Next-gen Unreal engine (tech demo)

[Sixty]

What it represents is visual cohesion. A solid world. More believable, allowing other game elements to shine through. No distracting visual ****ups to ruin the illusion.

More likely the introduction of new advanced graphics techniques will lead to new distracting visual flaws.

[gizmo1990]

Nice stuff. I look forward to all the games that will take advantage of this level of fidelity plus the decrease in games costs this must inevitably bring...

[Kit]

Could do with Epic releasing a proper HD video.

I thought the most impressive part was the reflections on the road when ED-209?s brother turned up.

The future of making the games look Next gen is making the animation look less ****e, Battlefield 3 is using the animation system from the FIFA games, so all the animations are silky physics based and linked together. Looks amazing

I totally agree after seeing the facial animation in LA-Noire. The graphics aren?t exactly mind blowing in that game, yet the moment you see the characters speak they become scarily realistic. Lets hope that game can kick start animation catching up to visuals - getting sick of seeing NPC?s talk like yapping dogs.

[Matt]

More likely the introduction of new advanced graphics techniques will lead to new distracting visual flaws.

Honestly man, many people don't seem to notice the distracting flaws this gen. By the next, when the biggest flaw could be a slight innaccuracy in colour processing, well....

Saying all that, I'm still not convinced this is anywhere near what we'll actually get next gen. But then I'm hoping we'll ditch raster based rendering all together; and let's not forget, Sweeney did say they'd be looking at going that way in the next Unreal Engine. I think it's telling that in a world obsessed with marketting spiel, they're not branding this as anything other than an updated UE3. Which is all it actually is, but the temptation would be to go with UE4 to get more media coverage. So that may indeed suggest UE4 will be something different, rather than an iteration.

[Kit]

Could do with Epic releasing a proper HD video.

kaBLAM!!!

The sumptuous demo, which was running in real-time at the conference, shows off new engine features and gives a look at what Epic says it "wants to see in the next generation of games."

Samaritan takes advantage of DirectX 11 features including tessellation and displacement, multisampled textures and Shader Model 5. It also uses subsurface scattering, Nvidia's Apex dynamics, Bokeh depth of field, image-based reflections, and other fancy technical wizzbangs and doohickeys.

Don't get too excited just yet, as the "next generation" part is key. While Epic did run the demo in real-time, it took a beastly PC with three GeForce GTX 580 graphics cards--the cheapest models of which cost around $500 apiece.

This is so far off even for PC. At a higher res you can see beads of water dripping off everything.

[Matt]

kaBLAM!!!

This is so far off even for PC. At a higher res you can see beads of water dripping off everything.

Awesome. It's all about immersion. Funny, a year or three back there was a discussion about one of the engines or games of the time (I have a feeling it may have been CryEngine) and there was water on that, and I commented that proper water interaction would be wonderful. Sure, you'll get the "but what does it bring to gameplay!" brigade banging their drums, but what it does is set the scene; it establishes a more believable game world. It adds immersion.

In game you may never notice it on faces, except in cut scenes. But you'd get it rolling off your FPS gun. You'd get water pooling on the ground. You'd get water kicking up as a car drives through it, rather than a bitmap particle.

Yep, I find this stuff all very exciting. Physics is the next big thing

[Dogg Thang]

It's pretty amazing stuff. Is anyone actually going to be able to afford to take advantage of this? Wouldn't the development at this level of detail be incredibly long and costly?

Looks amazing. As Matt says, it's in the level of immersion this would bring that the benefits would be seen. Many games now really have fantastic levels of immersion but being able to do this sort of thing just takes it up a notch.

[Matt]

You know, as things get more powerful, I'm pretty sure they'll come a time when development costs won't actually go up. Right now, many devs make high detail models, use them for normal maps, then do a lower poly model for in-game (and more LOD variants). Eventually we'll get to a point where you can simply chuck in the high detail model and let tesselation do it's thing.

Likewise, things like water effects should, in theory, simply be a middleware plug-in away. Right now, if you want to make something look wet in UE3, you get your base material and add a wet / running water texture over it. It's tricky to get it looking right. You want rain, it's a plane with an animated rain texture on it. Placing those planes can be a pain, not clipping into inside areas, that kind of thing. As we get to proper physical rain, you'd simply set a rain emitter in the sky (ie a cloud) and let it do it's own thing. Interaction, animation, it will all be handled for you.

Guess we're a way away from that But the thing is, rain is rain. You get the one plug-in, and with a few parameters for intensity, and you're away. One it's coded and completely realistic, you'd never have to go back to the code again.

But a while yet

Likewise, when we eventually more away from shaders and on to ray tracing, all those nice lighting effects devs spend ages tweaking to get looking right, will theoretically be perfect....

[Uli]

Yep, I find this stuff all very exciting. Physics is the next big thing

improved physics and AI were supposed to happen this gen with 360 and PS3. but what became of this goals? sucked up in the graphics race and postponed to the next-gen or, more likely, next next-gen

[Matt]

improved physics and AI were supposed to happen this gen with 360 and PS3. but what became of this goals? sucked up in the graphics race and postponed to the next-gen or, more likely, next next-gen

GPGPUs. Physics had not made the move over when this gen was developed. We still get a lot of raw processing power, and no reason an SPU or two couldn't be used to process more physics.

However, I think you need to go back to last gen to see just how much more we are getting now. The trouble is, we all take for granted now the little things like sparks interacting with scenery, we don't even notice them.

In this example anyway, we're talking physics augmenting the graphics. These things can go hand in hand. Physics isn't just about chucking as many boxes around as possible

[PeteJ]

Oh I completely agree with Matt here, go back to the last generation and see how far things have moved on. Fire up Read Dead Redemption and drink a few at the bar then stagger around and down a few steps, that's a massive leap in physics from the Playstation 2 days.

Animation is where the next leap in technology needs to come from. LA Noire's facial animation is more impressive than this Unreal footage to me, despite knowing that the Unreal footage is beyond what current systems can sensibly achieve. I think it comes down to expectations - I expect next-gen to look like this unreal footage, I wasn't expecting a game to have animation as good as LAN so soon.

[Matt]

Animation is a bit of a strange one. It's not just about the processing power. Even on big budget films, you can usually see the difference between a real person, and a CG one, based purely on their movement. I think, artistically, we're a way off there. Even motion capture somehow fails to capture all the intricacies of a real person.

As for facial animation, well I have no idea on that. All the little movements in a face we take for granted, simulating that must be a nightmare. But I guess, eventually we'll get a middleware product that will look life-like and then we'll be done.