How does something that was made in another game by one person look better than a game that's been in development for years with a team of 500. Blows my mind.
The responses got off on the wrong foot, but very simply, this just isn't a game; it isn't Halo. It's a gate shape, it's some terrain and a sky box of sorts, it's a gun model, and it's some background stacks off in the distance, all dressed up with Dreams' GI and some surface and particle effects. There's no interactivity, no AI, no player mechanics beyond the camera control, none of the complications that weigh upon game design, and really not much more to it but what you see. This Disarm guy does amazing work, and Dreams is stunning software, but it's really not helpful to compare the two. Funny as a meme, I guess, but not helpful.
(Also, this appears to be a modification of his "Photorealistic Forest" project that he's been working on for 3 months, which is how it got made so fast after the Xbox show. But Disarm does a crazy amount of work in Dreams and LBP, it's all worth checking out.)
This looks really good. I attended Vertex in London earlier this year and one of the talks was about Dreams engine. One of the creators went in depth about how it works and the potential for creating stunning things using their technology, in and outside of gaming. The takeaway is it's a way of rendering that requires orders of magnitude less memory (iirc), so you can create bonkers things on a PS4 that wouldn't be possible using traditional rendering methods.
Yeah, I'm really curious how "Dreams 2.0" will turn out in PS5. The current version has some clever ways of hiding limitations for designers, and when I see people building like a visual demo (I am not in the least bit skilled enough to try any of this myself!), at the time it almost looks like there's no stopping a designer aside from just time from making something look as realistic and detailed as they want. So would a PS5 improve resolution? "World" size? Physics/interactivity?
A Dreams project does tend to have a certain look to it (which is true somewhat of any game engine, although Dreams' particular method of their weird voxels or froxels or "Dreamxels" or whatever they're doing), and especially these visual tours like the Photorealistic Forest and the '
Unreal Engine 5 in Dreams", the visuals kind of get smoothed out on Youtube and hide the fuzzy extruded voxels and other chunky bits. They look simultaneously more and also less impressive on real hardware (it's fun to break out of the viewer and see what's actually in there, although doing the same thing in a real game also shows all the "western town" facades used in real game design too.) Dreams apparently uses a lot of unconventional and even abandoned techniques that developers "don't do" in regular games, usually for reasonable reasons (especially with modern graphics cards designed for pushing around polygons and layering on textures; if you're interested in digging into the mysteries of Dreams tech, try reading through
Alex Evans' 2015 SIGGRAPH deck talking about Dreams.) I'm not sure if/what PlayStation 5 will let Dreams do new things with this unusual tech, or if that power will be used primarily to enhance what Dreams already has dreamed up?
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