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The Coalition - Alpha Point Technical Demo and Character Rendering Test on Unreal Engine 5

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CamHostage

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It looked good, but it didn't look even close to the UE5 reveal, so that seems odd. Shorter, less content, far less environment detail. Not sure I see the point.
...a lot of that work was building out the engine and the associated technology wasn't it? They expressly said part of their goals with UE5 was ease of content creation because they know how hard it is to create high quality assets at scale.

It was the scary thing about this demo, when you listened to the whole talk, that they did it the hard way, and it took them a lot longer and came out with a lot less demo material, and it still didn't fully impress compared to work done the easy way.

At first, I saw the teasers of the two demos and thought, Ok, so they took some Quixel Megascan rocks and made a temple with a shiny alien diamond, then they used MetaHumans and made a beardyface guy, then ran that on Xbox to see its stats, and so that's it, pretty easy, just a little test...

But no, that's not what they did. It was a proper demo. They made their own rocks (90% original), and they crafted their own face (using the MetaHuman frame and parts but sculpted in their own tools) and they built and optimized some tech specifically for Xbox research (to share with MS and Epic,) and they really did take 9 months to make that whole 30-second thing. Which is scary how hard they had to work for so little! Epic Games' two UE5 demos would already be too short if they were actual game levels, but the Coalition one was barely a room or a whole cutscene. Meanwhile, home tinkerers are kitbashing some UE Marketplace parts and stretching out a preset MetaHuman face, and bam, they have a whole UE5 demo in a few hours. And Coalition's work is not crushing them in quality like you'd expect. (Ok, it does crush if you are informed and look closely, but to the normal viewer, the homemade stuff looks fine so far, and better even because it's not just rocks.)

So, what's that mean for future games? Like, why was this so hard to make when the engine was already in good shape? And if it took a high-caliber studio like The Coalition that look to make only that much, are all these developers going to be killing themselves making their own games at this new standard (unless they use preset assets)? There's some reasons inside the full GDC talk, but there's still questions in my head why this was so hard for so little for a team this good...
 
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Black_Stride

do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
So what the point of this? Not a game, just someone flexing UE5? Already hundreds of videos showing that.....

Should of made a ue5 Craig, for comparison
Epic needs developer feedback on their engine and tools and The Coalition are the best Unreal Engine dev out there so obviously Epic would partner with them to see what they could do and what issues they have with the engine in this early stage.

And they got their feedback.
Lumen is still far too expensive to really produce a 60fps game on consoles.
Virtual shadow maps have some issues.
Nanite for static meshes is the new gold standard.
When Nanite gets updated to support translucent materials it will likely also be the gold standard for foliage.
DCCs eventually slow down too much when approaching the multimillion polygon level....(new DCCs needed or smarter modelling)
 

Pedro Motta

Member
Epic needs developer feedback on their engine and tools and The Coalition are the best Unreal Engine dev out there so obviously Epic would partner with them to see what they could do and what issues they have with the engine in this early stage.

And they got their feedback.
Lumen is still far too expensive to really produce a 60fps game on consoles.
Virtual shadow maps have some issues.
Nanite for static meshes is the new gold standard.
When Nanite gets updated to support translucent materials it will likely also be the gold standard for foliage.
DCCs eventually slow down too much when approaching the multimillion polygon level....(new DCCs needed or smarter modelling)
Regarding the DCC side great strides are being made with softwares like Houdini using PDG, or Clarisse. Not sure why the Coalition has issues with this.
 

ZywyPL

Banned
So, what's that mean for future games? Like, why was this so hard to make when the engine was already in good shape? And if it took a high-caliber studio like The Coalition that look to make only that much, are all these developers going to be killing themselves making their own games at this new standard (unless they use preset assets)? There's some reasons inside the full GDC talk, but there's still questions in my head why this was so hard for so little for a team this good...

Either the design tools and the engine itself will become more optimized, user friendly and time effective, or the devs won't be bothering creating million-billion poly models for their games (let alone animating them), but something like 500k-1M polys, which will still be quite a bump from PS4/XB1 gen.
 

Black_Stride

do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
Regarding the DCC side great strides are being made with softwares like Houdini using PDG, or Clarisse. Not sure why the Coalition has issues with this.
Exporting the multimultimillion polygon files is actually quite hard.
Houdini isnt exactly mainstay in game development.
 

Pedro Motta

Member
Exporting the multimultimillion polygon files is actually quite hard.
Houdini isnt exactly mainstay in game development.
What makes you say this? I export multi million polygon files everyday, what can you say that's "actually" quite hard?

And saying isn't mainstay in game development....you're missing a lot lately.
 

Stuart360

Member
Fuuuck ... I don't see my 2080ti being able to run these games ...
Why?, the engine is very scalable. I mean if you're looking for 4k then your 2080ti would probably struggle over 60fps, but at like 1440p, maybe 1620p, it will breeze UE5 games. Hell i'm still expecting to run these games on my 980ti, at 1080p of course.
Dont forget these games will be running on XSS too, and some of them will even be cross gen games.

EDIT.. Also your 2080ti is more powerful than both XSX and PS5.
 
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Nickolaidas

Banned
Why?, the engine is very scalable. I mean if you're looking for 4k then your 2080ti would probably struggle over 60fps, but at like 1440p, maybe 1620p, it will breeze UE5 games. Hell i'm still expecting to run these games on my 980ti, at 1080p of course.
Dont forget these games will be running on XSS too, and some of them will even be cross gen games.

EDIT.. Also your 2080ti is more powerful than both XSX and PS5.
Your words gave my heart, as well as my penis, a great deal of courage. I thank you.

1440p at 60fps it is.

t4zyn8G.jpg
 
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