[HN Gopher] A first look at Unreal Engine 5
___________________________________________________________________
A first look at Unreal Engine 5
Author : HammadB
Score : 1175 points
Date : 2020-05-13 15:26 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.unrealengine.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.unrealengine.com)
| brauzi wrote:
| Wow, how soon until AR/VR is the standard in gaming?
| atum47 wrote:
| I just saw the tech demo on the ps5, really really impressive,
| the dynamic light, the zbrush import, the huge amount of
| polygons... I'm saying this with some experience as a 3d artist
| (zbrush) and a programmer.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Wow. It seems like real-time lighting and detail are getting to
| the point where they're so indistinguishable from reality...
|
| ...that now it's the actual quality of the models themselves, and
| even more of character motion, that are going to have to be the
| next steps in better graphics.
|
| I'm stunned by the lighting and detail, absolutely stunned.
|
| But at the same time, especially when you get into the
| architectural rooms, everything's far too "perfect". No grime, no
| crumbling edges, the motion of the ceiling opening is far too
| smooth, no vibration or catching, etc.
|
| Likewise, the character's ponytail isn't bobbing like real hair
| at all. Sometimes her movements seem to be anti-gravity and
| bizarrely robotic. The leather over her shoulder seems to float
| rather than rest, and twists as if it were made of gelatin rather
| than stiff cowskin.
|
| Not that these are criticisms at all -- I'm well aware of how
| hard they are. It's just fascinating to me to see, once rendering
| is basically "good enough", how the flaws in modeling come to the
| fore.
|
| And so where are those advances going to come in? Are there going
| to be procedural-generation advances in creating realistic grime
| and imperfections and irregularities? Or deep-learning advances
| for realistic bodily movement? And why is it so damn hard to get
| clothing to actually fall on the body right, instead of always
| looking like a stretchy foam skinsuit?
| Nition wrote:
| Yeah, this is looking so good now that we seem to have reached
| the uncanny valley of rendering. Where instead of thinking
| "this game has really good graphics" I'm now thinking "this
| reality has some bad graphics".
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Oooh yeah; some of those rock faces were sharper than my
| short-sighted self would expect to see in real life.
| sterlind wrote:
| All sorts of rendering tricks had to be played before RTX. Now
| that we have real-time ray tracing, models are becoming more
| important than shaders (see e.g. Minecraft. It looks like a
| real world made of Legos - the blocks make it look artificial.)
|
| Maybe once real time photorealism is cracked, we'll move to a
| completely Newtonian global physics for some games, with some
| analogue of "atoms" the way RTX models "photons."
|
| I'm not in the industry, this is just something I'm wondering
| about. What would Minecraft be like if blocks were the size of
| pixels and the physics were real?
| slx26 wrote:
| not exactly what you are saying, but you might be interested
| in teardown https://youtu.be/Wc_QC25RM44
| GuiA wrote:
| It's going to be at least a solid 3-5 years until one can say
| "now that we have real-time ray tracing" as far as most
| consumer devices are concerned, and even then it likely won't
| mean that all games will use raytracing for all rendering -
| more likely just for select special effects etc. I wouldn't
| give it less than at least a decade or two before we can have
| a mainstream fully raytraced game; and even then, I'd guess
| that good game artists will keep using smoke and mirrors to
| make effects even more stunning than what they can make by
| the brute force ray tracing approach.
|
| There are a few indie devs trying to make "finer resolution"
| Minecraft; e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQv1OEm_www
| [deleted]
| trynewideas wrote:
| buried lede, perhaps: retroactive to Jan. 1, "Unreal Engine
| royalties waived on first $1 million in game revenue"
|
| > Unreal Engine End User License Agreement for Publishing: This
| license is free to use and incurs 5% royalties when you monetize
| your game or other interactive off-the-shelf product and your
| lifetime gross revenues from that product exceed $1,000,000 USD.
| deerIRL wrote:
| This is a huge jump from the previous $3000 per quarter being
| royalty-free when they initially made UE4 free. It will be
| interesting to see if it helps them capture more of the indie
| studios from Unity.
| metalforever wrote:
| Yeah I would personally use this instead of Unity because I
| don't want to pay royalties on a tiny indie video game that
| I'm barely making any money on. My games aren't ever going to
| gross a million dollars. The licensing model at Unity is
| vague regarding whether tech workers need to pay for Unity
| Plus if it's a side thing for them also (I recall there being
| a 100k cap).
| avolcano wrote:
| Well, it's worth noting Unity _doesn 't have_ royalties -
| you just pay per seat on a monthly cost, and it's free
| indefinitely* if you make/raise less than $100k a year.
|
| * (this also means no official support and a few missing
| features, not sure if UE4 offers everything for free)
| metalforever wrote:
| It is unclear whether you have to pay the monthly fee if
| you don't have a registered business and are working on
| something in your free time, and have a day job making
| 100k+. I don't like how the motivations are out of whack
| here . Unity makes more money if I don't finish my game .
| teraflop wrote:
| Your question is answered pretty clearly by the license
| terms: https://unity3d.com/legal/terms-of-
| service/software
|
| > if you are an individual using the Unity Software, but
| not providing services to a third party, your Total
| Finances are the amount generated in connection with your
| use of the Unity Software. In this case, your Total
| Finances would not include amounts you generate from
| other work (for example, if your day job is as a
| zookeeper).
| asutekku wrote:
| UE offers everything free and now they started providing
| some in game services (such as accounts, statistics) for
| free too. Only way to pay to use Unreal Engine is to earn
| more than 1.000.000 usd which for most people means
| everything is completely free. I'd say unreal has a much
| better value proposition in here.
| gfxgirl wrote:
| i know games with $3 million dollar budgets that chose
| Unity over Unreal because with Unreal that would have
| cost them $150k where as with their 10 person team Unity
| cost them $45k for 3 years.
| deerIRL wrote:
| It may have changed, but back when we were looking into
| Engines to use, Unity had a completely free license until
| you hit $100,00 in sales or wanted to remove the unity
| splash screen on app launch which costed a then flat $1500
| licensing fee for the "Professional Edition".
| andechs wrote:
| Removing the splash screen for Unity is a feature - Unity
| has a pretty bad rep (perhaps undeservedly) because so
| much shovelware uses the engine.
| chongli wrote:
| I'd be really curious to see what a talented programmer or two
| could do with the engine by themselves, without bringing an
| artist on board. Is the Unreal engine flexible enough to do low
| fidelity, 2D games or are you just better off coding up your
| own engine at that point?
| AlunAlun wrote:
| You're better off using Unity for such projects.
| dubcanada wrote:
| The only reason to use Unreal for a 2d game is if you want
| easy cross platform support and an asset pipeline, otherwise
| you would probably just make your own or use one of the
| existing 2d engines.
| rasz wrote:
| Plenty of gamejam games are made in a weekend using Unreal,
| Unity is still holding strong due to ease of whipping
| something out in Adventure Creator.
| autarch wrote:
| I'm not an expert in these things but my understanding is
| that Unity is much better for smaller games. I think Unreal
| is aimed at the AAA market.
| jfkebwjsbx wrote:
| "Low-fidelity", 2D does not mean no artist.
|
| Pretty much every game needs someone talented in art or
| design. It can be one of the programmers, of course.
|
| Unreal is not a good choice for a 2D game, anyway.
| wastedhours wrote:
| Also > Epic Account and Game Services
|
| I think this has the potential to be a huge shift if enough
| developers build games targeting Fortnite players. There's an
| ecosystem right there to be tapped into, and Epic just happens
| to be giving you the tools to do it.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| And developers who launch on the Epic Store get much better
| placement than the average Steam listing, and free promotion
| by Epic's social accounts. At least right now, even before
| the financial incentives, there's a lot of perks for a new
| developer to become "heard of" from Epic.
| [deleted]
| jerome-jh wrote:
| I am quite disappointed she does not leave footprints in the
| sand, at 1:30.
| [deleted]
| robmerki wrote:
| I am always skeptical of tech demos like this, but if Epic has
| truly created a way to show full quality assets at runtime
| without manual LOD / optimization, then this is going to be a
| huge process improvement for game development. Same goes for this
| lighting. Baking lights is such a burden, if they can simply do
| all of this at runtime then making beautiful games just became
| that much easier.
|
| They also bought Quixel, which gives all of these photo realistic
| assets to any Unreal Engine developer (even if you're some kid
| building a game for free). Not sure how Unity can keep up with
| this.
| brundolf wrote:
| I'm normally skeptical of tech demos, but normally they don't
| actually talk about the tech. Assuming the actual promises
| aren't misleading, this is extremely impressive.
|
| > Not sure how Unity can keep up with this.
|
| Unity still has a big edge on usability. Unreal is very much a
| AAA tool: you have to use C++, all the built-in systems have a
| much steeper learning curve, etc. Even as a professional dev
| who's tried a few times to get into it for fun, it's just too
| much headache for my level of project. Whereas I can whip
| something together in Unity really easily. All that said, this
| definitely widens the gap for actual studios. If you have the
| time and know-how to use Unreal, you have even less reason to
| consider Unity now.
| jakearmitage wrote:
| You don't have to use C++, you have Blueprints, which can
| control not only shaders, but also game logic and levels.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Blueprints felt to me like they made a lot more sense if
| you knew how C++ worked, but I only used UE4 a little bit
| to toy around with it
| brundolf wrote:
| If you're a programmer who wants to write code, you have to
| use C++
| Arelius wrote:
| That's not entirelly true, there are for instance Python
| bindings, and I think some work exists on bindings for
| other languages. I just think they don't always have a
| lot of support until a case exists where it ends up being
| really valuable. Film studios in the case of Python.
|
| https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-
| US/PythonAPI/introduction.h...
| virtualritz wrote:
| Nah, you can do a minimal binding and write most of it in
| something else. E.g. Rust. Considerable boilerplate work
| initially for sure but possible.
| speedgoose wrote:
| I'm a programmer and I love unreal's blueprint. Unreal's
| c++ on the other hand, I hate it.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| For a non-programmer getting into games, C++ isn't that
| much larger leap than C#. Also, as others said, you have
| blueprints. They're not bad - though hopefully there will
| be some investments made into ergonomics of their use.
| random32840 wrote:
| You can also use SkookumScript, although I wouldn't.
| Blueprints can also be compiled down to C++.
| ngold wrote:
| I looked at unity and unreal 4 before starting to learn an
| engine. Unreal is great, but the massive amount of tutorials
| and documentation is why I started with unity. I really hope
| unreal 5 can do something similar in the distant future.
| Before unreal 6 is released.
| Mirioron wrote:
| I think it remains to be seen. Unity's big upcoming feature
| seems to what they call the Data Oriented Technology Stack.
| Essentially, this supposedly allows you to put far more non-
| static objects onto the screen than is usually available in a
| game engine. I do agree though that what Epic's doing here is a
| huge deal.
| robmerki wrote:
| I love the Unity's efforts with ECS, but how many games would
| benefit from it?
| barbecue_sauce wrote:
| As far as I know, Quixel still requires a subscription, and the
| assets can still be used in Unity. But the dynamic LOD
| optimization is definitely a killer feature.
| naikrovek wrote:
| Quixel is free for use with Unreal. The pricing structure for
| all other content tools is the same as it was before Epic
| bought Quixel.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Don't you still need to do some of that just for file size and
| data transfer, if nothing else? In the demo they said it had
| hundreds of billions of triangles. Google tells me you can get
| down to 18 bytes or so per triangle, but even if we assume a
| lower bound of just three bytes per triangle (amortized storage
| of 1 vertex per triangle of an x,y,z point), we're talking
| about on the order of terabytes to just store that scene,
| right?
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| "virtual" is the keyword. They do some magic to not calculate
| or store most of it, most of the time.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the virtual word here refers to the
| geometry being in a virtualized form, meaning that the
| renderer refers to it but the GPU does not have all of it
| in RAM but instead is paged in on demand.
|
| This paper about geometry images[0] was mentioned on
| Twitter from an old post by the programmer who implemented
| the functionality in UE5. Geometry images encode geometry
| in rectangular 2D textures that can be reconstructed later
| (the paper is kinda old for this, but i guess it can be
| done on a computer shader nowadays). If those images are
| stored as virtual textures, which are supported by the GPUs
| nowadays, they could be essentially using sparse
| textures/resources to store geometry.
|
| [0] http://hhoppe.com/gim.pdf
| naikrovek wrote:
| Instancing is the key, for that part of this demo at least.
| One statue replicated 300 times only costs _slightly_ more
| than one of those statues alone.
| omikun wrote:
| That's assuming 6 bytes per vertex, 3 vertices per triangle?
| Most assets use triangle strips, which averages closer to 1
| vertex per triangle. They also said the souce mesh is in
| billions of triangles, but their Nanite pairs that down to
| 10's of millions. At ~1 vert/tri * 6bytes * 100mil tri,
| that's 600MB of meshes. Keep in mind this is just a demo, so
| they can pack what would normally be an entire level into one
| room. A whole game might end up be equivalent to a couple of
| demos after they manually optimize even more.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I was going off of this:
|
| > Thus, when vertices are shared, the total amortized
| storage required per triangle will be 12 bytes of memory
| for the offsets (at 4 bytes for three 32-bit integer
| offsets) plus half of the storage for one vertex--6 bytes,
| assuming three 4-byte floats are used to store the vertex
| position--for a total of 18 bytes per triangle.
|
| From here: http://www.pbr-
| book.org/3ed-2018/Shapes/Triangle_Meshes.html
|
| And I they said hundreds of billions of triangle, not just
| billions (timestamp 6:29), but another commenter made a
| point that's obvious in retrospect that it's a ton of
| reused assets, not hundreds of billions of totally
| independent triangles.
| Apofis wrote:
| This would be awesome tech if everyone had gigabit fiber. You
| could just stream all the assets during loading time or if
| possible during gameplay. On second thought, 125MB per second
| probably wouldn't be fast enough. A 30 second load time would
| only result in 3750mb of assets at best. 4k on a Google
| Stadia doesn't sound bad if the latency is good.
| jayd16 wrote:
| In reality its the same rock mesh 1000s of times.
| xxs wrote:
| >even if we assume just three bytes per triangle,
|
| that give's you up to 16.7m (2^24) possible triangles. Your
| napkin math is way off,
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I edited it to clarify I meant that as a lower bound. Even
| if it were somehow achievable, 3 bytes per triangle times
| hundreds (plural, so at least 200) of billions of triangles
| is at least 600 billion bytes: 600 gigabytes.
| pas wrote:
| You can use delta compression, you can even use lossy
| compression. It doesn't matter if a vertex is at x=1.001 or
| x=0.998 if it looks good enough.
|
| That said, yes, of course, assets are getting enormous - Call
| of Duty: Modern Warfare - 175.2GB on PS4.
|
| There was a post about the new MS Flight Simulator and how
| it'll stream high-def textures from the "cloud" during
| gameplay, because it has petabytes of textures.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| Wow! Quixel looks amazing!
|
| I've been hobbyist in Unity for a long time. But I think I'll
| switch to Unreal just for that.
| AlunAlun wrote:
| Unity pays lip service to AAA but its primary market segment
| mobile game development (which is nearly half of the entire
| gaming market).
| pjmlp wrote:
| And Hollywood, just like with Unreal, some studios are
| adopting Unity instead.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| And indie devs. A ton of indie games are on unity on the
| desktop.
| [deleted]
| airstrike wrote:
| I'm mostly concerned about the storage and bandwidth issues
| associated with this level of detail.
|
| Are we going to download 500GB games on our Playstation 5s?
| tommoor wrote:
| Call of Duty: Warzone requires over 100Gb free on the PS4
| disk just to download updates.
| pas wrote:
| Gears of War with updates is 250G, so yeah, looks like it.
| one2know wrote:
| I'm sorry but an unreal engine 5 video needs to start with
| graphics, tim sweeney, or not start at all.
| rubber_duck wrote:
| The environment demo is very impressive - wonder why they didn't
| put a bit more effort in to the character, it would have been
| insanely impressive if the character detail was next-gen.
| goldcd wrote:
| I'd just assumed it was a "hey, wouldn't this be great if Lara
| Croft was standing here instead" place-holder.
| colordrops wrote:
| Yes the character stuck out as much less realistic than the
| environment. I thought it was an engine limitation but I
| suppose it could be improved with additional effort.
| LinuXY wrote:
| Any chance we can get a scalable network backend to go along with
| the render enhancements? Fan-out workers on actors and a KCP
| implementation would great!
| aeturnum wrote:
| It's great to see that graphics continue to improve, but I think
| the pipelining of reproducing physical space characteristics is
| most interesting to me. One of the things they mention in the
| video is using tools to measure how real spaces echo and then
| reproducing those echo characteristics in virtual spaces.
| Techniques like that have enormous potential for allowing us to
| use virtual space and actual space collaboratively. We'll always
| have games, but I'm excited to see how, in the next twenty or
| thirty years, technology that started in games starts to allow us
| to interact and socialize in new ways.
| jondiggsit wrote:
| As a high-end builder, I would love to integrate a wall like
| this into a project. The ability (as shown with the Mandelorian
| video) the screens have to produce light would be incredible in
| interior living spaces.
| keenmaster wrote:
| Modular micro LED panels will make this easier, when they're
| not absurdly expensive.
| frabert wrote:
| This has been done for ages in the audio production space, it's
| called "convolution reverb". It's quite nice, but it doesn't
| allow you to tune it very much, besides basic filtering and
| stretching/cutting.
| aeturnum wrote:
| Yah, they said "convolution reverb," so I think they expected
| audience to know what it was. Often it's not about creating
| new technology, but making existing technology accessible to
| new audiences and new creators.
| neotriple wrote:
| Honestly, convolution reverb is already highly accessible.
| It's a feature in $50 (and probably free) reverb plug-ins
| for anybody that does audio. They're relatively easy to
| implement and have probably been around for a decade+. As
| the OP said, the audio things they mentioned aren't new or
| adding any accessibility imo
| haywirez wrote:
| You have it right now in the browser Web Audio API, for
| free[1]
|
| [1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/API/ConvolverNo...
| thewebcount wrote:
| They were doing it in the 80s for music when samplers
| first became big.
| bkanber wrote:
| Ah, convolution reverb. We've had it for a long time in DSP.
| Basically what you do is pop a balloon (create an "impulse" --
| you can also clap your hands or use an electric arc) and record
| the echo. This gives you what's called the "impulse response"
| of the space.
|
| Reverb is really just thousands of echoes, and echoes are just
| the original sound delayed back to you. So what you can do is
| use the impulse response in a FIR filter, convolve it with the
| original signal, and you've recreated the same reverb with a
| different sound.
|
| This technique has been quite accessible to audio engineers
| (and mechanical engineers) for a few decades now. But you
| really only go out and sample impulse responses when you really
| need a very accurate model of the reverb. In most cases someone
| will just use a precanned impulse response.
| willis936 wrote:
| This is one area where hardware accelerated ray-tracing has
| me excited. I like the idea of walking sound sources to the
| observer. Unlike light, you need to account for the speed of
| sound through mediums, which adds an extra layer of cool imo.
| You also don't need to update at the audio sample rate, since
| most objects will not be moving very fast (unless you want
| trans sonic simulations, which would be exotic and cool).
|
| Forget all of the little hacks. Sound processing is cheap. In
| 2020 it is unnecessary to select from a set of pre-baked
| filters and applying them to some predefined volume (ie this
| room is echoey, this room is absorbant, etc.)
|
| This is one area where software has regressed then stagnated
| [0]. It doesn't make any sense, other than it wasn't
| prioritized. I think it's only a matter of time before
| engines go back and finally complete the audio simulation
| problem.
|
| 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS_Fbueh7F4
| bkanber wrote:
| I suppose it's a matter of acceptable approximations and
| cost. If only 2% of players have a high quality surround
| sound system, and only half of those have a good ear, then
| you really only have 1% of users who can tell the
| difference between raytraced audio and the heuristic
| "hacks" that sound engineers have spent decades developing.
| So I don't know if audio raytracing will become mainstream
| in games anytime soon. But I also suppose that if one
| engine does it, others will follow suit.
|
| Same thing with this Unreal 5 demo. Most users would not be
| able to tell the difference between rendering 16B vs 8B
| triangles per frame.
| willis936 wrote:
| You don't need a high quality sound system or a good ear
| to tell the difference though. You just need a pair of
| headphones and to be a human with hearing. Evolution has
| been at work for eons. Every human born is a powerful
| audio processing machine. I can't give you a rigorous
| proof or hand you a double blind test to try for
| yourself, so you'll have to accept an impasse or start
| going down a rabbit hole consisting of studies on pre-
| baked ray-traced FIR filters of known geometries and the
| audibility of group delay.
|
| I am convinced every human can hear the difference.
| Computation is cheap. There's no reason not to solve the
| problem.
| bkanber wrote:
| You should submit a patch to Godot, then! Force Unreal
| and others to implement it too.
| CarVac wrote:
| The only things I can possibly criticize is the global
| illumination lagging behind environment changes (presumably
| because it's iterative) and the water simulation not being movie-
| quality.
|
| Otherwise it's simply astonishing.
| vmception wrote:
| that water simulation was pretty bad and blurred out, I went
| over it a few times. I don't think this is a limitation of the
| engine because I have seen plenty of games use Unreal Engine 4
| and do it differently.
| flipgimble wrote:
| Let me throw in an anecdote that may amuse some: I was working
| for a now defunct large game company when Epic and Tim Sweeny
| came in to demo Unreal Engine 3 very early before the PS3 and
| XBox360 were launched. This was about 2004. Their demo blew away
| executives in particular. They showed multicolored lights casting
| multicolored shadows on a single high detail character. One of
| the lights was behind a stained glass window, projecting
| beautiful patterns. Soon after a deal was signed to use the
| engine throughout the entire studio. In retrospect that was a
| good decision and I have a lot of respect for Unreal Engine and
| Epic in general.
|
| Edit: found the video of the demo levels that shipped with very
| early UE3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m7T5ay_8DI
|
| However UE3-generation games that finally shipped had none of the
| visual effects from the early demos. The multicolored shadows
| could only be rendered with multiple passes, at least one per
| light, which proved to be too expensive for larger dynamic game
| scenes. It took years of work from the demo to shipped games, and
| an army of unnamed engineers to wrestle the technology into a
| product.
|
| UE4 had a great early demo of dynamic global illumination using
| something like voxel cone tracing if I remember correctly. To my
| knowledge that tech demo was never incorporated into the engine
| and never shipped.
|
| Epic is famous for their demos, and I love them for it... at
| least now that I no longer work professionally in that field. If
| anything it charts a long term technical direction for
| interactive entertainment.
| artsyca wrote:
| Dude I spent a large portion of my early career as a web
| developer making rounded corners on divs using all sorts of
| kludges
| pjungwir wrote:
| For a few years around 2001, rounded corners were a _big_
| part of hp 's branding. I was in a dev shop that maintained
| part of hp.com, and we had to have them everywhere. I didn't
| work on their site very often myself, but I think that team
| must have been experts at rounded rectangles. :-) At the time
| it was still sort of a cool effect on the web.
| waterhouse wrote:
| Better or worse kludges than this one?
| http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/roundy.html
| pix64 wrote:
| Well I just discovered this 11 year old Firefox bug due to
| that page
|
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477157
| artsyca wrote:
| Make the change easy -- then make the easy change
|
| They're probably waiting until it goes away on its own as
| all epic bugs do
| disease wrote:
| Thanks for the flashbacks! I had blacked out any memories
| of the world before 'border-radius' before seeing that!
| andy_ppp wrote:
| And now that it's easy people try to avoid using rounded
| corners...
| rodneyzeng wrote:
| Well, I just found people still love rounded corners in
| LaTeX templates of books nowadays...
| kposehn wrote:
| We shall not speak of those dark times!
| [deleted]
| rodneyzeng wrote:
| Check color box with rounded corner in LaTeX, people are
| still living with it nowadays...
| ecoqba11 wrote:
| Yep, fun times!
| golergka wrote:
| Bet it pays more, too.
| filoleg wrote:
| Almost definitely, but it isn't even nearly as mindblowing
| to a casual outside observer as a cool UE demo.
| hypertexthero wrote:
| All Steve Jobs' fault: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?
| story=Round_Rects_Are_...
| triceratops wrote:
| That was really great! Thanks!
| artsyca wrote:
| Really great! This reminds me of how epic and iconic this
| company truly was -- I lived in a constant state of
| delight as a child using their software and software
| developed on their platforms starting with the old BRUN
| command on apple ][
| skratlo wrote:
| This made my day dude, thanks for that. Imma dropping
| everything now and going to make rounded corners button with
| WebGL canvas, using signed distance function in a fragment
| shader.
| gridlockd wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdqjcMmjeaA
| ordinaryradical wrote:
| Read the parent again with this playing in the background
| for peak webdev irony.
| Apofis wrote:
| Rounded corners using tables and gifs?
| rpeden wrote:
| Or by just using Flash.
|
| I never did it myself. I know there are plenty of reasons
| to _dislike_ flash. And I know plenty of people absolutely
| hated sites created solely using Flash.
|
| But I have to admit I enjoyed the creativity I saw on many
| Flash sites. There a generic sameness to much of the modern
| web. I know Flash sites were useless for SEO, and probably
| for accessibility too. So I don't think things are
| necessarily _worse_ now. Just more generic.
|
| Of course, you can create a Flash-like site using web-
| native technologies, but it's probably more work.
| ekvilibrist wrote:
| Wasn't the problem with "Flash sites" that it was way way
| worse than any regular website... as a website? Kinda
| like SPAs today. You had to reinvent stuff the browser
| already did perfectly. But as long as you made Flash
| _APPS_ to be run embedded on websites, it was pretty
| awesome. Animation, video, etc. No competition, hands
| down just great tech... until HTML5 caught up.
| pvorb wrote:
| I was going to say something similar. A lot of the
| drawbacks from flash sites also apply to current SPAs. I
| know you can get usable and SEO friendly SPAs, but it's
| so much work compared to plain HTML files or templating
| in the backend.
| conradfr wrote:
| You know it. 9 cells tables, slicing your pixel-perfect
| corners in Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop, exporting as a gif
| with transparent color.
|
| That also reminds of the transparent 1px gif "hack".
|
| I'm not that nostalgic about that. Once in a while all that
| knowledge comes in handy for troubleshooting an email
| template...
| JorgeGT wrote:
| > in Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop
|
| That's a weird way of spelling Macromedia Dreamweaver...
| conradfr wrote:
| Ah. I remember using Dreamweaver 4 a bit, and Fireworks
| (alpha channel transparency in png ? What is this
| sorcery?).
| artsyca wrote:
| Yea and applying a JS fix to allow transparent PNG
| debaserab2 wrote:
| That reminds me of the old trick of using a 1x1 pixel in an
| empty table cell to ensure that internet explorer would
| actually expand the table cell to whatever width you set it
| to (height still needed another trick if i recall
| correctly). would work, too, but then the minimum
| height of the cell would be whatever the line height was
| set to, and the line-height property didn't behave the same
| across browsers.
|
| It's funny how old tricks make a comeback. I see a lot of
| 's in React codebases to preserve whitespace around
| JSX tags.
| cmsefton wrote:
| And the old trick of a 2x2 pixel gif with one colour
| transparent, and the other a non-transparent colour
| which, when set as a background to the table cell,
| provided an illusion of colour transparency with the main
| background behind the table.
| Jetrel wrote:
| To invoke the old "rule 5" of explaining things:
|
| Until surprisingly recently, there was no built-in way to
| make a rectangular element on a webpage have rounded
| corners. People had to use all sorts of dirty hacks to make
| a final product that "looked like" it was a native, built-
| in feature. Usually in the old days it basically amounted
| to various forms of "putting a picture of a rounded corner"
| (often a gif) in each of the corners of the element you
| were putting on the page.
|
| There were a lot of different ways to do that, but one of
| them was to use "tables" - tables these days are usually
| only used for what their genuine, semantic intent is: for
| drawing a literally spreadsheet-like table of data. But
| back in the earliest days of the web, they were the only
| controllable way to visually lay things out on any kind of
| grid, so despite the fact that they were "supposed" to have
| nothing to do with visual layout, they'd get used all the
| time for that - often getting used to do visual borders and
| stuff.
|
| So to do rounded corners, you'd basically make a table that
| was a 3x3 grid. In the corner elements of the grid, you'd
| have tiny pictures of rounded corners; in the side elements
| of the grid you'd basically have nothing (they'd be really
| skinny elements, either very wide or tall). Then the middle
| element in the grid would be gigantic, and would hold your
| actual content.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| Let's also add the infamous sliding door div structure to
| making expandable dynamic height divs.
| artsyca wrote:
| How about that layout with columns and a sticky footer --
| sirmarksalot wrote:
| I was about to weigh in on how 9-slicing is absolutely a
| valid strategy for UI components, and give you an example
| from my professional work, only to realize that I can't
| think of a single example that wasn't, "hack around some
| library that doesn't have border-radius".
|
| I'll be glad for the day when 9-slice is a truly obscure
| technique.
| artsyca wrote:
| Nine slice put a lot of food on the table but I started
| to question my purpose in life
|
| Border-image came and changed the game in the early
| 2010's... Doing exactly that in essence
| CydeWeys wrote:
| And for an authentic contemporaneous example of this
| technique, here's my website that I designed in 2002 when
| I was in high school: http://cydeweys.com/archive/
|
| You won't know it from looking at it because you'll only
| see the rendered static HTML, but that entire site was
| actually written in C++. Using the AP C++ libraries (yes,
| _that_ AP).
| artsyca wrote:
| Shouts to Udephus!
| atum47 wrote:
| YES BABY!!! I use to do it all the time. =)
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20040204003135/http://www.reali
| d...
| artsyca wrote:
| Rico Suave!
| magma17 wrote:
| here is another kludge: border-radius
| artsyca wrote:
| Yea man! Border-radius changed the game and made nine-
| slices method legit
|
| I remember using a JS poly fill with modernizr to get it to
| work like as soon as it came out and making pixel perfect
| images to use with it!
| bredren wrote:
| I also spent an inordinate amount of time getting rounded
| corners on a fan site blog I ran. I forgot about this.
| Lorin wrote:
| CIG's customizations to the Lumberyard engine have been pretty
| impressive - believe they're working on SDF now
| Krasnol wrote:
| Yeah it looks nice but the price is that it's broken
| everywhere else and will probably be overtaken by newer
| engines until it reaches a release. That is...if it ever
| does.
|
| Otherwise, not many games made it to release on that engine:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Lumberyard
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| Lumberyard is a fork of the CryEngine, and quite a few
| games have shipped on either CryEngine or one of its forks
| (particularly Dunia, which Ubisoft uses extensively).
| backtracking wrote:
| It's say current UE4 games don't match the details of the UE4
| demos they showed on release.
| cdash wrote:
| I really don't agree with that. Current games look better
| than the UE4 demo.
|
| See this for the original demo of UE4.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD9CPqSKjTU
| rowanG077 wrote:
| FF 7 remake comes extremely close though. That's the best
| looking UE4 game I know. It's expected that real games do not
| have demo levels of visual fidelity.
| crammyRL wrote:
| I will say its Gears 5. Coalition has been incredible with
| their usage of Unreal since the original Gears of War back
| in Xbox360 days. They peaked with Gears 5.
| dazzawazza wrote:
| Remember the PS1 dinosaur demo? Yeah the whole industry is
| famous for this.
|
| Games are more than tech demos.
| philipov wrote:
| Tell that to the VR scene.
| Mirioron wrote:
| To be fair, Epic wanted to have real-time global illumination
| for UE4. They even had a lot of the work done, but it just
| never quite made it. The performance impact was too great. I
| imagine several years later they've been able to deal with
| most of the issues, especially since we have a lot more
| computational power available.
| danbolt wrote:
| I always wondered if that dinosaur was using the 2MB of
| memory in the final retail unit, or 4MB often seen in arcade
| boards using the the PS1's technology.
| flatiron wrote:
| I could swear I "played" it when I was a kid off a
| PlayStation magazine or Pizza Hut demo disk on a retail
| (well modded) unit
| dazzawazza wrote:
| I think it came out on a demo disk at some point. You got
| to move the dino about and maybe the light source? It's
| been a long time!
| detritus wrote:
| Yes, I distinctly remember rotating this model around on
| an original PS1 many (many) years ago.
| dkersten wrote:
| Yep, I remember this too.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| For me it came on a disk caled Demo 1 which shipped with
| the first issue of the Playstation.
| Jare wrote:
| I recall seeing it live in a devkit but I can't for the
| life of me remember the devkit specs. Note that that demo
| catered very expertly to the strengths of the PS1 hardware,
| it should run jut fine in a retail unit.
| danbolt wrote:
| Yeah, the sort of things pictured in the dinosaur demo
| don't always match what's seen in retail PS1 games. I'd
| love to see a dissection of it.
| Jare wrote:
| Some things I can think of:
|
| - Dinos were so in vogue and so suggesting of
| technological innovation. Jurassic Park came out what,
| 2-3 years earlier?
|
| - Very limited z-sorting requirements, could likely be
| done with a simple bsp if sorting individual polys proved
| too taxing.
|
| - Polys of fairly regular dimensions, not overly long in
| one direction. Helps with less visible sorting and
| clipping artifacts.
|
| - No problem with lack of perspective correction, because
| textures are already shimmering due to the organic skin
| animation.
|
| - That black fog has always been very effective. We love
| terrifying things emerging from the dark, which Doom3
| tech proved again, and more recently VR.
| ccktlmazeltov wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7Lk7idveeU
| proverbialbunny wrote:
| It looks like PS2 graphics.
| jansan wrote:
| I guess they go completely to the limit in their demos,
| so in actual games you will see it only after the next
| version of their engine has been released.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ksec wrote:
| Not in the industry, so pure speculation.
|
| Unreal Engine's old business model were exactly that, get you
| excited with demos and sign up ( paid ) for their engine. And
| it was the same with UE 3 and UE 4. But in 2015 all that
| changed. It was open sourced on Github, it has a very
| sustainable revenue model due to the explosion of Mobile
| Gaming, the Gaming industry as a whole is now bigger than
| Movies and Music industry _combined_.
|
| I think it is fair to say EPYC no longer has the incentive to
| do that with UE 5. And because it is / will be open source,
| they can now actively work with many different partners (
| Hardware such as Sony and Microsoft and other publishers ) to
| make sure those technology works as intended.
| gfxgirl wrote:
| FYI though, It's not open source. Open source has a meaning
| and Unreal doesn't fit that meaning.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=open+soruce+definition
| tanilama wrote:
| It is open source in the sense the source code is available
| for you to see. But probably not on the usage part.
| skohan wrote:
| It would technically be "source available", no?
| notaplumber wrote:
| UE5 is not open source, it is shared source or "source
| available". Assuming it follows the model of UE4.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software
| 0xCMP wrote:
| Good point, but OP's point is that they can't hide behind
| demos. Anyone who requests the source will most likely get
| it and be able to see what's going on.
| notaplumber wrote:
| Indeed, that part is accurate. It would be technically
| interesting if the tech demo was a part of UE5 source
| release. I'm not familiar if they've done that in the
| past.
| barbecue_sauce wrote:
| Possibly a typo, but EPYC is a processor brand. EPIC makes
| Unreal (and Fortnite).
| mtsx wrote:
| It's not open source..
| lmilcin wrote:
| Just looking at demoscene, it is possible to create amazing
| results with very little resources if you have right people and
| infinite time and resources to polish couple of seconds of it.
|
| This rarely transfers to a product that has a lot of content to
| be built, an actual budget, good but not star developers and
| conflicting requirements.
| mycall wrote:
| Is Unreal Engine at all related to Future Crew's Unreal in
| 1992?
| pas wrote:
| Who knows, they had a hard time coming up with the name.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20010814190955/http://www.games
| p...
| bilekas wrote:
| Their early demos are usually really good, but the early
| versions rarely ship with all of them, over time though to
| their credit they do arrive, and often exceed the
| demonstrations.
|
| Some of the new lighting features in UE5 are interesting and
| should be cheaper than RTX overall, but will be interesting to
| see the mix and match which developers will achieve. Looking
| forward to having a play around with it.
| lumens wrote:
| Extremely impressive.
|
| That said, I am struck by how the inaccuracies in physics
| modeling start sticking out like a sore thumb the closer the
| visuals get to realism. After gawking at the ground and falling
| rocks in the first scene, I kept getting stuck on the weird
| movement of her ponytail. Also the landing of the first jump
| across the chasm.
|
| Picking nits for sure; incredible work here.
| ben7799 wrote:
| For sure, the physics once she starts rock climbing are
| horrific and super uncanny.
|
| Forearms need to be parallel to the gravity vector almost all
| the time. Arms need to be kept straight almost all the time.
| The only exceptions for these are the actual top of a motion to
| move up to the next hold.
|
| All stuff you would never notice if the graphics weren't
| amazing.
|
| I think I'm so used to seeing unrealistic pony tails and
| clothes I don't even notice.
|
| Other than Uncharted I don't recall playing games with
| climbing.. I've spent enough real world climbing time since
| then it's noticeable now.
| aaanotherhnfolk wrote:
| I got the uncanny valley sense from the footage and had to
| watch it a few times to understand why. As you say, there are
| still subsystems whose fidelity don't meet the quality bar that
| the texture and lighting set.
|
| Little things like the player model's hands interacting with an
| invisible flat surface above the incredibly intricate rock
| textures.
|
| Yes, nits. With the player model acting as a locus for these
| uncanny interactions, I wonder if there will be a wave of first
| person games that can take full advantage of the photorealism.
| naikrovek wrote:
| Hair is nowhere near realism, yet.
|
| This is masked by using hairstyles which are either not
| intended to move or which are intended to display limited
| movement.
|
| Her hair isn't in a true ponytail, anyway. Even with more
| restricted movement of the hairstyle she has, it still doesn't
| look right at all.
| xsmasher wrote:
| The more accurate the rendering is, the more accuracy you
| expect of everything else.
|
| A game with cartoonish or simplified rendering can get away
| with one attack animation, one "working" animation etc; but
| once the rendering becomes realistic, you need better
| animations and physics, etc.
| johncoogan wrote:
| Does anyone have any theories as to how Nanite actually works?
| I've never heard of virtualized micropolygon geometry before and
| it sounds a bit buzzwordy. Do we think they are just loading the
| full model into GPU memory, or are they baking down various LODs
| and normal maps at compile time through some automatic process?
| Either way, it's a huge workflow improvement. It's just unclear
| what's actually happening...
| alkonaut wrote:
| "Micropolygon" I assume means Reyes rendering, I.e that the
| polygons are created on demand from underlying geometry.
| Instead of various LODs you tessellate when rendering,
| specifically for the view so each pixel has ~1 vertex. Walk
| closer to the statue and it gets more triangles in tesselation.
| Miraste wrote:
| But how is it running so quickly? I've seen adaptive
| rendering implementations before, but they couldn't run in
| real time. If they are really using billions of polys they
| can't store them all in VRAM. Is the PS5 SSD fast enough to
| recalculate polys for every model in the scene every frame
| (Or even every few frames)?
| micheljansen wrote:
| Interesting how these demos used to be about how awesome
| everything looks. That still matters, of course, but previous gen
| engines already achieved cinematic photorealism. Now it's all
| about ease of use and workflow. No more need to worry about poly
| counts, normal maps etc.
| cryptozeus wrote:
| What a Demo ! Hopefully PS5 delivers this level of gaming.
| wildpeaks wrote:
| It's a total game changer.
|
| Time for everyone to learn Unreal, Houdini, and Mari.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| It'd be my default engine if it had language bindings other
| than C++.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Are there any technical details available for nanite and lumen
| works?
| surfsvammel wrote:
| For someone with zero insight into these kinds of things. What
| happened with Id software delivering game engines? Do they have
| competing software or are they not doing that sort of thing?
| alibert wrote:
| They are still doing in house engine. id Tech is now at version
| 7 and is used by their latest game Doom Eternal (running on
| Vulkan exclusively). Extremely well optimized for any
| configuration spec and run great especially on AMD GPU.
| DenisM wrote:
| For all the advancements the demo is still essentially
| monochromatic.
|
| As I recall this is done to avoid the difficulties of rendering
| how two adjacent differently colored objects bleed their colors
| onto each other. No color - no bleeding.
|
| I'd prefer color over pixel accuracy.
| jeffbee wrote:
| That my reaction to this recent UE4 demo. The whole world is
| monochromatic, and this seems to be an adaptation to the limits
| of the technology.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKu1Y-LlfNQ
| PossiblyKyle wrote:
| Multiple comments here agree that the water is not the engine's
| strong suit, but the thing that bothers me the most these days is
| not the water, but the wetness (or lack thereof). Why can't
| nobody do wetness well? In most games you'll play, you can dive
| deep into the water and when you go out your model will stay
| completely dry. If Naughty Dog managed to do it well on a PS3, so
| can the game engine as a feature on the PS5.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| I've been wondering for a while Unreal doesn't just make the
| Unreal Browser.
|
| You download and install it.
|
| Then you give it a URL, and it streams down a map, and downloads
| DLLs containing behavior custom to that map. While you're in a
| map, you can walk through a portal to another map. Or you can
| just keep moving in a direction, which streams more and more map.
|
| If you're in a multi-player environment, you connect to a server
| for that environment. If you're in a solo area, you're just
| running locally.
|
| Isn't this what the Oasis (from "Ready Player One") is supposed
| to be like? What stops them from doing this?
| yodon wrote:
| They did. It's called Fortnite. It's been fairly distuptive.
| chupasaurus wrote:
| UE4 supports dynamic multiple maps. Fortnite maps are static
| ones, even though they could be done using that feature.
| yodon wrote:
| The hard part of the multiverse is the business model.
| Features like dynamic maps are just that, features. If you
| have a business model that works you can bring all the tech
| features to play. If you bring the tech to play without a
| business model you just crater spectacularly. This is why
| Fortnite is important.
|
| It may not be the feature list you thought the multiverse
| would launch with but in hindsight it will be the feature
| list that the multiverse did launch with.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| For me, if the content is compelling, I'm paying a
| monthly membership. I expect the multiverse to pay
| content creators based on how much time I linger in their
| content.
|
| Did HTML / HTTP have a business model? Or were they a
| platform upon which other things were built?
| yodon wrote:
| The business model for HTML/HTTP was and is advertising.
|
| People initially tried subscription models for HTML
| content but it didn't work so everyone went to
| advertising based models. Observationally, subscription
| HTML content models have continued to not work (yes,
| Netflix, but Netflix is more about video content than
| HTML content).
| VikingCoder wrote:
| There was no business model for HTML/HTTP.
|
| It was a set of technologies. Advertising later came to
| it.
|
| There are tons of subscription models for HTML content
| that you're ignoring. Patreon, YouTube, online news. Some
| small, some large.
| [deleted]
| friendlybus wrote:
| Similar to the concept being attempted at Core, though it's
| packaged as a game modding platform. https://www.coregames.com/
|
| Yes you can make unending worlds in UE4.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| How do you make money from this? Who would buy it? Why would
| anyone use it? Is there a point beyond "this is a cool thing",
| which is pretty well captured by Roblox and Second Life and
| VRChat
| VikingCoder wrote:
| 1) How do you make money from this?
|
| How do you make money from anything on computers? With Ads,
| with Paid Memberships, Paid Access to content.
|
| 2) Who would buy it? Why would anyone use it?
|
| Isn't that kind of like asking "who would buy the internet?
| Why would anyone use the internet?"
|
| Remember when Chromebooks were announced and everyone laughed
| because it's "just a browser?!"
|
| Well, imagine if you were browsing, except it looked like
| Unreal engine when you got to 3D content. Rather than looking
| like crappy WebGL content.
|
| 3) Is there a point beyond "this is a cool thing", which is
| pretty well captured by Roblox and Second Life and VRChat
|
| Do you think Roblox, Second Life, and VRChat look as good as
| Unreal Engine 5?
|
| Would you enjoy playing content in Unreal Engine 5 without
| having to install an entire game first?
| hobofan wrote:
| > Do you think Roblox, Second Life, and VRChat look as good
| as Unreal Engine 5?
|
| The main bottleneck is the price of asset production.
| Producing assets on the level of this demo videos is
| magnitudes more expensive than what you would see in those
| other platforms. So for someone to be able to turn a profit
| with that, there would need to be either a bigger
| willingness to spend, or an explosion in player base.
|
| There are also likely technical challenges. I'd imagine
| that very few people have both the storage capacity and
| bandwidth to sustain such a system. You see people on here
| complaining about websites being a few MB heavy. In such a
| high quality 3D browser, you would need to load multiple
| GBs per scene.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| I think there's a chance the player base would grow if
| there were one app you launch, and then you're in 3D
| world. I think it would help in discovery.
|
| On the technical challenges, yes, you need bandwidth.
| Just like you need electricity to play a console game.
| Yes.
|
| But maybe Stadia is a good way to limit how much
| bandwidth you really need? Load the data on the server,
| and stream the rendered views.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Nothing is stopping them from doing this.
|
| At the same time, nothing is motivating them to do this either.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| Isn't that kind of like saying that "we can all just keep
| using Postscript files. There's no need for this HTTP / HTML
| thing. Why would I want to stay in the 'browser'? I just use
| FTP to fetch content, and use my favorite Postscript renderer
| to view content."
| vvilliam0 wrote:
| Not unreal engine, but you might be interested in
| https://aframe.io/
| willis936 wrote:
| I think it is interesting that the first thing they talk about is
| LOD. UE4 is famous for its bad LOD implementation. Look at FFVII
| Remake [0]. It's an insanely high budget game made in UE4 with
| top-of-the-line assets, yet some textures never load in to their
| high resolution versions. UE4 has earned this stain. Since
| they're talking LOD first and foremost, maybe Epic actually fixed
| their UE LOD issues this time around.
|
| 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyGl5C3Uwak&t=10m40s
| underdeserver wrote:
| Holy forking shirtballs, that looks amazing.
|
| There's still some weirdness - I found the water movement (around
| 4:10) a bit odd, and the lightball in the cave seemed to be
| directional even though it was a ball. But my god, that's
| beautiful.
|
| The end scene with the flying reminded me of the (fully rendered)
| Avatar ride at Disney World. I stood in line for two hours for
| that.
| AlunAlun wrote:
| I agree the water was weak point, which is why they didn't
| spend much time looking at it!
| mthoms wrote:
| Watch the characters' hand. When she first reveals the ball, it
| glows in every direction. Then she moves her hand position to
| "focus" the light forward.
| underdeserver wrote:
| Yeah, but I don't see 100% sync between where she moves her
| hand and where the ball glows.
| Priem19 wrote:
| While this is completely amazing, a caveat: graphics are way less
| important than we think it is. I still remember every nook and
| cranny from Tomb Raider 3's jungle level, and when I think about
| it I imagine being deep inside a real jungle. It didn't matter
| that everything looked jagged; my imagination could go wild.
|
| This is probably a flawed opinion, but sometimes I think the more
| realistic games become, the less work for our imagination. I
| don't mean to say that we should stop upgrading graphics. What I
| do wish to say is this: if you have to choose between optimizing
| gameplay or graphics, choose gameplay. If you can do both, do
| both. Having access to a ridiculously powerful easy to use engine
| does not automatically mean you can do both by just jumbling high
| detailed props, foliage, terrain together and be done with it.
| It's counterintuitive, but it takes even more skill and a keen
| eye to create beautiful and immersive environments in a nearly
| photo realistic engine than those used 20 years ago. Why? We live
| in a perfect photorealistic real world, so we immediately spot
| things that just look weird and unnatural in game. Whereas in old
| engines our imagination corrected for all those things.
| rland wrote:
| I have a sister opinion to this take, which is that artstyle is
| far more important than graphics, and there is a very important
| difference between the two that is often ignored by large game
| studios. \\*
|
| Your graphical capability can push a hundred million triangles,
| but choosing the color, composition, and visual coherence of
| those triangles is more important to how people interpret your
| world than anything else. Humans have an extremely attuned
| visual processor that infers so much about the way the world
| behaves solely by the way it looks.
|
| The reason that classic games can be immersive despite a low
| poly count is because the artists have made the visuals behave
| in a way that is coherent with our internal model of the game
| world.
|
| An example of this is Portal. The portal gun is an interesting
| gameplay tool, but the game was able to fully take advantage of
| it because the artstyle of the game was very tightly coupled
| with the mechanics. They did a great job of making sure that
| the visual environment offered clues to how the game mechanics
| worked, which made it so easy for people to quickly grasp how
| the portal gun operated in complex environments. Had the
| artists failed, Portal would have been "oh yeah, I remember
| that game -- the portal gun was a neat gimmick but it felt
| clunky."
|
| The easy way out is to just try to make your environments and
| game mechanics as realistic as possible, essentially borrowing
| that creation of intuition from the real world. But the most
| creative games have worlds whose completely novel or alien
| mechanics are coupled with art direction that preserves this
| coherence, which makes the world just "click." Putting more
| triangles on screen makes for much prettier art, but the true
| substance of a game is something completely different.
|
| \\* not on purpose; it's just extremely difficult to pull off.
| audleman wrote:
| In a post about a new piece of graphics technology might not be
| the best place to have this conversation, but I'm glad it
| popped up. I recently decided to start playing Dwarf Fortress,
| a game with such terrible graphics it literally takes an act of
| will to get past them. Seriously, people post a screenshot full
| of commas and equal signs and say "epic battle, lol!"
|
| Yet, something anazubg happened once I dedicated myself to
| deciphering the ascii characters: my imagination sprung to life
| to fill in the gaps. From those bland a-z characters came
| vaulting ceilings with intricate wall designs. Epic twisting
| caves. The oddest looking characters.
|
| I compare it to a game of RimWorld, where the graphics make a
| lot more sense, but turns out limits my need to imagine it
| being different.
| antonios wrote:
| Exactly why I find good roguelikes to offer the most immersive
| gaming experiences. Just the input you need to let your
| imagination go wild. But not many friends share that sentiment,
| unfortunately.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Yeah, when all graphic is blocky, your imagination does the
| rest. But when you have blocky graphics together with shining
| water animation like in Morrowind (I think) it breaks
| immersion.
|
| Still though, that demo was impressive (even though there were
| maybe some tiny things not perfectly balanced with the shining
| other effect)
|
| I want to play games that look like that, now.
| apelin wrote:
| I guess we'll have to see if Unity will havea response on that.
| Have to say thou, having billions of triangles without
| sacrificing FPS is exciting.
| jerome-jh wrote:
| OK there are N=10^6 triangles and that shows the raw GPU power.
| True indirect lighting would be N^2: this is both impossible and
| not worth the cost in terms of realism. So maybe they do it on a
| low LOD geometry or even a dirtier trick. A low LOD is probably
| also used for collision detection. Keep in mind that these
| people's job is to trick you, to the letter. Maybe there is not
| much more than a larger GPU and an simplified creation process in
| this demo.
| petercooper wrote:
| I really, really, really want an Unreal Tournament 2021. It's a
| shame they haven't pushed that series as a showcase for the
| engine anymore.
| ww520 wrote:
| Still playing UT99. The original Unreal Tournament is just
| something done right.
| bloodorange wrote:
| UT2004 was brilliant too.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Came here to say the same thing. Hopefully, we'll at least get
| UT5 as a tech demo like UT4 was.
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| After the many fiascos of UE4 and the shit Sweeney and Epic have
| pulled I dont really care, I'm sticking with blender and godot.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| Many fiascos? Are you talking about how epic didn't pay dancers
| for their dances in fortnite? Or the crunch they pushed on
| their workers to ship fortnite content?
|
| I'm trying to think of others, maybe you could expand a bit?
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| Just a bit of background first. I bought in heavily to the
| ue4 ecosystem as soon as UE4 was released, back when it was
| $20/mo. After about 3 years I had enough and moved to godot
| and blender and being away from that ecosystems it's
| deficiencies grow ever more glaring.
|
| It started with promises that the editor would treat linux as
| a first class client. Those were lies, as not only did a
| community fork do more work than epic for years because they
| refused PRs, but the launcher still hasn't been made
| available for linux, requiring people to use Windows just to
| get marketplace assets. Now I get it, linux is a small subset
| of the community and it's their choice, etc, so I moved on
| with only a few hundred in marketplace assets lost, my
| personal choice and not a huge deal...
|
| Then there was paragon (at least I got a refund). Then they
| completely changed fortnite. Then it was just one thing after
| another. For example, epic was bad enough with exclusives,
| but they actually even pulled Metro Exodus from steam even
| after it was taking pre-orders! They promised they wouldn't
| do it again, and then did it again with Anno 1800. Then they
| started buying studios to remove old games from steam. They
| even started "bribing" crowdfunded games that magically moved
| away from steam despite originally promising steam release.
| (Shenmue 3, Outer Wilds, Pheonix Point)
|
| Their security was breached multiple times, with one single
| breach being over 9mil accounts. Multiple people with credit
| card issues who chargedback'ed immediately got a refund and
| then had their accounts suspended. (epic getting around
| chargeback fees).
|
| Epic is ~%40 owned by Tencent and has been found to do
| questionable things on systems. https://www.reddit.com/r/Phoe
| nixPoint/comments/b0rxdq/epic_g...
| https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-steam-data-reddit/
|
| They bought easy anti cheat (EAC) and then completely stopped
| all efforts to support linux (Valve had been in talks with
| them and discussing the linux issue). (a pretty big deal for
| the linux community as it affects many games present and
| future)
|
| They started paying off mods at the fortnitebr reddit sub
| which caused a mod exodus and a lot of hubub.
|
| Tim Sweeney on linux: "Installing Linux is sort of the
| equivalent of moving to Canada when one doesn't like US
| political trends. Nope, we've got to fight for the freedoms
| we have today, where we have them today."
|
| Tim Sweeney doesn't understand the difference between first
| and third party: "Steam's the largest PC store and already
| has PC exclusives such as DOTA2, Counterstrike, and Portal.
| Valve has every right to make deals with developers and
| publishers to secure more exclusives, just as Apple,
| Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, and Epic Games do!"
|
| They bought "views" on youtube at least a few times (see
| Shenmue 3 trailer)
|
| There is no gifting in the epic game store, and if you use
| the same payment on other accounts (like family) they will
| lock that payment method.
|
| They killed Rocket League on linux and macos.
|
| The epic games store barely functions, with no user reviews
| and plans for the devs to "opt in" reviews so they can select
| only the reviews they like. They did enable OpenCritic
| reviews though. Broken or no cloud saves, achievements, mod
| support, forums, or wishlists.
|
| This is only a partial list!
|
| It wasn't until 2019 that the Fortnight dev crunch thing came
| up, and honestly just calling it a "crunch" doesn't seem to
| do the issue justice when contractors were under a culture of
| fear to work 70-100 hr work weeks!
|
| When someone has a repeated pattern of abuse and lies and
| gaslighting, you can be sure thats what they will continue to
| do in the future, and that is what both Epic and Tim Sweeney
| have and are going to continue to do. Anybody who buys into
| the UE4 or UE5 ecosystem is probably going to regret it...
| unless Epic pays them off like they have plenty of times
| before.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| Some of those are very valid concerns, others don't really
| seem like fiascos.
|
| Paragon: Epic returned all purchases and made all the
| assets free on their marketplace. That seems like a pretty
| consumer friendly way to shutter a product that wasn't
| doing well.
|
| Exclusives: Paid exclusivity made games like Satisfactory
| possible, and I believe that all the exclusives are timed?
| Making games is expensive and unpredictable, exclusives
| ensure devs can take more risks without worrying about
| going bankrupt.
|
| Security is a serious concern for sure.
|
| Acquisitions: As far as I can tell, Psyonix is the only
| game studio they've bought, and they haven't pulled their
| game from Steam? Are there others?
|
| Tencent ownership: What's the _actual_ concern here? There
| 's a lot of sinophobia in gaming circles these days.
| There's plenty to be concerned about with the CCP and
| Tencent, but what's the specific worry about them having a
| minority stake in Epic?
|
| Linux support (Rocket League, Editor, etc.). These are data
| driven decisions. Rocket League, for instance, had 0.3%
| playership across Mac and Linux combined. They were
| updating their game, and fixing bugs for that small of a
| community just doesn't make financial sense. They issued
| 100% refunds, which seems pretty reasonable?
|
| > Anybody who buys into the UE4 or UE5 ecosystem is
| probably going to regret it
|
| As someone who worked in the industry for years (but never
| for Epic), I highly doubt this. I've worked with UE, Unity,
| and CryEngine/Lumberyard and there's a huge difference in
| support and tooling between them.
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| You asked for the negatives, but please don't get me
| wrong. I really like the interface and many of the
| features of UE, and the tech behind it. It's just a shame
| I felt forced to move away from it. Also, please keep in
| mind I'm not the typical person who is trying to get into
| gamedev on the side, as I'm a RMS loving, linux-only,
| most of my stack is gpl sorta dude.
|
| On the last point, you may be right, I might have been a
| bit hyperbolic but there are cases where I have seen it
| play out. One of my favorite games in the potential
| department was Mortal Online, but it constantly struggled
| with UE3 limitations despite official Epic support and
| moves with Atlas, etc (heres to hoping Mortal Online II
| using UE4 is good). UE4 has great graphics but as you
| know there is more to a game than that.
| fartcannon wrote:
| I think you were totally right. His counter-arguement
| basically boils down to 'so what' which is pretty bad.
|
| Some thing's are more important than others. Buying and
| removing support for already supported systems is an
| incredibly anticompetitive move and shouldn't be
| forgotten.
| rydre wrote:
| https://youtu.be/00gAbgBu8R4 - did Epic manage to pull off what
| Euclideon Holographics could not?
| rydre wrote:
| Looks impressive. Lets see what Unity has upcoming.
| rasz wrote:
| Who knows, maybe they will finally fix freezes in Escape from
| Tarkov (confirmed by devs as engine problem) after 4 years of
| promises.
| cdolan wrote:
| Is it just me or does water still look terrible?
|
| UE5 has better water than this, but not by much in my opinion
| (Halo 3, a 10 year old game):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4eFg-lnpDM
| nailer wrote:
| I'd say the Halo 5 video is better, but it's likely due to the
| artist.
| cdolan wrote:
| The artist at Epic using UE5 didnt do the best job on the
| water, you mean?
| seemslegit wrote:
| "Virtualized micropolygon geometry" sounds like a laundry
| detergent ad.
| seanwilson wrote:
| What's going on behind the scenes to explain the jump in graphics
| quality? Hardware? Algorithmic?
|
| Does this involve some breakthrough somewhere or is this
| incremental?
| random_ind_dude wrote:
| The graphics look good because of two things: Quixel and global
| illumination. Quixel is Swedish company that Epic acquired in
| 2019. Quixel does high-resolution scans of actual physical
| objects(photogrammetry) and makes them available as textures in
| Unreal Engine. The sheer rock faces that you see in the demo
| are Quixel megascans of actual rocks.
|
| The other thing that makes the graphics look impressive is
| global illumination, which provides real time dynamic lighting
| of the environment, instead of baked in (pre-rendered)
| lighting. The demo seems to only have a single light source -
| sunlight in the cave, light from the crystal looking thing in
| her hand while inside the room. I am not sure how well it look
| like in actual games when there are multiple light sources.
|
| The rest of the stuff doesn't look too different from current
| gen games.
| vasili111 wrote:
| All this for sure looks amazing. But I do not think it will bring
| anything new to gameplay. There is no big gameplay changes in
| past 15 years. All shooters, all MMORPG, all strategy games and
| etc are based on the ideas of 2003-2005 years. Graphics are
| improving but most games have similar gameplay. I think the
| biggest next impact to gameplay and game industry will be engine
| that will be able to have huge zoom ability + ability to handle
| more than 30 000 players on the same map (of course that also
| depend on server software and not only game engine). Like
| traveling from space on ship to planet and after landing and play
| as a regular 1st person game but all of this with lots of players
| on the same world (more than 30 000). I think that is next big
| thing that will change game industry.
| aerovistae wrote:
| No new ideas in the last 15 years? Have you _played_ Return of
| the Obra Dinn? Or Overcooked? Or Spiderman for PS4? Idk, I
| think these are bringing whole new levels of gameplay to the
| table just in the past year.
| jayd16 wrote:
| This ignores AR, VR, and other recent genres. We just had No
| Man's Sky come out doing exactly what you describe. Other
| procedural infinite space games exist.
| vasili111 wrote:
| > This ignores AR, VR, and other recent genres.
|
| They sounded promising but they did not made actual
| revolution in games. They are not mass product used by most
| players.
|
| > No Man's Sky come out doing exactly what you describe.
| Other procedural infinite space games exist.
|
| I said "able to have huge zoom ability + ability to handle
| more than 30 000 players on the same map". There are no games
| that have those both at the same time. Only those 2 in one
| game is what I am saying.
| keenmaster wrote:
| Play Half Life: Alyx and you might change your mind about
| VR. I think it convincingly shows that VR is the future.
|
| My setup:
|
| - OG Vive with deluxe audio kit and the wireless kits.
| (Both kits completely change the Vive and are in my opinion
| critical)
|
| - GTX 1080 Strix (factory overclocked)
|
| - 7th 6700k
|
| If I'm having this much fun on first gen hardware, then
| imagine next gen headsets with higher resolution, wider
| FOV, eye tracking, foveated rendering (enabling graphical
| fidelity more similar to big budget 2D games), a better
| developer ecosystem, more extensive haptics, built in
| wireless, more players (for social experiences and
| multiplayer), and increased comfort.
| liamcardenas wrote:
| Game Devs: Is Unreal Engine the premiere game engine at this
| point? UE has been a popular engine for a long time and with the
| recent _massive_ success of Epic Games, I have a hard time
| imagining Unity or even in-house engines are able to match the
| engineering that goes into this. That said, I am not familiar
| with this at all -- which is why I'm asking.
| jayd16 wrote:
| When you say "At the point" do you mean now with UE4 or what we
| think UE5 will bring? Unity will probably be a bit behind
| because they seem to focus on mobile more but they're not
| usually significantly behind.
|
| UE sort of seems to have a technical advantage on some
| platforms and Unity sort of has more of an outreach to smaller
| teams. Most games are not trying to be on the cutting edge
| though.
|
| You can ship a game on either engine just fine. In my
| experience, licensing plays the biggest role in the decision.
| gigatexal wrote:
| This is insane. The next decade of gaming is going to be amazing.
| gfxgirl wrote:
| So I'm going to join the naysayers here and say while the
| graphics look absolutely phenomenal the game itself looks the the
| same game I've been playing for 20-25 years.
|
| A 3rd person character who walks through caves, canyons, ruins,
| slides through tight places where the camera moves in close, can
| only climb on areas painted with the "you can climb here color"
| and then pushes or pulls a few knobs for "puzzles"
|
| It could be the original Tomb Raider (1996) or God of War (2005)
| or any Uncharted or all the other similar games in between. I'm
| sure others can name the same game that's been skinned over and
| over and over.
|
| I love pretty graphics but I'd really like to see the tech used
| to give me a new game, not just an old game with prettier images.
| thysultan wrote:
| I'm hoping games shift to a physics realism approach once we
| catch to what ever graphics goal the industry sees as "good
| enough". I'd prefer if 90% of the environment was "tangible".
| unnouinceput wrote:
| this is a demo. and i prefer graphics at engine level and let
| the games win or lose due to their quest/lore/immersion of
| storyline rather than a poor choice of graphics that looks
| clunky.
| dougmwne wrote:
| This is a tech demo. Epic will be able to demonstrate their
| engine more effectively in a familiar genre. If they were to
| showcase this using a completely original game genre concept it
| would distract from where the focus should rightly be, the
| pretty graphics. As far as I know, this is not a game that's
| being developed or released. If you are not interested in 3rd
| person action games, don't buy them.
| redxdev wrote:
| This seems like a silly complaint to me. Epic's engine team
| isn't the one coming up with game mechanics - that's largely up
| to teams actually making games. Unreal may have some
| functionality related to commonly implemented mechanics but
| anything truly unique isn't coming from the code in a generic
| engine anyway - it's coming from the studios building on top of
| it.
|
| This is a demo showing off tech. Any "game" that exists in the
| demo is purely to sell the realtime aspect and making it in a
| familiar environment or with familiar mechanics is just to show
| how the tech might be implemented in an otherwise known area.
| bredren wrote:
| This was also what I thought of. I get the "this is a demo" but
| my first consideration after realizing the stale example
| gameplay was to think about what UE 5 would be most awesome for
| and it is VR / AR.
|
| These flat "3D" experiences are like Duck Hunt to the kids in
| the retro bar in Back to the Future 2.
| choeger wrote:
| Hundreds of billions of triangles? How much main memory has the
| PlayStation 5?
| bluegreyred wrote:
| i believe the latest rumors suggest 16GB unified GDDR6, but the
| relevant tech here might be sophisticated caching technology
| that also leverages a fast PCIe 4.0 SSD
| guevara wrote:
| I really liked the fluid simulations. It's always been something
| hard to get right in games. Albeit, it did look pretty janky in
| the demo but I hope we can get some quality fluid simulations in
| games soon.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Wow, we'll soon be down to only one game engine.
|
| Crytek has financial worries. Plus it's the most difficult to
| use, because it's almost all C++.
|
| Unity is very accessible thanks to C# scripting, but has bug
| issues (and no source code).
|
| Unreal Engine looks amazing, is cheap or free for indie studios,
| and has source code included.
|
| If they can make UE slightly easier to develop for, they'll
| dominate the market.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Unity doesn't really overlap with Unreal. Unreal is big and
| cutting edge for AAA titles. Unity is much more simplified. The
| path of least resistance is usually pretty clear for someone
| starting a project.
| brundolf wrote:
| For a while there they really tried to overlap. Unity's been
| making a huge graphics push over the last five years - it
| actually had realtime GI before Unreal did, and wasted no
| time telling the whole world about it:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk8gpz0o5TU
|
| More recently it's been making a lot of noise about its new
| scriptable render pipeline and shader graph. Of course these
| are still playing catch-up with Unreal, but they're doing an
| admirable job.
|
| Meanwhile Unreal totally changed its pricing model ~5 years
| ago to be much more similar to Unity's and affordable for
| indies/individuals, as well as adding native support for
| mobile platforms, etc.
|
| For some customers there may be a clear choice, but for now
| at least there's also a ton of overlap between their markets.
| We'll see where things go in the future.
| swalsh wrote:
| There's a possibility Valve might release Source 2
| unixhero wrote:
| Half Life 3 confirmed.
| chupasaurus wrote:
| Dota 2 Reborn is the first game on it, full release was in
| September 2015. Also Dota 3 was a joke over 7.0.0 patch
| which had changed all of the core mechanics in the game,
| but to be fair it had breaked the chains from WC3 map
| mechanics.
| outworlder wrote:
| It would be a shame if they didn't. Alyx is a pretty good
| showcase.
| [deleted]
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| Wait. What about id Tech?
| dralley wrote:
| And Frostbite, although it's specific to EA.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Not licensed to third party studios. The last one that was
| open sourced was id tech 4 (Doom 3).
| Miraste wrote:
| Other Bethesda studios can still use them. I remember
| Arkane got ahold of id tech 5 for Dishonored 2, and then
| renamed it "Void Engine" and added a bunch of bugs.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Both Unity and Unreal Engine offer their source code on
| Github...
|
| Both engines have bugs, and one of the biggest complaints about
| Unreal Engine is that any feature not used by Fortnite is half-
| baked until Fortnite uses it. With Unity, the biggest
| complaints are about the relatively transitory lifetimes of
| some of their biggest-marketed features, like rendering
| pipelines or networking code.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| No, Unity only has the C# part on GitHub, but it also has a
| huge proprietary C++ code base.
| pjmlp wrote:
| The C++ part is being slowly replaced by C#, written in the
| HPC# subset.
|
| And then there is always the possibility to pay for the
| source code anyway.
|
| This is a business after all.
| SeanBoocock wrote:
| Indeed. However, they do offer a commercial license to big
| developers/publishers will full source access.
| Substantially cheaper than the non-royalty, commercial Epic
| license too (but at the AAA level they're both rounding
| errors).
| synunlimited wrote:
| Crytek is living a second life as Amazon's Lumberyard (though
| they say they have revamped the vast majority of the code)
| pjmlp wrote:
| All engines have bugs.
|
| Unity source code is partially available on github, and full
| available on commercial license, which is fair.
|
| Then there are plenty of other engines out there, for example
| Cocos2d-x is number one in Asia for 2D mobile games.
| chupasaurus wrote:
| You forgot to mention the greatest editor there is, UnrealEd.
| Unity has a good one, Crytek has a horrible one.
| timdorr wrote:
| Not really: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines
|
| Plenty of proprietary engines are in use today. And you've got
| FOSS options like Godot and Blender. UE's definitely the
| biggest, but other options aren't going away any time soon.
| slezyr wrote:
| Blender Game Engine has been removed from the 2.8 release.
| Miraste wrote:
| The Blender Foundation endorsed Godot as the modern open
| source option.
| brundolf wrote:
| For a while we pretty much only had UDK (Unreal 3). Unity sort
| of invented the idea of an omni-platform game engine that's
| affordable and accessible for indies. Then Unreal slightly
| shifted its strategy to compete with that rising market, and
| Crytek... jumped in too.
|
| I think Unity is too valuable to low-medium end indies to go
| anywhere (you really don't need most of these new features if
| you aren't going for a photorealistic look anyway), but we
| could see a partitioning of the market as Unity takes over the
| low-mid and Unreal takes over the high-end. Unity actually _no
| longer_ has the (partially) realtime global illumination they
| were so proud of just a couple years ago, because of licensing
| woes: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/07/03/enlighten-will-be-
| repla...
| runevault wrote:
| You aren't wrong about features, but the fact it's now free
| until $1 million USD in sales means by the time you own Epic
| a cent you've made a LOT of money, in Indie terms. Depending
| on how tight you think your budget will be that could be
| important.
| axlee wrote:
| Amazon is getting in the engine game as well, with Lumberyard.
| And there is always the possibility of other studios making
| their proprietary engine available if there is a profit
| opportunity. RAGE and Anvil come to mind.
| [deleted]
| gok wrote:
| Demos are always beautiful but how about fixing some of the stuff
| that makes playing UE games unpleasant? The ridiculous load
| times, the random stutters and pop-ins, crazy high memory
| usage...
| mcphage wrote:
| > Unreal Engine 5 will be available in preview in early 2021, and
| in full release late in 2021, supporting next-generation
| consoles, current-generation consoles, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android.
|
| I wonder if they consider the Switch a current-generation
| console.
| badRNG wrote:
| I'd sure hope so if iOS and Android are on the list.
| mcphage wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that most high-end iOS and Android devices
| are significantly more powerful than the switch--I mean, they
| generally cost hundreds of dollars more.
| sk0g wrote:
| High end smartphones now cost around the same as the new
| Xbox and PlayStation combined would, or about as much as a
| solid mid range gaming PC...
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Yes but they don't have specialized hardware and have the
| highest power consumption constraints.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Too bad. I'm always curious about gains in cross-platform
| target productivity. The dream being that you build a high
| fidelity game and just need to drag a slider down to create a
| build that runs at 30fps+ on the, for example, Switch.
|
| Of course what we normally see is a lot of work to port down
| games. A good example being all the work that went into getting
| Witcher 3 to run on the Switch:
| https://developer.nvidia.com/gtc/2020/video/s22697
| ksec wrote:
| In the past, I have always looked at Demos from Games and thought
| this is very good and getting _close_ to movie quality. But that
| "close to" remained "close to" for quite some time. Even though
| It is improving every year but you can still tell it is gaming
| graphics. Even if some of the shots are not real time and pre
| rendered, they are still gaming like.
|
| That Unreal 5 Demo was the first time ever I thought this is
| Hollywood Movie quality GFX ..... ( Apart from the Character ).
| IT IS STUNNING! And this is done Real time on PS5!
|
| Edit: I am sorry for the tone and block capitals.... I am
| seriously geeking out.
| swalsh wrote:
| Unreal is now starting to be used in place of green screens in
| some movies. (there's a lot more that goes into it, but
| essentially it seems like unreal is one of the core software
| pieces)
|
| Here is an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjb-AqMD-a4
| bilekas wrote:
| This is really cool, I just wonder for this particular demo,
| would it be cheaper to film in a real world location! :)
| ksec wrote:
| For movies industry, a lot of the cost are actors and time
| involved. Having everything filmed with pre made scenes
| saves you lots of time comparing to green screen back and
| forth with VFX. Real world location also means lots of
| travelling.
| atonse wrote:
| Traveling with lots of heavy, expensive equipment,
| setting up, tearing down, then all the unpredictability
| of outdoor anything (weather, etc).
|
| Also one amazing thing was the guy talking about
| "shooting a 10-hour dawn" - I can imagine a lot of time
| is wasted trying to recreate a certain time of day. With
| this, you don't waste that time. You can do as many takes
| as you need. The sun stays right where it is.
|
| Absolutely mind-boggling.
| bilekas wrote:
| > Also one amazing thing was the guy talking about
| "shooting a 10-hour dawn"
|
| I watched the whole video on the MAnchurian example, and
| it sold it obviously for me, but I was only initially
| thinking of the first demo.
|
| Clearly its hugely beneficial.
|
| What I find interesting is, naughty dog had a bit of a
| staff turnover for designers and hired film animators (in
| this case it was a crunch), cgi etc.. Funny how they're
| now almost cross skillset now. Have to admit, makes me
| feel older every day.
|
| REF:
| https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2020-03-14-crunch-
| once-ag...
| jotm wrote:
| Amazing, the future of this tech is just exciting
| alufers wrote:
| This is really cool, looks like HDR environments in real
| life. Makes me wonder if this could be used in conjunction
| with cameras and some clever image processing algorithms as a
| camouflage method.
| centimeter wrote:
| The Mandalorian filmed a lot of scenes with UE4 doing real-
| time rendering onto large LED screens like in that demo.
| Looked pretty good! Probably more fun and easier for the
| actors too.
| nabla9 wrote:
| If you can afford to put one or more GPU's per LED screen,
| there is little limit what you can render real-time,
| especially when the camera is so far away.
|
| I wonder how many GPU's that system had.
| skohan wrote:
| That's true for simple rasterization, but many effects
| don't scale that way
| Scaevolus wrote:
| It used four synchronized PCs with a total cost of
| ~$20,000 to render three 4K panels, which is pocket
| change for a large production. The LED walls or a single
| lens costs more than that!
|
| This goes into way more technical details:
| https://ascmag.com/articles/the-Mandalorian Particularly
| interesting is how the system had ~10 frames of latency,
| so excessively fast camera turns would show lower quality
| renders.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Ah. of course. The system tracked camera and rendered
| what the camera saw and little around it accurately. Rest
| was rendered just for lightning.
| erichocean wrote:
| The guy who developed the tracked camera invented the
| Roomba (maybe with others? not sure). Pretty cool dude.
| penagwin wrote:
| > If you can afford to put one or more GPU's per LED
| screen, there is little limit what you can render real-
| time
|
| Umm, Ray tracing would love to have a word :P
|
| In all seriousness, typical animated frames for big
| budget films easily take hours or longer _per frame_. It
| really depends on what looks you're trying to achieve.
| Game engines have come a long way in terms of realistic
| graphics with realtime rendering, but it's worth noting
| that it's still not the same quality as a fully ray
| traced scene (whether that matters depends on the content
| I guess)
| nabla9 wrote:
| Yes, of course. But fully animated CGI traces everything
| back to camera and single screen in movie quality. This
| setup has 1,326 individual screens, 123,904 px/m2 filmed
| from several meters away for 180 degree view. None of
| those screens were rendered even close to movie quality.
|
| btw. Only about 50% of the scenes were made with this
| setup. rest was traditional ray-tracing.
| basch wrote:
| A lot of what/why they are doing it this way, is
| realistic lighting and reflections. Im not sure the
| difference between a realtime game engine and ray tracing
| matters that much when you are using it as faux ambient
| light.
|
| After it is filmed, they can still go back and touchup
| the backgrounds. Someday with ray tracing they can do
| real time finished products, but for now the tech works
| great at what its intended to do.
| jl6 wrote:
| If a scene has been filmed in this setup, how easy is it
| to separate the physical foreground from the background
| screen if they want to re-composite the foreground with a
| more detailed rey traced background?
| scrumbledober wrote:
| I imagine with the advancements in consumer level tech
| with portrait mode in cameras and zoom backgrounds that
| the tech ILM has could make easy work of this.
| basch wrote:
| Imagine if the screen flickered at 120hz and half of them
| were green and the other half were the cgi, and you were
| able to capture and separate both.
| ygra wrote:
| The system allows you to insert a dynamic greenscreen
| around a foreground element (while also retaining the
| option to preview how things will look after everything).
| So you can retain most of the virtual set for reflections
| and lighting, while still having a greenscreen.
| miohtama wrote:
| Here is how the production looked
|
| https://youtu.be/gUnxzVOs3rk
| diimdeep wrote:
| Incredible. Replace green screen with real time rendered
| scene. Truman Show IRL.
| ngold wrote:
| We are getting closer to wallpaper and screen meaning the
| same thing.
| elihu wrote:
| I think it's the global illumination that really makes the
| difference. You can't get to realism just by drawing more
| polygons, but if light acts in believable ways (especially when
| the scene changes or lights move around) it really starts to
| look like real life.
| driverdan wrote:
| Keep in mind it's contending with YouTube compression too. A
| lot of the artifacts you see around the character and other
| moving objects are likely compression artifacts.
| davidhyde wrote:
| The video was hosted on Vimeo which is generally less
| aggressive with quality and banding but this is still a good
| point.
| driverdan wrote:
| I didn't realize the provided link was for Vimeo. I had
| watched the video earlier on YT.
| Shivetya wrote:
| the water effects just after the four minute mark looked odd.
| while the fixed assets like the statues and such later on
| looked great. however I kept going back to the water and
| questioning some of the lighting effects too.
|
| don't get me wrong, the fixed assets look amazing and I look
| forward to seeing more done with this system
| explorigin wrote:
| Water, dust, cloth and hair physics are all still in the
| uncanny valley...not to take away from the tremendous
| progress with triangles and lighting!
| bt1a wrote:
| I thought the scarf movement looked great.
| explorigin wrote:
| Not to me. It was too stiff which caused it to move in
| some unnatural ways.
| robotdongs wrote:
| It didn't seem to reflect well the way cloth moves when
| sliding across another piece of cloth. When she was
| climbing, I'd expect the scarf to sort of wrinkle/bunch
| up, then fall to her side, not just cleanly slide off.
|
| However I could see them adjusting the physics for the
| demo to ensure the cloth actually fell by her side so we
| could see it swaying as she climbed.
| SahAssar wrote:
| Really? To me it felt like it was in the uncanny valley
| for cloth. When climbing it seemed to cling to at certain
| distance from the body at all times, like it had a
| certain range it could swing to/from the body but could
| not exceed.
| bt1a wrote:
| I noticed this too. They briefly showed it because it's
| probably still being worked on (guess). The flow didn't look
| very natural at all.
| twoquestions wrote:
| It's not so much that the water looked off (which it did
| compared to the rock), it's that the character was completely
| unencumbered by the water. If you're walking through ankle-
| deep water, your feet are going to slow down as they drag
| through the water and go faster through air, and the
| character's stride didn't account for the increased drag.
| It'd be the same as if you put that super-realistic character
| in a stylized game like Hollow Knight without adapting her
| animation to 15fps like the rest of the characters are.
|
| The animation was great, but the graphics were _much_ better,
| and one can 't help but notice the quality difference even
| though both are awesome works of art.
| Mirioron wrote:
| From what I've seen the look of water is usually not provided
| by the engine itself. Water is really hard to make look good
| and a lot of it depends on the specific needs of a game.
| simias wrote:
| At the risk of sounding a bit negative I personally find that
| graphics have plateaued since about the PS3. Sure, there are
| more polys, sure, there are higher res textures, sure, there
| are more complex and dynamic lights. But you don't really have
| the kind of gap we used to have between, say, the PS1 and PS2
| for instance. Diminishing returns and all that. The problem is
| that, in my experience, this eye candy only matters for about
| 10 minutes when you get into a game, then you stop really
| paying attention to how it looks and you focus on the gameplay
| and story etc...
|
| Meanwhile all the dynamic stuff is still fairly primitive IMO.
| At around 4 minute in the video they briefly mention the water
| effects. They don't really spend a lot of time on them and for
| a good reason, they don't look particularly good.
|
| When I was a kid in the 90s I definitely expected future games
| to look a lot better, but I also expect gameplay and world
| interaction to progress massively. Fully interactive
| environments you can interact with like in the real world. You
| could destroy everything, dig holes, build things, have
| advanced physics, great AI for NPCs etc...
|
| It saddens me that the AAA video game industry is almost
| entirely focused on eye candy first and foremost. That being
| said I concede that I'm clearly in the minority, after all the
| Uncharted games are generally considered to be good games when
| I find them incredibly boring.
|
| I hope that now that we can reach near-photorealism in games
| they'll have to come up with something new to keep pushing the
| envelope.
| ksec wrote:
| I agree that Story telling and Game Play is still the top
| priorities. Look at Nintendo! I enjoy Zelda,( not exactly the
| best graphics looking game ) more so than most
| "photorealistic" game in recent years. ( I will also admit I
| am now a lot older and dont have time for serious gaming )
|
| But still, the graphics in UE5 is stunning. The last time I
| was stunned by 3D Graphics was Crysis, and that was I think
| over 10 years ago.
| skohan wrote:
| I think raytracing has the potential to be a big leap
| forward. Real-time lighting and shadows are still incredibly
| limited, and most games are only able handle dynamic shadows
| from a hand-full of light-sources at a time. I think we don't
| see the difference yet because baked lighting gets a really
| good result, but I think after we live for a while in a world
| where every flickering candle, and every emissive texture in
| a game is a fully-fleged, shadow-casting, dymamic light
| source, then we are going to look back at current gen games
| and see how static and artificial the lighting is.
|
| But I do agree with you in general that more advanced
| simulation is a huge, largely untouched opportunity in games.
| danso wrote:
| That's funny you bring up the PS3, because my first reaction
| to the parent commenter and the OP video was how I remember
| thinking things couldn't get much better than the PS3 demos
| [0] - which now look comparatively primitive - but I've had
| that same feeling with PS4 and now PS5. But PS5 really does
| seem to be getting close to real-time interactive realism.
|
| But I agree with you that I expected games to be much
| "better" by 2020, back when I was a kid playing 7th Guest. I
| guess I couldn't understand back then how much manual, hard-
| to-scale labor and budget would have to go into story,
| dialogue, art, acting (plus salaries of A-list movie stars),
| mo-cap, etc. I expected in-depth scripted NPC behavior, like
| in 1992's Ultima VII [1], to be extremely commonplace and
| basic by now, but I obviously didn't understand back then
| what actual AI and emergent simulation requires (versus
| manual scripting, and testing of that scripting)
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzvOgTABwr0
|
| [1] https://www.filfre.net/2019/02/ultima-vii/
| sergeykish wrote:
| Final Fantasy VII Remake characters are amazing - skin
| tone, hair, animation. Beautiful, beautiful sets. I can't
| imagine anything better.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I lost my mind when I saw the announcement for Killzone
| https://youtu.be/PDfu1mYQXEg
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| The video that reignited Xbox360 vs PS3 forum battles
| around the internet.
| esoterica wrote:
| That was the Killzone 2 trailer, not the Killzone: Shadow
| Fall trailer the parent posted.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Yeah, you're right. 2005. Good times.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHFqOat79Cg
| BorisTheBrave wrote:
| The UE5 demo show realtime GI. Current systems often rely on
| baking. So this feature really allows games to have more
| dynamic environments at the same visual quality as last gen.
| That's surely a win for gameplay.
| [deleted]
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| I find that the best PS4 games look and play markedly better
| than the best PS3 games.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Your only commentary here is that it doesn't live up to your
| expectations. You wanted more.
|
| And then you wonder why AAA studios focus on graphics?
|
| > That being said I concede that I'm clearly in the minority
|
| You definitely aren't in the minority. r/gaming is full of
| people racing to be most unimpressed by a good looking game.
|
| All the HN comments pointing out flaws with "don't get me
| wrong, it looks decent!" could be predicted the second I read
| the submission title.
| skohan wrote:
| Maybe it's just because I am old enough to remember playing
| Super Mario on a CRT, but that attitude sometimes astounds
| me. Like I have read many assessments that the latest Doom
| game's incredible framerates are nothing to be impressed
| by, because the game is "visually underwhelming". I think a
| lot of people don't understand how difficult real-time
| computer graphics are to implement, and I have difficulty
| viewing the world through their eyes.
| geddy wrote:
| You can appreciate the technology behind it, but once the
| graphics in a game (which you play to escape real life)
| begin to mimic real life, it can feel underwhelming.
|
| For instance, a game like Okami on PS2 is far more
| impressive to me than some 4K tech demo. When it comes
| down to actually playing a game, I don't give a shit
| about the polygon count, I give a shit if it's fun to
| play.
| cargoshipit wrote:
| It's the usual HN: pretentiousness abound. Can't even be
| excited about a wonderful tech demo.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Or maybe it takes thoughtfulness to read that comment for
| what it is: an opinion about priorities of game studios.
|
| And it resonates with me. I like eye candy like almost
| everyone and can appreciate technological marvels in CGI
| (and currently working with UE4 after hours, creating my
| own assets, I can appreciate how much work goes into
| modern game graphics). At the same time, I do feel many
| games these days try to use high-resolution textures and
| pretty shaders to paper over incoherent storylines and
| lack of gameplay depth. I think it's an entirely valid
| point to make.
| simias wrote:
| I must have expressed myself poorly, my point was not that
| I don't think it looks good, my point is that I feel like
| all this effort is focused on a single metric, making stuff
| look good in trailers.
|
| Remember when HL2 was announced you had this super fancy
| physics engine? How objects would bounce and realistic
| react with each other, how you could stack things and come
| up with puzzles that would just use the physics engine
| without hardcoded scripts? HL2 was gorgeous looking but it
| was more than bump-mapping and complicated light models.
| You couldn't port HL2 to goldsrc and have it play the same.
|
| Meanwhile almost 2 decades later we're back to fully
| scripted puzzles, mostly non-interactive environments and
| AI that's generally limited to a glorified A* algorithm.
|
| This tech demo doesn't look decent, it looks really good,
| there's no arguing about it.
| cargoshipit wrote:
| Not sure what you're on about. While playing Horizon: Zero
| Dawn and God of War I was constantly admiring and enjoying
| the visuals.
| staticassertion wrote:
| I think there's just an obvious law of diminishing returns on
| certain things.
|
| If you double the number of triangles, it doesn't take long
| to get to a clean looking circle - the next time you double
| it, it doesn't look _that much better_ unless you 're zooming
| way in on it.
|
| So there's two things here, I think:
|
| * There are tons of other improvements, like dynamic
| lighting. This turns into more of an immersion/ realism
| thing, and less of a "detail" thing. It's weird when your
| characters shadow doesn't move the way you expect with the
| light sources, it's weird when one part of the room is
| totally dark because a block is just slightly in the way of a
| light source, and the light isn't bouncing around it.
|
| * With VR, this will all matter way more. You're going to
| have people taking objects in the game and putting them right
| up to their face - suddenly the difference between X
| triangles and 2X triangles is really noticeable again,
| relative to a 3rd person view on a monitor that's at least a
| foot or two away from you, where objects are always at a
| distance. Immersion is an extremely important factor for VR,
| so optimizing there makes a lot of sense.
|
| So while todays mediums may not demonstrate these wins, they
| open up possibilities for new mediums.
| eslaught wrote:
| The graphics are better, but camera and animations are a dead
| giveaway. It was fine when the camera was relatively static and
| far away, but shots with more movement became really
| noticeable. (Watch carefully, you can see the character's hand
| go through the rock in some places, or not make full contact in
| others. Once you notice it's hard to un-see.)
|
| I'm sure this is all fixable, but some part of me wonders how
| much larger game budgets will have to become (or
| correspondingly, how much less content will be offered) in
| order to achieve the new standard in production qualities.
| grogenaut wrote:
| - no shadows on the scarabs
|
| - obvious SSAO when hand touched the rock wall
|
| - odd reflections on the bird sculptures
|
| - down-resing of textures and motion blur when she flew
|
| - obvious uncanny valley face (pancake makeup, no subsurface
| scattering) on face closeup
|
| - dust sprite clouds
|
| were some of the things I noticed on my first watch
|
| but it was still quite pretty. like what I'd expect uncharted
| 5 on the pc to look like
| jfoster wrote:
| It's strange that the character wasn't more photorealistic in
| this demo. If you Google Image search you can find more
| photorealistic characters from previous versions of the Unreal
| Engine. I wonder if there might be some trade-off being made
| between photorealistic character and lifelike character
| movement.
| skohan wrote:
| I suspect it's a way to avoid the uncanny valley, and serves
| to highlight the photo realistic quality of the environments
| even more.
| onli wrote:
| I assumed the same. If you also make the character more
| realistic you run into the risk of making the demo eve more
| unbelievable. Now there are some hints that underline their
| claim that it runs on a PS5, like some videogame like
| animation transitions, character movements and the
| character model itself.
| extesy wrote:
| It was done on purpose, similar to how Pixar movies have
| obviously cartoony and unrealistic characters in an otherwise
| photo-realistic environment.
| guilamu wrote:
| Well, I may be wrong, but I was under the impression that the
| Unreal Engine will also work on the next XBOX (and any PC) and
| that the PS5 was less powerfull than the next XBOX.
| ksec wrote:
| Yes, it isn't specific to PS5. I was only mentioning PS5
| because it is not the most powerful machine of all and we are
| already capable of that.
| ingenieros wrote:
| "As for Microsoft's Xbox Series X, Sweeney isn't saying the
| new Xbox won't be able to achieve something similar; both are
| using custom SSDs that promise blazing speeds. But he says
| Epic's strong relationship with Sony means the company is
| working more closely with the PlayStation creator than it
| does with Microsoft on this specific area."
| rasz wrote:
| That just means they got paid to say it.
| skohan wrote:
| It remains to be seen how the PS5 and the new XBox compare in
| terms of performance.
|
| The specs of the new XBox are slightly higher on paper, but
| the PS5 is doing some really interesting things in terms of
| optimization. Basically the XBox is going for high constant
| clock speeds, and the PS5 is shifting priority between the
| CPU and GPU components of the SOC so each gets boosted
| performance when it's most relevant.
|
| Both consoles are doing very interesting things with asset
| streaming and decompression of assets directly from the SSD
| to video memory which are going to open up new opportunities
| not only in visual quality, but in terms of how flexibly game
| worlds can be designed.
|
| Probably we will have to wait and see how all of this plays
| out in terms of real-world performance.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Highly dangerous of the PS people to build non-
| deterministic performance into their console. Developers
| who try to push every ounce of power out of it will hate
| it.
|
| edit: Maybe deterministic isn't the correct word. What I
| mean is that you can design a physics system that you can
| ensure runs on the PS5 CPU. But then the graphics boys make
| an upgrade and suddenly some power is diverted to the
| graphics and the physics system is no longer working
| correctly. This is still deterministic. But a nightmare to
| work with when optimizing for hard-real time requirements.
| The only way this can be done sanely is if the developers
| can fix this power budget and thus restore "determinism".
| uryga wrote:
| does it have to be non-deterministic? couldn't they add
| an option to hint which should be prioritized? maybe
| hint_prioritize_cpu_begin() ...
| hint_prioritize_cpu_end()
|
| or something?
| didibus wrote:
| It sounded like they managed to make it deterministic by
| keeping the power draw always the same and fixing the
| cooling solution to handle max load.
|
| So developer can expect it to perform identical to
| whatever balance they've set between CPU/GPU. That's my
| understanding at least.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| If the developer can control the balance then it's fine.
| If this balance cannot be controlled by the developers
| then it's a nightmare. It's not clear to me this is
| developer controlled.
| iMark wrote:
| Mark Cerny's tech talk emphasised that performance is
| determistic:
|
| 'So how does boost work in this case? Put simply, the
| PlayStation 5 is given a set power budget tied to the
| thermal limits of the cooling assembly. "It's a
| completely different paradigm," says Cerny. "Rather than
| running at constant frequency and letting the power vary
| based on the workload, we run at essentially constant
| power and let the frequency vary based on the workload."'
|
| https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-pl
| ays...
| rowanG077 wrote:
| It's clear from the presentation that it's not possible
| to run the CPU at full power and the GPU at full power at
| once. This means the CPU will be stealing performance
| from the GPU or vice versa when the system is pushed to
| it's limits. This means the things you can graphically do
| are directly connected to how much the CPU is loaded.
| This will be very hard to optimize for. Since seemingly
| unconnected physical pieces of hardware are influencing
| eachother.
|
| The only way I can see this going well if this balance is
| fixed by the developer. E.g. the developer specifies I
| want 60% of the power budget to go to the GPU and 40% to
| the CPU. If this is handled dynamically by the PS5... oh
| boy.
| skohan wrote:
| > the CPU will be stealing performance from the GPU or
| vice versa
|
| Another way to think about it is that very few games are
| using 100% CPU capacity and 100% CPU capacity at the same
| time. This model gives the developer a combined compute
| budget, which can be allocated as required for the task.
| omni wrote:
| > Developers who try to push every ounce of power out of
| it will hate it.
|
| How common is this though in an era where most releases
| are multi-platform?
| danso wrote:
| The PS still sells itself heavily based on console
| exclusives (Uncharted, The Last of Us, Horizon Zero Dawn)
| that are ostensibly well-tuned to the hardware. Guess
| we'll have to wait until HZD's makes it to PCs to see how
| easily it's ported.
| barbecue_sauce wrote:
| I think Death Stranding is on the docket first for a PC
| port; that uses the Decima engine as well.
| skohan wrote:
| I don't know to what degree it is deterministic or
| controlled by the developer. It might be interesting if,
| for instance, graphically heavy games can essentially
| trade CPU performance they're not using for additional
| GPU headroom in an intentional, explicit way.
| [deleted]
| sevencolors wrote:
| Maybe i just don't play many games where a camera tracks a
| single player like the demo. But the camera tracking felt
| jerky. Is that normal?
| barbecue_sauce wrote:
| Depends on the game, and camera logic is usually up to
| developers rather than the game engine so sensitivity can be
| fairly flexible.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I think with every engine- or console generation people will go
| "this is photorealistic!", but in practice / real games it
| doesn't look / feel that way, or (maybe more likely) you get
| used to it until you run into the next best thing.
|
| That said, The Mandalorian has used the Unreal engine to render
| real-time backgrounds for scenes, so it's good enough for that
| at least.
|
| And in films they don't need to do real-time, they can take
| their time to render a scene.
| datasage wrote:
| Often there are choices made to support a larger range of
| devices that require comprises on graphic quality. It doesn't
| make a lot of sense to build a game only 5% of your customers
| can afford to run.
|
| Next-gen consoles will have to become more ubiquitous before
| the previous gen consoles are left out of game releases.
| jfoster wrote:
| In this demo I thought it "didn't feel that way" more due to
| the camera positioning and character than anything else,
| though. The environment seemed quite indistinguishable from
| pre-rendered CGI.
| skohan wrote:
| A highly scripted tech demo is also not such an accurate
| representation of what real-world results are going to look
| like.
|
| Yes they can render it in-engine, but they can use bespoke
| character animations which don't have any blending
| artifacts, and they can put the camera on a rail and tune
| the assets and particle effects until they are certain
| every single frame can be rendered in under 16ms. They can
| hide billboards and other rendering tricks and be certain
| the camera is never going to hit them at an angle which
| gives them away.
|
| Real-world game play scenarios are much more unpredictable,
| and the results are likely to fall well shy of this mark.
| MrScruff wrote:
| It definitely wasn't indistinguishable from pre-rendered
| CGI, there are a lot of shadow artifacts for one thing. It
| looks great but we get this ever few years from the real
| time people - they're amazing at picking off the low
| hanging fruit of offline rendering and finding a quality
| compromised solution that can work in realtime, but they're
| chasing a moving target.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| It's definitely impressive but kind of obviously not pre-
| rendered still. There is quite some aliasing in smaller
| details of the more complex objects and the edges of
| shadows aren't soft. The water effects looked quite bad
| still.
| emn13 wrote:
| Also, the character model's hands+feet commonly clipped
| the walls slightly, and sometimes had that odd sliding
| motion in which the overall limb seems approximately
| stationary with respect to the surface they're touching,
| but the actual edge does not, it slides about a little.
|
| I mean... that lighting was really, really good, and I
| think this is the first triangle-based demo where the
| surfaces really don't look oddly angular almost anywhere
| (maybe with exception of the stalactites). But it's a far
| cry from the hand-tuned look of something prerendered.
| swalsh wrote:
| There are definitely diminishing returns at this point.
| However, I think there's a lot of room for impressive Physics
| demos.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Triangles that are just one pixel in the screen, dynamic
| lightning and overall rendering this close to photorealism,
| it's the all the other aspects of the games that limit the
| experience.
|
| Physics engine, character movement, etc. could still be
| improved.
| majora2007 wrote:
| Did you watch the video? Because they also have improved the
| audio system, chaos engine and animations drastically.
| globular-toast wrote:
| The quality of the graphics make the lack of realism in the
| animations more jarring for me. When the character touches
| a surface it just doesn't look in the slightest. It's quite
| frustrating actually. My brain seems ready to see realistic
| contact but instead sees a body moving around unnaturally
| near a surface that its supposed to be in contact with.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Yes, and you can clearly see that they have not reached at
| the same level of realism as the rendering.
| rplnt wrote:
| > you can download and use Unreal Engine to build games for free
| as you always have
|
| That's a very stretched-out definition of always. Unreal used to
| be one of the most expensive, if not the most expensive, game
| engines you could license. It's been only few years they adopted
| this free model.
| asutekku wrote:
| It's been six years already. While not necessarily "always",
| that still pretty much covers the current generation.
| agumonkey wrote:
| It's a tech demo so I cannot expect more but it feels bland to
| me. More like a live interactive movie. I see no potential for
| gaming.. the visual and geometric complexity dwarfs the usual
| gameplay IMO.
| ohitsdom wrote:
| > no potential for gaming
|
| I'm very confused by this. This demo gameplay is pretty
| representative of a few genres of games like Tomb Raider. It
| also translates well to different types of gameplay, so I don't
| get your dismissal.
| agumonkey wrote:
| But I fail to distinguish what more this new gen will give to
| the latest TR game. At this point it's gpu porn, more rocks
| that one can ever count.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| I've always been excited to see these demos over the years, from
| childhood until now. Although they may not be what is actually
| implemented in a real game, Unreal, id, Nvidia, etc. have always
| managed to spark that feeling of giddy euphoria, a glimpse into
| the future, with these demos.
| Thaxll wrote:
| For people not working in video games in might seems super
| impresive but I can assure you that major publisher have similar
| rendering visual in there in-house engine. Super cool none the
| less!
| OctopusSandwich wrote:
| That looks so good! I hope they add few VR related features. I
| tried running the default VR scene with Unreal 4 and couldn't get
| it to work.
|
| Unreal looks better than Unity but I found it difficult to get
| started.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| It took a good deal of fiddling but I was able to get this
| starter project working with Valve Index:
| https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/steam...
|
| It included teleporting and picking up objects, full hand
| tracking and finger positioning.
|
| Overall, it seemed like a decent foundation but clearly needed
| a LOT of work to be ready for a full game. The skillset and
| toolset is very different than what web/app devs and backend
| devs use.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I've got the default VR scene running on my Quest. It works
| pretty well - there's just a slight bug with the teleport
| texture.
|
| The Unreal Editor was not as easy to use as I thought it might
| be, but it isn't too bad. I wish it didn't take an hour to
| recompile shaders all the time though.
| aswanson wrote:
| holy...This is crazy. I really want to learn game engine
| architecture. Anyone have any links/recommendations for starting
| developers?
| kmfrick_ wrote:
| Read the Game Engine Black Books by Fabien Sanglard at
| fabiensanglard.net ! They are among the most beautiful books on
| game engine I've ever read. I read the PDF and then bought them
| both to support him because he really, really deserves it. The
| other articles on his website are also really well-written and
| super interesting!
| aswanson wrote:
| Thank you.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| Can someone help me articulate my issue with this? Looking at a
| lot objects, they seem unnaturally detailed. Like the bugs, or
| the statue at around 6 minutes. Something about it makes me
| really uncomfortable feeling physically.
|
| Is this like a weird infinite depth of field kind of thing?
| friendlybus wrote:
| There's limited places for your eyes to rest. The end scene
| with heavily detailed architecture surrounded by smooth desert,
| does it feel more comfortable than the earlier footage?
| zokier wrote:
| There are all sorts of weird (temporal?) artifacts in the demo,
| I think especially visible in the climbing scene. Look at this
| cropped capture for example:
|
| https://ibb.co/PrYT6pq
|
| The region below her arm is much sharper/detailed (missing
| dof/motion blur?) than surrounding area. It seems to be somehow
| related how stuff is revealed, as her arm was moving up in this
| bit, so the overly sharp region was covered in previous frames.
|
| Also the shadow (e.g. her fingers) has very sharp pixelated
| edges which can contribute to the feeling of oversharpness.
| There are some other lesser artifacts also abound, so yeah, its
| obvious that the engine cuts corners. But of course that is to
| be expected, realtime graphics is all about compromises.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| There's no distance blur and the entire shot is "in focus".
| These shots would be impossible to take with a camera. In
| addition, if you game a bunch, you'd expect LOD to drop with
| distance, but here it doesn't.
| kart23 wrote:
| it's too sharp for me. I don't think there's much antialiasing
| going on.
| hpoe wrote:
| So I don't care much for graphics quality, I started moving
| towards the terminal and CLI for most everything in my life about
| ten years ago, ultimately I feel that graphics falls under
| unnecessary fluff and eyecandy that distracts from "real" data,
| gameplay, etc.
|
| But that flight scene at the end of the demo, how realistic it
| was, how it was seamless, how detailed it produced a physical
| reaction in me, a feeling of like "WOW" throughout my entire body
| as I watched it. That was amazing.
| dx87 wrote:
| Graphical quality can be a way of conveying "real" data. Here's
| a video where they cover the importance of graphics in fighting
| games, such as allowing characters to have larger move sets
| because the better graphics allows moves to be visually
| distinct to players.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSxk7THBnxY&t=2s
| hpoe wrote:
| You kids are spoiled nowadays with all your fancy graphics
| that substitute flash for performance, I played Warcraft Orcs
| and Humans for weeks, in all of it's beautiful pixelated, 8
| bit glory. Now get off my lawn, zug zug.
|
| mild \s
| Razengan wrote:
| Graphics tech has been good enough for a while. I wish developers
| would start giving more love to improving other areas like
| physics, AI, and speech synthesis, that can make a game actually
| _feel_ and play more realistic than just eye candy would.
|
| But I guess those other technologies depend more on the CPU/RAM
| etc. which consoles lack in, so they don't want to bother with
| that.
|
| Here's an example of how games have actually been going backwards
| in almost all other areas except graphics:
|
| Far Cry 2 vs. Far Cry 5:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCeEvQ68jY8
| Wesxdz wrote:
| Woah! The AI and physics in Far Cry 2 is an order of magnitude
| better. It makes me wonder how the games regressed to be so bad
| (maybe devs just don't care as much anymore?), given that Dunia
| Engine is used by both games. 'the game's director, Clint
| Hocking, noted that internally, much of the design of Far Cry 2
| was haphazard'
| Razengan wrote:
| > _It makes me wonder how the games regressed to be so bad
| (maybe devs just don 't care as much anymore?)_
|
| Console limitations might be one reason. Apparently
| everything has to run on every platform under the sun or you
| might die impoverished in a dark alley, a mindset that has
| inflicted other horrors, like Electron, upon us.
| muststopmyths wrote:
| This looks nice, but I'm not sure what the practical gameplay
| consequences for the new tech are. I sure as shit am not going to
| ship a terabyte of original-quality assets in my game.
|
| It would help me produce cinematics more easily though, I
| suppose.
|
| Real-time global illumination looks dope. No more overnight
| lighting builds :)
| randyrand wrote:
| why not? PS5 can download/delete as you go.
| muststopmyths wrote:
| Bandwidth ? someone has to pay for it. users might have
| bandwidth caps and/or have to pay as well.
|
| Not to mention that streaming high-quality assets from the
| network is not going to be fast.
| quotemstr wrote:
| If I understand the geometry images paper correctly, you don't
| have to ship the original assets. The technique uses fancy
| topology to encode a mesh as an image --- x, y, z of each
| vertex being the r, g, and b channels of the image --- and
| pages the images into the GPU on demand. You can downsample the
| images as much as you want
| ngz00 wrote:
| That is pretty impressive, but I was distracted by the lack of
| anti-aliasing and the rough edges on all the models when back-
| lit.
| madrox wrote:
| The lede seems somewhat buried here. The tech they spend most of
| their time talking about has more to do with development
| iteration than graphics. Not having to optimize LODs or light
| maps mean more time spent generating models and iterating on a
| scene. As with software development, quality is all about how
| quickly you can iterate. As for the rest, this demo says more
| about the PlayStation 5 than Unreal.
|
| As a consumer, I'm expecting to see a graphics jump in the next
| generation of games (as you would expect) and some fun new
| physics details (yo, RTX!), but not much beyond that. However,
| this will likely lower the cost of developing cinematic games
| like Uncharted or RDR.
| ben7799 wrote:
| It mostly looks amazing but also very uncanny valley.
|
| The development process improvements sound most promising.
|
| I was amazed until the the character started climbing the rocks.
|
| Seems like no one at Epic has ever climbed a rock in their life..
| it sent the whole demo back to PS1 land. It doesn't even look
| like a super hero rock climbing, just looks totally wrong. Almost
| no part of the body ever looks angled correctly to reflect
| gravity being a thing, like the physics engine switches off.
|
| That and her ankles are fused and never plantar flex so the
| walking looks bizarre. Again, it's all amazing but now it becomes
| uncanny valley cause you notice the weird remaining stuff.
| impalallama wrote:
| I Noticed that they panned up within seconds of showing water
| because (I assume) of how wacky the fluid dynamics look.
| starpilot wrote:
| The environment looks great, the anime-eyes character with
| porcelain skin definitely looks UV. The climbing motion is uhhh
| a little floaty? In any real rock climbing video, you can see
| that the effort is much more labored.
| xxs wrote:
| Similar feeling but starting off with the initial leap. The
| animation of the interaction/grab with the cliff edge looked
| very off - climbing without the feet touching the rocks.
|
| Creating a scenery with a lot of details depth is fine but it
| doesn't even come close to having proper animation/character
| models and especially realistic physics.
| neogodless wrote:
| Somewhat tangential - I was hoping I could download and run a
| demo to see how things look on my hardware. What are your
| favorite downloadable graphics demos?
| [deleted]
| forgot_again wrote:
| I guess this might sound unreal, but I literally have not looked
| at AAA game graphics in over 10 years, so this looks absolutely
| stunning.
|
| Back in 2009 my 360 died. I had been an avid console gamer before
| that, but I never replaced the Xbox and in 2010 went off to
| college, where I mainly played N64 with friends as well as games
| on my phone.
|
| After I graduated I was busy with work and life and never got
| back into the gaming cutting edge. Sure I played StarCraft once
| in a while for old times' sake as well as different old Total War
| games cause they're awesome, but never the sort of major AAA
| release I used to play all the time as a kid.
|
| I also never really looked at modern graphics since I didn't have
| friends who played modern games and never watched videos
| showcasing what games looked like.
|
| So coming from 2009, this is absurdly good.
| LockAndLol wrote:
| I hope they name the authors of the theses that they used to
| achieve this. It's inconceivable to me that some dude sat down
| and decided how everything should be coded.
| bovermyer wrote:
| And now I need to pick my jaw up off the floor...
|
| That is some seriously impressive tech. The developers should be
| VERY proud of themselves.
| mathnode wrote:
| Epic Online Services; this is the big take away for UE5, graphics
| will always improve, but user experience is key to long term
| success.
|
| We can now all sit back and watch Epic eat Valve's and
| Microsoft's Lunch right in front of them, like some kind of
| sordid picnic.
|
| I look forward to seeing the pricing details and revenue options
| based on player base and time.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Whatever the tech actually delivers, as braggadocios as the
| claims are (they would render hundreds of utilities and workflows
| obsolete), I am astounded by their licensing update.
|
| I'd long migrated to Unreal for technical and workflow reasons as
| well as having an open engine, but this just seals the deal. A
| lot of indie studios could get their big break self-publishing
| this way.
| crangos wrote:
| Looks impressive, especially the reduced friction for artists.
| The demo hints at several shortcomings of the engine, though,
| especially the nanite componet. Stepping through the feature
| highlight (whatever the youtube compression lets through), during
| dense scenes geometry often gets washed out, looking less
| detailed then an authored model would probably look. Hard edges
| often appear fuzzy, and the fuzziness is not temporally stable.
| Geee wrote:
| The tech here is impressive but so is the content they have
| created or it. Even more so. It's kind of insane that game art
| isn't usually given the credit it deserves. Everyone seems to
| think that the engine just produces these images somehow. Look,
| the artists had to actually design all this architecture and
| statues etc. It's not an easier job than actually being an
| architect... Producing content at such level of detail is very
| expensive and time-consuming and it just doesn't come
| automatically with the engine.
| dt3ft wrote:
| This is history in the making. Just leaving my trace here :)
| knorker wrote:
| Here it is on youtube, so that you can play it without it
| stalling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC5KtatMcUw
| vmception wrote:
| so PC gamers, with 8K textures and UE5, what would you like to
| see aside from pushed framerates?
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Removal of motion blur as the default. It's even present in the
| demo!
| vmception wrote:
| I don't actually hate motion blur, I really like the
| cinematic feel of in-engine graphics.
|
| I went through a phase where I wanted things sharper and
| sharper to showcase technical ability (mostly in consumer
| grade video and photography), but then once THAT was
| ubiquitous I found myself focusing on deteriorating the
| quality for its uniqueness and allure. Forcing the viewer to
| find focal points themselves and increasing interest.
|
| I feel like gamers don't really have an opinion one way or
| the other, but have been told not to like blur? I'm not
| really sure I just haven't seen the arguments and have gone
| full circle on the meme myself. At the end of the day I enjoy
| it.
| modeless wrote:
| Physics and character animation haven't kept up with the
| improvements in graphics. Especially for VR we need big
| advancements in both.
| ebg13 wrote:
| My #1 desire for the future of game graphics is universal
| support for foveated rendering.
| vmception wrote:
| why do you want that, out of curiosity. The description seems
| to mimic human eye and reduce load on rendering processor,
| but it seems like less information for the player at once
| ebg13 wrote:
| It's not less information if you have eye tracking VR
| hardware, because you literally cannot see where you aren't
| looking. If anything it gives you the ability to dedicate
| more resources where it actually matters.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Better physics. It's 2020 and still doors, walls, and even
| windows can be struck by a rocket without anything other than a
| scorch decal left behind.
| vmception wrote:
| there have been a couple games over the decades that do this
| well, I too am surprised how this isn't built right into the
| engines for everyone to independently opt for doing that
| tiborsaas wrote:
| It's not a technical limitation, but more like a game design
| limitation.
|
| If you can punch holes in any wall, then the designers
| suddenly have an infinite cases to handle. It could still
| cause problems with open world games.
|
| I'm with you btw, 100% destructible world is my childhood
| dream for games.
| Leherenn wrote:
| Active worlds.
|
| I've played open world games like the Witcher 3, or Assassin's
| Creed Odissey; and damn they're impressive games. Assassin's
| creed in particular was really amazing, you could wander
| through ancient Greece and just enjoy the sights, visit the
| cities.
|
| With the kind of things demoed here it will be even more
| amazing.
|
| But the games feel somehow lifeless, as if you're the only one
| really living in there. Sure there are some NPCs, but they are
| all reactive, not active. You can roam the countryside for a
| while and come back to civilization, nothing will have changed,
| except maybe the town will be governed by blue instead of red.
|
| There's some premises, on Odissey, you have some patrols for
| both sides moving around, and if they encounter each other they
| start fighting. But that's small scale, and partly scripted at
| that, there will always be the same patrols going through the
| same paths.
|
| What's missing is that you cannot walk on a battle in progress
| unless it is in the story. You won't see a city patching up its
| walls after a siege, merchants running a real economy, people
| going on with their lives in general. But meaningfully, not
| just walking around the town and going back to their house at
| night.
|
| I assume it's really difficult though. First technically, it's
| a lot of CPU power. And a lot of work to create AI that
| meaningfully impact the world.
|
| Then it's how to design a game in a world you cannot really
| predict. It could be purely open box, a la mount and blade, but
| I think it could be more, with an underlying story line that
| would adapt to the changing world.
|
| Of course you don't need to do everything at once. In this
| case, simply having the 2 armies stateful (e.g. a set number of
| troops with some replenishments, but not always the same
| soldiers in the places), with troops moving across the
| countryside, and 2 AIs vying for power across the land would be
| fantastic
| vmception wrote:
| yeah, all the economy stuff in games is because you are the
| only one amassing wealth, stealing and looting from everyone
| and everything. it is pretty ridiculous.
|
| even that skyrim patch that lets you invest and makes shop
| owners have more money was still only influenced by you and
| you alone
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Everyone should just keep in mind the first look at Unreal Engine
| 4 all those years ago before getting too too excited. Big step
| forward, absolutely, but it won't be as seen here.
| technovader wrote:
| Should I not be impressed then? I thought this was cool.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| It is cool, absolutely, and really neat tech, but it always
| looks cooler in the demo than in the games that are produced
| by it.
| the_duke wrote:
| All I could find with a quick search is this Unreal 4 tech demo
| from 2012: [1]
|
| A lot of it actually looks subpar 2020 standards.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZmRt8gCsC0
| r1nkgrl wrote:
| Games built on Unreal 4 in the last couple of years look way
| better than that 2012 UE4 demo. The first few years of games
| on UE5 might not look like the UE5 demo today, but in a few
| years they will catch up.
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| I'm not sure whether your comment was about a time delay before
| release of the engine, or whether you're implying that computer
| hardware won't be fast enough anytime soon.
|
| In the video they said it was running on a PlayStation 5. There
| was a section in the demo where they had interactive gamepad
| controls so it appears it might have actually been running
| real-time on a PS5?
|
| I never thought I would be saying this but storage might
| actually end up being a bigger issue than CPU/GPU performance.
| The new MS Flight Simulator has to stream the world over the
| internet because the entire map is 10 petabytes. In the UE5
| video they said the demo scene was 13 or 16 billion
| triangles... I imagine that will take up a huge amount of disk
| space.
|
| Modern AAA games are already 50-150 gigabytes each, and this is
| only going to grow as models and scenes become increasingly
| detailed.
|
| Edit: finding holes in their demo - this may be a video
| compression artifact, but the big open scene at the end
| appeared to be of much lower quality. This is something current
| AMD GPUs can do where if you move around it dynamically lowers
| the resolution to prevent FPS from decreasing. Perhaps they
| also dynamically lower resolution in the big open areas? IDK
| how much of a benefit that would make, but you can never trust
| these marketing videos...
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| This is a demo. You can easily see that it's structured in a
| way that allows to easily mask loading of the new scenes and
| that there's not a lot of interaction going on - pretty much
| the only interactive thing they shown was dynamic
| illumination (which is something they were promising since
| early UE4 demos, and I believe that's what GP mostly meant)
| and particle system.
|
| You can be sure that demos like that (especially early ones)
| make tons of compromises that are neatly hidden on the video
| but that usually wouldn't be viable in context of a regular
| video game - at least without severely limiting your game
| design choices.
| Spivak wrote:
| But real games have always and will continue to use the
| same tricks. This demo could be put directly into a Tomb
| Raider game and would be fantastic.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| The Tomb Raider-esque parts where the character is
| jumping and climbing didn't look right. She's missing
| some kind of "weight" or something in her animation that
| makes it look like she's not really doing those things.
| Lara Croft's animations are much more convincing.
| doikor wrote:
| This isn't supposed to be a real game but a tech demo of
| engine capabilities. Expecting them to spend as much
| money on getting climbing animations as good as a AAA
| game is kind of crazy.
|
| When it comes to animation the interesting stuff were the
| "automated" hand/foot placement animations like the hand
| on the door they mentioned.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Fair. It certainly makes me appreciate the little details
| in games like Tomb Raider and Uncharted more.
| rasz wrote:
| looked pretty realistic .. for a spider-woman
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Of course. However, you have a much wider choice of
| tricks to use and where to put them in a demo that
| doesn't even make an attempt at gameplay.
| ska wrote:
| Wasn't their point that real games never quite reached
| the promise of UE4 demos, implying that the same will be
| true of this generation?
| konart wrote:
| I think the comment above was about the fact that U4 demos
| where also very realistic, and also real time. Still, how
| many U4 based games can you name that look nearly as good as
| those demos? I can name zero.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| I remember the first UE4 thing I saw was Fortnite, which didn't
| seem that impressive...that might have just been the first UE4
| game though, and not the first UE4 footage, I can't remember.
|
| (Just a reminder, this was back when Fortnite was not a Battle
| Royale game, and nobody in the world knew about the it. That
| game was in development / early access for ages before it
| became the biggest thing in the world.)
| cosmotic wrote:
| Even with all the amazing lighting and polygon counts, they still
| have screenshake from a 2001 game, only now even more uncanny.
| "Is this a video game or real li.... never mind"
| gautamcgoel wrote:
| What a magical demo! That made my day. I had largely written off
| console gaming as a never-ending sequence of brain-dead first
| person shooters. I'm glad to see real innovation in the graphics
| space - coupled with advances in AI and NLP, I think we could see
| a crop of incredibly realistic and meaningful games in the next
| few years.
|
| IMHO, a key innovation that still needs to occur is a shift away
| from flunky and unintuitive hand-held controllers to a more
| natural and vibrant method of input. I really liked the scene in
| the movie Her, for example, where the protagonist is playing a
| video game and uses hand gestures to control his avatar, all
| without a physical controller. Wii and Kinect were the first few
| steps in this direction - I'm not sure what the next steps are.
|
| I think voice input and NLP is an incredibly fruitful space to
| explore - imagine what video games would be like if you could
| actually talk to the characters, instead of merely punching and
| shooting them.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| It certainly won't be running games that look like this, but
| the Oculus Quest is doing neat things with hand tracking.
|
| Recent demo shown on Adam Savage's TESTED:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0KhC1GpLSQ
| modeless wrote:
| Minority report style hand waving is a dead end. Tactile
| feedback is a hard requirement for a decent hand controlled
| interface. But that doesn't mean we need to stick with
| traditional game controllers. Valve Index controllers give you
| buttons without the requirement to hold anything, plus far
| better tracking than any controller free tracking system.
| m12k wrote:
| To play devil's advocate - games with this kind of production
| value require a huge investment in asset production, which
| means they tend to be very conservative when it comes to
| gameplay, because they want to be damn sure it doesn't flop. So
| until the production of something like this comes way down in
| price, the games that look like this are likely to be clones of
| existing successful games, e.g. Uncharted, brain-dead first
| person shooters, etc.
| moultano wrote:
| Maybe, but photogrammetry is a _waaaay_ cheaper way of
| producing assets, and being able to directly ingest high res
| models from a scan could actually drop the art costs of games
| a great deal.
| dvtrn wrote:
| I thought Horizon Zero Dawn hit the right balance across
| gameplay, visuals and story narrative in this current
| generation of gaming and received all the praise it deserved.
| Now, I'll say in my opinion, not one thing was overwhelmingly
| novel in comparison to the rest, but the attention to detail
| given to each of those elements elevated the collective
| experience in that particular title, the result was a game
| that felt incredibly fresh and easily replayable.
| Panoramix wrote:
| This demo looks more like a somewhat interactive movie than a
| videogame.
| utexaspunk wrote:
| That was my first thought- it's a shame all we have to interact
| with such a complex, richly rendered world is a couple of
| analog sticks and some buttons.
| ccvannorman wrote:
| You're going to absolutely love what Oculus is working on.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| What are they working on? New hardware?
| mortenjorck wrote:
| I kept expecting the demo to fall back into some kind of
| traditional combat scenario as the player character explored
| the environment, but I love that Epic decided to make the
| hypothetical game in this tech demo exclusively about
| exploration.
|
| I would absolutely love to play a game like this, combining the
| sensibilities of indie walking-sims with the epic scale of
| triple-A productions.
| VMG wrote:
| does it run on linux?
| acomjean wrote:
| Unreal engine 4 does, so I suspect yes.
|
| You'll probably have to compile it yourself, but it isn't hard.
| (I did it).
|
| https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Platforms/Linux/Beginner...
| kgraves wrote:
| which one?
| soygul wrote:
| I wonder if the background in the flight scene is pre-rendered.
| If not, then PlayStation 5 (which the demo is running on) is
| going to be a beast of a console.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| I have to wonder how much of this requires ray tracing hardware.
| I've noticed for many, many years that the quality of models and
| textures has been 'good enough', but lighting, for the most part,
| still sucked. Ray tracing seems to solve a lot of lighting
| problems.
| skohan wrote:
| The real-time GI is amazing. Ray tracing is going to be a game
| changer, not only in terms of visual quality, but also because
| it's one of those rare times in computer graphics where the more
| advanced solution is actually making it easier on graphics
| programmers by replacing a bag of dirty tricks with a unified,
| physically based solution.
|
| One interesting note: they say the GI is "instant" but you can
| actually see that they are using temporal stabilization to
| achieve this effect, and there's a slight lag between when the
| light changes and when the GI finds its resting point. I suspect
| removing this lag will be one of the things which makes graphics
| feel "next gen" when GPUs can handle enough rays per pixel to
| handle GI in one or two frames instead of a few dozen.
| brundolf wrote:
| I tried to figure out whether the new GI used raytracing, and
| it doesn't seem like it is? If it is using raytracing hardware
| it isn't nearly as impressive. If it _isn 't_, then it's sheer
| magic.
| [deleted]
| skohan wrote:
| I'm almost certain they are. HW raytracing is of the big
| selling points of the new console generations, and if they
| achieved these kinds of results without it, then I would have
| to reconsider my skepticism of the occult.
| paavohtl wrote:
| It was confirmed[1] in a Digital Foundry interview that the
| demo is NOT using HW raytracing.
|
| [1] https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-
| this-...
| skohan wrote:
| That's incredible. I look forward to learning more about
| how they do it
| [deleted]
| olavgg wrote:
| Shadows are too sharp, so I don't think they use raytracing.
| brundolf wrote:
| It certainly isn't _completely_ raytraced, because current
| hardware can 't support that. If they use the new hardware,
| they're using it in some kind of mixed mode. Whether that
| means only for certain materials, or whether they're able
| to use it to do "fat rays" that approximate only the
| general direction for indirect light, or whatever else. But
| direct, hard shadows are quite cheap (comparatively) on
| today's regular, rasterization-based rendering systems, so
| that part isn't surprising.
| skohan wrote:
| It certainly isn't fully path traced, but the result does
| look to me like they are using ray-traced GI. You can
| tell by some of the details, like colored bounce lighting
| which I am not sure can be achieved with this level of
| detail using other methods.
|
| The current standard for getting real-time performance
| for ray tracing is to limit the number of rays and
| bounces, and stabilize the results temporally.
|
| I.e. to get a "physically accurate" result you would have
| to send hundreds, or thousands of rays per pixel, and
| bounce them up dozens or hundreds of times. With this
| method, instead you send maybe even one or two rays per
| pixel, which gives you a noisy result. But you store the
| result, and accumulate it over a number of frames, and
| apply de-noising, and over time you end up with a high-
| quality result.
|
| I believe that is why when the light moves, the GI lags
| for a fraction of a second in this demo.
| longtom wrote:
| Another trick is in stead of tracing multiple bounces per
| ray at once, to compute one indirect bounce every n-th
| frame using intermediate results from the previous (not
| the current) frame and then spatio-temporally smooth the
| results, possibly with on-screen bilateral filtering of
| the past few frames. I think one can see they do this
| when they move the light source. It takes a while for the
| indirect bounces to fade out. Perhaps they use screen
| space ray tracing for this (meaning no indirect bounces
| for occluded geometry).
| skohan wrote:
| Why would sharp shadows rule out raytracing? And how would
| they achieve this quality of GI without it?
| longtom wrote:
| Because softer shadows add to the realism, so they would
| have used them if they had invented a new efficient ray
| tracing method! Look at 5:12 in the video. The shadows
| are way too sharp. It's probably good old shadow mapping
| for the first bounce and then screen space(?) global
| illumination.
| rasz wrote:
| Ray tracing is a scam to push more hardware we dont need.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNRp9Y33xWE Can you spot the
| difference worth >2-3x performance drop?
| waltpad wrote:
| It seems to me that this game doesn't actually take in
| account all the _seemingly_ existing light sources when
| computing the shadows: see for instance at around 7:45, there
| is an obvious light source in the bottom right region
| (actually a bunch of synchronized pulsating lights on some
| sort of cylinders) which clearly should affect the surfaces
| close to it, but it doesn 't in either mode! In the next
| comparison, there's a fire burning close to a wall, and
| likewise the fire doesn't seem to emit any light on the wall.
| Actually, the commentators do mention that there isn't that
| much dynamic lights handled in the game, limiting the effect
| of RTX.
|
| I don't know how that RTX tech is working, but from what I've
| seen of the port of Quake2, it looked much more convincing -
| did you see it before making that judgement?
| anchpop wrote:
| Current games that use raytracing often only use it for 1
| light. For example, Metro Exodus only uses it for the sun.
| This means parts that take place underground look virtually
| identical with or without RT turned on. It's possible that
| they do the same thing in this game
| skohan wrote:
| Real-time ray tracing is not impressive in the current
| generation of games because they're optimized to maximize the
| quality of traditional lighting solutions. Most games use
| mostly static assets and lighting, because baked lighting can
| get a nearly photorealistic result as long as nothing moves.
|
| Highly dynamic environments are where the technology shines,
| because it can achieve results which traditional solutions
| simply can't. I think ray-traced Minecraft is the best
| current example of the potential of this technology.
| naikrovek wrote:
| This is a very ignorant comment.
|
| For some tasks, ray tracing already outperforms traditional
| rasterization.
|
| All "photorealistic" 3D renderers are trying to produce
| output on par with a true ray tracing renderer, and because
| the computation required is so high, tons of bodges and hacks
| are employed to approach that level of quality. The resulting
| complexity of a traditional rasterizer is astronomical
| compared to the complexity of a ray traced renderer.
|
| Ray traced graphics has been the goal the entire time
| computer graphics have been a thing; for the past 40 years,
| at least. That's always been the goal. I can't remember a
| time when it wasn't.
|
| It's only now that hardware fabrication technology has put us
| in a place where we're able to slightly open the door to the
| rendering techniques we've desired for so long. It's an
| exciting time.
|
| It is not a scam. It may not perform well in most situations
| currently, but I can promise you, that will change
| significantly as time goes on.
|
| Just like how early CPU hardware was slow and expensive,
| early ray tracing hardware is slow and expensive. Over time,
| CPU hardware has gotten cheaper and faster, and the same will
| happen with ray tracing hardware.
| bob1029 wrote:
| IMO, ray tracing is a scam as currently presented by Nvidia,
| et. al. GPUs are not the correct way to approach this
| problem. RTX is an approximation at best and a complete joke
| at worst. That said, I do believe ray tracing is the future
| and can become the standard way in which we engage with all
| 3D graphics concerns.
|
| Contrast the GPU with the newest generation of x86 CPUs. They
| have more cores than you can typically use, provide
| ridiculous amounts of pipelined throughput, and have
| specialized vector instructions which can dramatically
| accelerate common 3D graphics tasks (i.e. matrix
| multiplication).
|
| Most practical ray tracing algorithms are trivially
| parallelized (e.g. just throw each scanline at a thread) and
| also exhibit properties which can leverage the deep stack
| depths and OoO execution enabled by modern CPUs. Ray tracing
| is inherently a recursive activity with a profound number of
| potential branching opportunities. x86 has absolutely no
| problem dealing with this kind of scenario. This is exactly
| what it was built for. GPUs on the other hand require yet
| more specialized hardware that has its limitations baked-in
| at the transistor level. x86 does not have these same kind of
| limitations.
|
| Consider the hypothetical benefits of having your entire
| graphics pipeline implemented within 1 cache-coherent memory
| domain and on top of a single instruction set. Imagine no
| Direct3D/OpenGL/Vulkan/drivers/etc are involved to ruin your
| day. What if you could fit all of your required scene,
| texture and model data into L3 cache? How many times can you
| fill L3 from RAM per second on a 3950x with reasonable memory
| configuration? How many times per frame at 60fps? I feel we
| need to take some time to look at the emerging opportunities
| with the new hardware that is coming to market.
|
| I worry that the developer community is so out of touch with
| the hardware aspect (e.g. 22ms hello world) that we are
| basically saying "lol no just use GPU magic graphics
| rectangle" and calling it a day. I feel like specialization
| of ASICs is fundamentally taking us in the wrong direction
| now that we are able to put so many general purpose cores
| onto a single package/die in a very cost-effective manner.
| Maybe this is why AMD is taking so long to bring a proper
| Nvidia killer to market. At some point there has to be a
| certain # of cores where someone raises their hand and asks
| "why do we still need a separate GPU?".
| jayd16 wrote:
| Fundamentally we're talking about 10-15 recursive bounces
| but millions of independent rays. A GPU is not at a
| disadvantage.
|
| Consoles have dabbled with single memory models and high
| memory bandwidth etc. and its nice but its not new. Mobile
| chips are unified memory.
| zarkov99 wrote:
| This is stunning, but scary. Even if my descendants survive
| plagues, nuclear war, climate change and malevolent AI's, they
| might not have a chance against the allure of these simulated
| worlds.
| lotyrin wrote:
| On the other hand, I think this probably is the least-scary
| answer to the mystery of the great filter.
| keenmaster wrote:
| If there are other civilizations out there, I think we're
| more likely to be visited by super-intelligent AI than we are
| to meet their creators. Think of a small sentient spaceship
| going the speed of light with a million IQ hive of
| replicators on board. They wouldn't have to bother about life
| preservation or oxygen or any of that noise. Their creator
| species would stay in their galaxy until their AI finds
| another ideal planet to colonize, or they could be dead and
| their legacy lives on in the AI. The existence of
| extraordinarily compelling virtual worlds wouldn't have much
| of an impact in my opinion.
| stjo wrote:
| underrated comment
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