV are actually tiny people living inside your set. It also helps him show that changes can be made to the game’s design and code, recompiled and executed nearly instantly—a technical feat that has been simply unheard-of in game development. And just like that, the silence in the room becomes reverent. The videogame industry has changed.
Click to expand...

Grins Diesel engine (Bionic Commando, BCR, Wanted etc) could do this in 2007, probably earlier. You could reload all the game code in runtime without even loosing any progress in your game session. It was certainly a very nice feature, but I'm sure there are other engines that can do it by now. I've seen several engines where you could run from the editor at least.
 
B

Backfoggen

Banned
-SD- said:
Hires. Still meh.

Click to expand...

Wow that looks way more impressive. Look at the stones in the wall on the first pic.

That's also another point: we'll need 1080p to even see the small details. In 720p you couldn't see the difference between a flat wall or a detailed one like in that first pic.
 
P

pottuvoi

Banned
-SD- said:
Hires. Still meh.

Click to expand...
No tesselation/displacement on environment or a character.
A post based DoF which doesn't handle transparencies.
Both are 'easily' tweaked to work and not actual limitations.

Otherwise looks good.
beril said:
So in non-marketing-speak I'm guessing this means dynamic shadows and deferred rendering. Haven't most other engines been doing that for years?
Click to expand...
Dynamic GI.
If it really works without any preprocessing, it's quite unique considering the quality in those images. (Cryengine2 had low resolution GI from single light source it's centered to viewer so objects further away didn't have the effect.)
 
B

BurntPork

Banned
@the high-res shots

Not the generational leap some were expecting. Just looks like a high-end PC game. Also, the textures are pretty bad.

I'm sure this is all due to the art style, though. It's technically impressive, but visually? Just a PC game on ultra with nice lighting.
 
L

lefantome

Member
Ok, content is coming.

Probably EPic realised that an article on wired and some bad screens is not the best way to show their new engine.

Full tech demo traile released in 3..2..1..


Also the quality of te tech demo is not consistent in all the scene, in some the look is technology driven.
Console tech demos are created also for marketing towards users, I think we will see something nicely crafted in the future.

The destroyed room picture shows a big amount of amazing new techniques, but that's it. It's no a game yet.
 
P

-Pyromaniac-

Member
It looks prettay prettay good, definitely not what I expected considering their comments though, but pretty good none the less. Though considering that these pics aren't from fully populated games and all that I don't know what to think yet. I don't trust tech demo pics or trailers, I only trust real games.
 
C

ClovingWestbrook

Banned
BurntPork said:
@the high-res shots

Not the generational leap some were expecting. Just looks like a high-end PC game. Also, the textures are pretty bad.

I'm sure this is all due to the art style, though. It's technically impressive, but visually? Just a PC game on ultra with nice lighting.
Click to expand...

Sorry but I haven't seen any current PC game that can pull that off (texture wise) Maybe I haven't been looking hard enough.
 
M

Metalmurphy

Member
Still not impressed from what's supposed to be next gen screens.

For next gen I imagined each one of those fire particles be a light source and stuff like this... this is just what we have now but more.
 
C

charsace

Member
-SD- said:
Didn't see these posted yet.

http://www.abload.de/img/ue4_03pyifk.jpg[/IMG

[IMG]http://www.abload.de/img/ue4_042fd3v.jpg[/IMG[/QUOTE]

These 2 really show off the particles and GI. And I like all the motion blur that is applied per particle.

[quote="Metalmurphy, post: 37969667"]Still not impressed from what's supposed to be next gen screens.

For next gen I imagined each one of those fire particles be a light source and stuff like this... this is just what we have now but more.[/QUOTE]

I can't really tell from these pics, but it looks like the particle near the monster's legs is bouncing light on to it.
Click to expand...
 
B

Backfoggen

Banned
BurntPork said:
@the high-res shots

Not the generational leap some were expecting. Just looks like a high-end PC game. Also, the textures are pretty bad.

I'm sure this is all due to the art style, though. It's technically impressive, but visually? Just a PC game on ultra with nice lighting.
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure no PC game comes close. Maybe with everything pre-baked you get somewhat of a comparable result but completely dynamic? No.

Particles seem like a cool thing to push provided they react to the player and are not just floating around.
 
I

i-Lo

Member
EVIL said:
particles are an obvious feature they want to push
Click to expand...

Ya think so? Don't think it could be more obvious, lol

I am starting to appreciate the stills more than before. Those insanely high res screens show certain things we haven't seen in current gen game yet. Plus, if prebaked shadows are history then it leads me to believe dev time and cost not only being saved but also being more natural.

I am really liking how the light from the volcanic Mjolnir is reflected off of the demon's armour.

ClovingSteam said:
Not digging this one.
Click to expand...

You'd be digging it literally and living large if you knew that one's made out of platinum and the other is gold.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Epic Games to update Unreal Engine pricing for devs not making games. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney says the company began running into financial problem
2
89
6K
Drizzlehell replied
[VGC] The Like a Dragon series must continue using its bespoke Dragon Engine, but staff must also learn about alternate options
Game Dev
3
443
The Cockatrice replied
GDC 2024 | Conf Schedules for Unreal & other Game Tech
2
822
CamHostage replied
Unreal Engine 5.4 is now available with many improvements
18
2K
adamsapple replied
16 Minutes of Bodycam Gameplay (New Unreal Engine 5 Multiplayer FPS) — JackFrags
2
68
6K
StreetsofBeige replied
Top Bottom