toblix

Unreal Engine 4

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So here's a sweet trailer showing off the latest version of the Unreal Engine:

And here's an even sweeter developer walkthrough of the new amazing tech they've cooked up. It even has a twist, sort of:

[media=]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=MOvfn1p92_8

It's so great that this amazing engine is available to everyone, even developers who are interested in stuff besides murder simulators. Of course, there's also Unity and CryENGINE, the latter of which is probably similarly astounding.

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Why is this in the Idle Banter forums? :erm:

But yeah, look forward to whatever some smart people make with this. I'd love a hugging simulator with those graphics, eh? Hug the shit out of that demon guy.

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I went back and forth on where to post it. I think I decided on Idle Banter because it's more of a technical thing, maybe, or something, but primarily I reached the maximum amount of time I had set aside for deciding where to post. Now that I've thought more about it, I'm still not sure if posting it in Video Gaming would be correct. Would a post about physics middleware or foliage generators be at home there? How about asset creation and management, source control and project management systems? Payroll software? Where does the line go?!

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Obviously, we need a Speedtree thread.

I'm most excited by the way you can drop in and out of the editor. Having to wait for a level to rebuild, then load the game to walk around in it, was by far the biggest and most time consuming ball-ache of mapping with older versions of Unreal unless like some people you didn't bother building on the grid.

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I went back and forth on where to post it. I think I decided on Idle Banter because it's more of a technical thing, maybe, or something, but primarily I reached the maximum amount of time I had set aside for deciding where to post. Now that I've thought more about it, I'm still not sure if posting it in Video Gaming would be correct. Would a post about physics middleware or foliage generators be at home there? How about asset creation and management, source control and project management systems? Payroll software? Where does the line go?!

You're right. THE LINE WILL BE DRAWN NOW?! :worship:

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I think anything remotely related to games or gaming belongs in the other forum, which a game engine or any kind of game middleware definitely falls under IMO. But that's me, who for years ignored Idle Banter and directly bookmarked the gaming forum so who knows how many threads I've missed. ;(

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murder simulators

That's pretty much what keeps my excitement low. The tech in all its glory will primarily be used to make environments in which you inflict harm on people or the people you kill look more amazing. And if it's not the killing that turns me off, it will be the sexism, and if it's not that it will be the boring unoriginality of the shinier Ice-level, or the Lava-level (yeah, it's only a tech-demo, but still, it was pretty much that). Some years ago I could easily get excited about new engines but nowadays I just feel alienated from the mainstream this is part of.

Sorry to just come here and poop on this, it's probably in part just post-E3 cynicism. Again RPS summed it up pretty well some days ago: E3s Press Events Do Not Represent The Gaming I Know.

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The end of the second video there totally blew me away (IGN.com) - having it zip him directly into code and then him literally playing as it compiled and the jump height changing mid-stream was incredible. I actually said "holy shit" out loud. It's been a while since I did any serious programming but that totally excited me, and the scripter in me loves the editor in general.

Whatever you think of their games, there are some talented fucking engineers at Epic.

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Wow, that last part is really amazing. I've got 10+ years of knowledge of the UnrealEngine (down to the absolute core of the engine). And what they have shown in biggest jump in their technology so far. Besides the massive improvements to the editor itself, the semi instant "native" programming is absolutely awesome. Epic got rid of UnrealScript in UE4 and you're now writing C++ for the game logic. Or at least that's why I've been told. So that last part of the video, they change some part of the game logic in C++ which was compiled in the background and injected into the running application. That alone is an amazing feature.

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I've got 10+ years of knowledge of the UnrealEngine (down to the absolute core of the engine).

Wow, do/did you work at Epic?

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I think anything remotely related to games or gaming belongs in the other forum, which a game engine or any kind of game middleware definitely falls under IMO. But that's me, who for years ignored Idle Banter and directly bookmarked the gaming forum so who knows how many threads I've missed. ;(

True enough. Moved!

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I would at least have a little discussion first. Thread policy is super-important.

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Looks like mostly anything they needed to previously bake into the textures is now done in real time, which is a big step.

Also the particles were very filmic-- but like was stated above, it will be used for big expensive games I will never want to play-- Ihaven't even seen the previous Unreal engine in action.

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Wow, do/did you work at Epic?

I've done contract work for Epic on several occasions, but I've also been very active in the mod community since UT'99 was released. Anyway,I've seen the guts of UE1 through to UE3

@manny_c44 The UDK (the more or less free UnrealEngine) will eventually move on to be based on UE4. So you will see its technology is small cheap games.

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Looks pretty incredible to the mere layman... although that first shot of the demon man still looks plasticy, a carryover from ue3?

Still, the lighting effects etc are pretty outstanding and I can appreciate the benefit of inline code compilation etc, even I thought the jumping bit was pretty damn neat!

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Is it just me or did they take a good look at Unity? I can see all kinds of Unity type things in there, but I'm not familiar enough with other engines/editors to know that that is a thing everyone does nowadays. I looove the new flexibility in the UI and being able to compile and play and then see the results once it's done. So I'm wondering, does this mean that this is kind of what we can expect from the next console generation? I thought that UE4 was being made with those platforms in mind specifically.

Edit:

[media=]

[/media]

Given that this seems to be a game for next gen consoles (it's rocking UE3), I'd say that is indeed kind of what we can start to expect. Boring looking gameplay aside, that looks gorgeous. DAT GLOBAL ILLUMINATION.

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Lit particle FX are cool and make everything blend a lot better.

The biggest missing thing throughout this video is the lack of blending between elements, you still can spot out the harsh polygonal edges between objects in more than a few places. I figured after RAGE this would be top priority for any engine because it's one my biggest problems in game environments.

Tech demo was neat, the art wasn't great though, but shows potential.

The pipeline stuff to get everything in real time is exciting, but not new to a lot of other engines.

The lighting is finally catching up to whats possible today, so that's good, it was the biggest thing holding back the current UDK.

Not much in terms of animation advancement was mentioned... or did I miss that? Needs to be equivilent to euphoria or GTFO.

Not a lot of reflection examples which is a big step in "realism"

I still hold the pure visual bar with Crysis and honestly this didn't look that far beyond.... even though I'm sure there is more stuff going on, the results didn't "blow me away"

Still cool though, wish I was working on a "next gen" game right now, stupid E3 teases.

*I feel your pain castrop; when I can't tell Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, or Splinter Cell apart there is some serious problems in the main stream. With that said, UDK is practically free and if you're not trying to make millions, a lot of indies could make some cool short games with it.

** I think Star Wars is using a 3rd party lighting system if they are using UE3.

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This is cool, though as someone who spends more time with the audio side of stuff I'm more interested in the new version of FMOD (audio middleware). Still, as someone who has spent a lot of time with UE2-3 this is a huge leap forward and I'm interested to see what smart people do with UE4

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Is it just me or did they take a good look at Unity? I can see all kinds of Unity type things in there, but I'm not familiar enough with other engines/editors to know that that is a thing everyone does nowadays. I looove the new flexibility in the UI and being able to compile and play and then see the results once it's done. So I'm wondering, does this mean that this is kind of what we can expect from the next console generation? I thought that UE4 was being made with those platforms in mind specifically.

I don't know Unity, but the amount of slightly-more-user-friendly tools out there has definitely begun to look like a threat to the bigger engines. Most of the smaller developers I know are going for smaller tools, and some years ago I heard rumbles of Epic wanting to make something work in terms of modding and consoles. The current console generation *cough*Xbox*cough* aren't very well built for allowing users to publish and download things from each other though.

How it would pay for itself, I have no idea, but I could see an editor this powerful working with tech like OnLive or Gaikai too. If revisions can be made this fast without requiring a personal server farm, and the user isn't having to watch progress bars for minutes at a time, why not?

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** I think Star Wars is using a 3rd party lighting system if they are using UE3.

Do you mean 1313? In interviews they've made a point of mentioning they have Industrial Light & Magic engineers working on a bunch of stuff, trying to get some of the rendering techniques they use for films to work real-time for the game.

I agree with what you're saying about animation. For whatever reason it didn't occur to me during the demo, but yeah animation improvements are really what I've loved most this console generation so that bar at least has to be maintained going forwards.

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It definitely looks neat, and I'd definitely enjoy making a game on it. They should license to game jams for 48 hours, THAT would prove it's great for rapid prototyping.

The biggest missing thing throughout this video is the lack of blending between elements, you still can spot out the harsh polygonal edges between objects in more than a few places. I figured after RAGE this would be top priority for any engine because it's one my biggest problems in game environments.

Tech demo was neat, the art wasn't great though, but shows potential.

The pipeline stuff to get everything in real time is exciting, but not new to a lot of other engines.

The lighting is finally catching up to whats possible today, so that's good, it was the biggest thing holding back the current UDK.

Not much in terms of animation advancement was mentioned... or did I miss that? Needs to be equivilent to euphoria or GTFO.

Not a lot of reflection examples which is a big step in "realism"

So they don't have virtualized ("mega") texturing yet, nor a lot of other bells and whistles. From the talk it doesn't even look like they're ready to start giving the code to third party developers yet, though obviously they hope to be close. And yeah the art could have definitely been better, the lighting made the demo, not the low res textures and odd art style.

As for Star Wars 1313, of course it's UE3! It's internally developed and Lucasarts signed an exclusive deal for all internal properties to use Unreal Engine sometime last year (I think it was last year anyway). Though it's obviously a heavily customized version that probably uses last years DX11 plugins from the Samaritan demo.

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Here's a great write-up of the engine capabilities on Eurogamer. There is no static light baking in the videos, it's all dynamic illumination, which is pretty impressive.

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Can anyone even do mega textures now that Bethseda bought ID? They sort of created the concept so I wonder if it isn't some patented thing no one else can develop.

Also UE4 has been sent out to some developers from what I hear.

***

I think LA Noire really set the bar for facial animation , I believe there is no dispute in that, GTA4 and Max Payne are probably the pinacles of gameplay animation(Euphoria) but obviously in this generation the resources to do both at a very high degree weren't there and all those games were coming from Rockstar, so I don't know why there is such a low priority to mimic these concepts from other studios.

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I don't think MegaTextures is critical for having smoothly blending surfaces and stuff like that, the only real visible difference it makes from a player perspective is the lack of repetition when it comes to textures. The actual blending is more down to the artists and what the engine's texturing facilities are like in general — for example in CryEngine it's always been possible to paint textures and smooth things together beautifully.

In fact CryEngine can already do global illumination and live changes to the code too (We all remember the same code running simultaneously on 360 and PS3, right?). I'm really looking forward to seeing how Crytek up the game with their next major release.

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Can anyone even do mega textures now that Bethseda bought ID? They sort of created the concept so I wonder if it isn't some patented thing no one else can develop.

Carmack is very vocally against patents, and none of their technologies have been patented in the past, so I don't expect MegaTextures to be any different.

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