Unreal Engine 4 Shown At GDC

Wow, does it have the texture pop up feature of Unreal Engine 3?

Seriously though, I can't wait to see full games made with this. Especially Unreal Tournament. I've been starving for a new UT...
 
IIRC, we saw some pretty awesome stuff from Unreal Engine 3 tech demos, but NOTHING created with it really matched that level of quality, sadly.
 
I'm not TRULY impressed by much...but this I have to say made me literally say "WOW!" out loud at work...this truly looks amazing!

One step closer to that TRUE uncanny valley!
 
Is there a video? Honestly I am not overly impressed with the screenshots so far. The polygon count is impressive but the textures are not overly awesome.
 
is it bad that the first thing that popped in my head is...

"it'll look good on consoles and look like shit on pcs.."
 
Screenshots do not impress me at all.

I guess People Can Fly are already making the new UT with it.
 
They should be pushing this on the PC and not hoping consoles will catch up to the PC. We need something to get people interested in PC gaming.

Course nividia virtual GPU may put consoles out of business one day.
 
I think where this will really shine is in the video. Plus, I think it's hard to consciously visualize this as a game. Also, I think art style will play a huge factor, and this doesn't look like it has very much at all.
 
hesho said:
is it bad that the first thing that popped in my head is...

"it'll look good on consoles and look like shit on pcs.."
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I thought UE4 was made with nextgen consoles in mind and not what is currently available and a reason why it has been so long in development. Therefore, it should look amazing on PCs.
 
I hope this is not what were getting for another 8 years :(

Unreal 3.5:
fu1k3l.jpg


Unreal 4.0:
351ztwh.jpg



Notice the "cheek" and neck textures... Am I missing something? :confused:
 
Mojo3k70 said:
I hope this is not what were getting for another 8 years :(

*snip*

Notice the "cheek" and neck textures... Am I missing something? :confused:
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Yeah, that was what I noticed. The textures really seem pretty sub-par. I'm guessing the video itself is more impressive with lighting and particles and whatnot, but the screenshots are not that special.
 
end of the day it's still 20% engine. 80% artists.

Very few games were able to make full use of Unreal 3 capabilities. Probably even fewer for Unreal 4. You need massive budgets to do that kinds of graphic work. It's why you get these games that cost $100mil to develop over two years, and then are only like 5 hours long.

I'm just not impressed by graphics anymore.
 
I guess I'll have to see it in motion, but at the moment I'm not impressed at all, which really doesnt make sense since my jaw was on the floor when I saw the Samaritan demo. In fact Samaritan still looks amazing. My guess is these photos just dont do it justice. From here, this demo smack of nothing more than an overclocked Xbox360.
 
I personally think this is amazing. Are the textures that great? No, but have you guys looked at Skyrim? Are the textures BAD? Not even close. Let's be reasonable, here. We're talking about a tech demo that was created in three months. Of course it will look "better" in motion. It's hard to convey exactly what this engine can do in a screenshot. I think what people aren't really getting their brains wrapped around is that this stuff is real-time. Running out of the editor. That's damned impressive.

Also, this isn't meant to show off an actual game, it's showing you what the engine can do. Besides, this is Epic "Gears of War" Games who created the demo. Of course it looks like what we've seen out of them before, it's the same lead artist. Apparently we get to see the video next month. That will be the right time for judgements to be made. For now, I'm totally optimistic.
 
engine looks really nice, but whats the point of it when no good games will ever come out that use it, for PC.
 
Nookie420 said:
engine looks really nice, but whats the point of it when no good games will ever come out that use it, for PC.
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Historically new consoles on launch day offer superior graphics than even the best PC's at that time. PC's will of course quickly trump them in a matter of months, but for the time being a consolized next gen engine should look truly impressive.
 
UE4 introduces dynamic lighting, which behaves in response to its own inherent properties rather than a set of preprogrammed effects.
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UE just NOW supports dynamic lighting? Wow Epic is behind

And Tessellation? Other engines have been doing this already....

Glad they are finally catching up though
 
Looks awesome!
/queue the nothing is good enough crowd. Probably the same people that talk about supermodels having pointy elbows.
 
McFry said:
Historically new consoles on launch day offer superior graphics than even the best PC's at that time. PC's will of course quickly trump them in a matter of months, but for the time being a consolized next gen engine should look truly impressive.
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Historically...History show's us an industry that's grown both financially and technically by many magnitudes since 05. Between a greater grasp of software engineering to better understanding the h/w they'll be running it on basing the next generation of engines upon history won't lead to any accurate conclusions. You also have to take into account the growth of the industry. They not only have more software engineers for these projects but more talented and experienced one's. On top of this the budgets for these projects goes far beyond anything possible from 7 years ago.

One must also take into account that the difference between what occurred with this generations engines earlier on what will occur with the next generation of engines won't be similar conditions. The change in h/w architecture from single-core to multi-core processors was something no one had sufficient expertise in with regards to gaming and there won't be that kind of radical change in engine optimization this time around.

Furthermore the rumors concerning the hardware being chosen for the next consoles suggests all platforms will utilize mature and well-understood hardware that engineers have experience in utilizing. This means that while they'll be able to better optimize for this hardware the difference between PC and console won't be as noticeable as before at launch as porting assets from one platform to the other would be far easier than it currently is. In fact, just from engine tech alone porting from console to PC has become easier because of advances in game engines. These advances put to rest many of the factors that lead to consoles have 'better' visuals than PCs for a short amount of time.

These next consoles really won't have anything over a PC this time around. Unless they pull 12-cores out of their ass they'll just be low-end rigs with low overhead that'll be outdated and outclassed far before they're launched maybe even before they started choosing which hardware to use.
 
Great engines...now will there actually be a great game to go with it? One without 'console controls'.
 
I'm fairly underwhelmed by those screenshots. I hope it looks much better in motion.

The leap from UE3 to UE4 looks a lot smaller so far than the leap from UE2 to UE3.
 
Brent_Justice said:
UE just NOW supports dynamic lighting? Wow Epic is behind

And Tessellation? Other engines have been doing this already....

Glad they are finally catching up though
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no they have had both for awhile now. When it comes to making quality games there's a reason so many developers use the Unreal engine.

As far as people talking about ue3 being old you need to realize they're constantly updating it. I'm sure there's still some original code from the first quake in ID's latest engine. It's not like an engine is a static thing. This is all just marketing it very well could have just been an update.
 
as a game developing hobyist using Unreal Engine 3, I'm exited about the new engine's real-time features. I'll try to explain why:

f_unreal43_ss.jpg


If you look closely at the particle shots, especially this one close-up of the characters face, you can see particles bouncing around it's 'horns' and facial features, something that is quite instruction heavy. Most of the time, particles just simulate without effect from the world around them, maybe a virtual 'box' to contain themselves so they don't just disappear into the ceiling/walls. This means if you had complex geometry within the particles' simulation area, the particles would most likely move straight through it as if it did not exist. If my prediction is true: UE4 has introduced a new way to physically simulate particles that allows them to interact with real-time geometry, my guess is a screen-space 2.5D effect (like a differed rendering approach) Either way, this can't be proven until we see it in motion.

ff_unreal4_statue.jpg


Also, the various surfaces seemed to be reflecting in real-time, not cube-map 'faked' reflections. The reason the reflections look so convincing is that the colour, the light angle, the reflection hotspots are ALL where they should be. That sort of thing can be done using a cubemap, the dead giveaway that this is real-time is the fact that the silver statue reflects the gold statue, and so does the small orb in the right side of the picture. There are a lot of reflective surfaces in the various screenshots, some mirror-like, some more dull and more like brushed metal; but they all seem to reflect properly, meaning that the new engine could be doing real-time reflections on the fly. Again, most likely through a differed approach. Also note the tiles at the bottom of the shot in shadow seem to be reflecting ever so dully the gold of the statue.

ff_unreal4_orrery.jpg


This shot demonstrates a potential new lighting system. We know UE4 uses dynamic only lighting, meaning old, static lightmaps are out. but I'm seeing more and more light-emitting surfaces and I'm seeing more of them in unortodox shapes. In UE3, you could attach a dynamic light to a bright object and that would look pretty damn convincing, but if that object was oblong and concave, the light would not behave as it should. This is because a light in UE3 acts like a single point in floating-point space, the origin of the light is infinitely small. Even a small light bulb has area to it: it occupies a space about 4cmx6cm and emits light diffused though every square inch of it's surface. However, a light-bulb is easy to simulate though an infinitely small light source; compared to a person the lightbulb is nearly one-thousandth our size. imagine a wall of light, how does one simulate that kind of area with one infinitely small point? What I'm getting at is I see a lot of (what seem to be) Area lights. Area lights emit light from a surface instead of a point, allowing for more realistic light distribution from a light-emitting source. It is possible Epic has implemented a real-time final-gather renderer. Final gather is a rendering technique that does not have separate lights and objects, but rather looks ate every surface as a source and reflector of light. It would truly be awesome if Epic has actually implemented a FG system in a game engine.

just my 2c
 
Well I am not impressed with the ground and dirt. It does not look very convincing. All else is great. Rocks always look dull in unreal games to me
 
mastaBlasta said:
end of the day it's still 20% engine. 80% artists.


I'm just not impressed by graphics anymore.
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Well said. I bet when the Xbox 720 does come out, its graphics won't be a ton better than the current version. I am just hopping that all games are rendered in 1080p because I know that can and will be the biggest jump if they do it.
 
My problem is, they make Dynamic Lighting sound like it's the new best thing in technology, while Dynamic Lighting has been used in the past, for a long while now. It may be new for the Unreal Engine, but it's not new in gaming and in other gaming engines. They are playing catch up.
 
As an outsider looking in, I think it is harsh for anyone to judge something as massive as a new Unreal Engine, before we've even seen a game utilize the engine. I can't wait to see what the PC-only title is from Epic. Fingers crossed it is a new Unreal Tournament built using UE4. The gaming world needs more PC-only AAA titles...as long as they aren't garbage.
 
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