T4 on UE 3.0? Rumors about the engine. - by Judith
JC_Denton on 27/11/2009 at 14:47
Quote Posted by d'Spair
I've been messing with both UE1 and UE2 quite a long time ago, and in terms of space creation it was total garbage. Unless one makes cubical rooms and 90 degree corners stricltly snapped to grid, there is a fair chance one will start getting BSP holes 30 minutes after starting making a level. In UE2, all gometry details are static meshes, while BSP remains almost as primitive as in the first Unreal engine (born 1998). Guys who work with T3Ed will easily confirm that making detailed error-free spaces in Flesh is pain in the ass. I would be very surprised if that is changed with UE3.
I'm not competent in these things, but have you seen Batman: Arkham Asylum? it's a very well detailed U3 engine game.
Flux on 27/11/2009 at 16:21
I'm having a hard time believing that since ue3 is not optimized for dynamic lights at all, even the newer udk version. Unless they re-write the renderer from scratch...:p ...wait, I've seen that movie before.
Judith on 27/11/2009 at 17:54
I'm not the biggest fan of the dynamic lightning, really. We saw them in T3, we saw them in D3, they look crappy, IMO (both). And impede performance, even now. T2 was never about dynamic shadows and look how people love it :) I'd be happy for a nice baked lightmaps and dynamic shadows only for characters, like it's being done for most games these days.
Flux on 27/11/2009 at 18:10
Eh? I'm not talking about dynamic shadows, but dynamic lights only. The simple torchlight which you can douse off in thief1&2 is a dynamic light. Ue3 is not even good at that(pointlighttoggleable, try to turn in on/off kismet and have couple of them in an area, enjoy your fps while you can before your rig crawls).
How would you plan to bake zillion combination of baked lightmaps for such situations where the player might use water arrows or not? Ue3 is designed and optimized for static lights mostly and looks good in that way.
Or watch the fireworks when thief4 announced with no water-arrows.:p
Judith on 27/11/2009 at 18:32
Actually, I don't know how you tried to make them but I didn't have the problem with turning them on or off. And I was making some "broken", flickering or "wavy" lights using material editor expressions. And the baked lightmaps will react just as they did in Thief 2. I don't know the exact mechanism but they probably will have the same brightness and contrast as the "ambient darkness", so when the light is gone they won't be visible it such area.
Flux on 27/11/2009 at 19:56
Quote:
but I didn't have the problem with turning them on or off.
Of course you can, I meant performance-wise for a fully playable finished level. (especially when you don't have zoning anymore
Quote:
material editor expressions
. They are mostly used for light effects, they don't act like pointlighttoggleable class
Anyway, I hope to see one unreal engine 3 game where the environment is not static.
Judith on 27/11/2009 at 20:21
Lights can be toggled by the scripts, mostly, but you can use the LightFunction to emulate things like broken light flickering, fire or torchlight effects, etc. And it affects normals, specularity, shadows and other things like that.
And I didn't have problems with performance either way, in a finished map, even when I used Gears PC Editor, which is a bit buggy and unstable. I didn't use toggled lights in the final map just because they were redundant and didn't improve the gameplay in any way :)
Flux on 27/11/2009 at 22:00
Quote Posted by Judith
. I didn't use toggled lights in the final map just because they were redundant and didn't improve the gameplay in any way :)
In your case, for sure. Since I replied to this thread, I'm talking about a possible thief game, where toggled lights are must.
