addink on 6/11/2009 at 22:20
CryEngine3 has support for dynamic global illumination as opposed to the static global illumination of Unreal3's lightmass, which only creates prerendered lightmaps.
On the other hand, how well CryEngine3's dynamic global illumination actually performs in complex spaces still remains to be seen. Also the number of reflections that it supports could well be just one.
On Topic:
Cool.
The_Raven on 6/11/2009 at 23:09
Yeah, after I had made my original post, I ended up watching the video linked to in the Cryengine 3 thread. I does appear to be dynamic in that case, and we know for sure that it is static in the case of Unreal Engine 3. Also, the castle with the banners and pillars in the Cryengine 3 video look eerily close to the screenshots in the wiki article for Lightmass.
All in all, I still think it is neat. Also, the use of navigation meshs instead of nodes is a nice plus.
Shadowcat on 6/11/2009 at 23:27
Quote Posted by clearing
It'd be pretty awesome if Cryengine 3, idTech5 went this way.
It certainly seems like a shrewd business move. People get experienced in using UE3, which makes it a natural choice to use if they move on to a big-budget retail game; plus Epic make money on the smaller games too.
If Crytech or Id were to follow suit, it would be interesting days indeed (Id has already been awesome with their GPL engine licensing in the past, of course).
Ostriig on 6/11/2009 at 23:58
A bit off topic, but with id Tech 5 in particular I'm not sure that's feasible - if I recall correctly, Carmack suggested that games based on the engine could not be used as mod platforms by players on their current-gen gaming PCs, due to the massive sizes of the texture maps involved (Virtual Texturing assets).
The_Raven on 7/11/2009 at 00:24
That's only applicable if you wanted to generate really large megatextures for terrain.
Renzatic on 7/11/2009 at 00:37
Right. Not everyone has to make a 500 square mile piece of megatexture. Most computers out nowadays could probably compile something the size of your usual DM/Onslaught maps without any problem.
Ostriig on 7/11/2009 at 00:44
Yeah, that's a good point. I wish I could fetch the original context I heard this in, a quote or something for the sake of clarity, but I just can't remember the interview.
The_Raven on 7/11/2009 at 01:19
I think (
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20291) this was the original article that you were probably thinking of.
Quote:
"Unfortunately, Rage is going to be more difficult to mod," said Willits, primarily because of the complexity of the game's vaunted megatexture system, which stores the texture data for levels as one huge texture map that streams in, rather than many smaller textures.
Megatextures require huge amounts of processing power to be baked into their final form for distribution on the game disc; Willits alluded to a large number of computers working for a long time to process them, analogous to a CG render farm.
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The megatexture issue aside, Willits said other aspects of the game will actually be easier to work with than the company's prior titles. "The description languages and the tools are a lot easier to use than the things we've done in the past," he explained.
Ostriig on 7/11/2009 at 01:31
Same idea, but different source. It's this (
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/08/11/carmack-talks-rage-other-stuff/) video interview with Carmack, I'm pretty sure I remember it correctly now. It even mentions "challenges of modding in the 'post Doom 3 era'" in the little blurb thing, though I can't say at which point in the half hour recording the thing about modding comes in.
But yeah, I assume you guys are right, and that smaller spaces would still be doable.
