T4 on UE 3.0? Rumors about the engine. - by Judith
mothra on 11/3/2010 at 23:08
crysis ran fine on any system, even the minimum specs. ppl just tended to turn everything on high or medium and then wonder why it's slow. I got a dual core + nvidia260 and still cant run high+dx10 properly > 40fps. it's still the benchmark and I played it on a p4 3ghz + 8800gts without any problem. it just looked "bad". as I have heard cryengine3 is just cryengine1 without some bells and whistles so it can fit on a console. but there are sure some optimizations as well. we'll see when crysis2 comes out.
Avalon on 13/3/2010 at 18:46
Quote Posted by mothra
crysis ran fine on any system, even the minimum specs. ppl just tended to turn everything on high or medium and then wonder why it's slow.
Exactly. On "high," the game looks good, but it doesn't boast so many features that it should run like a slug on a gaming 'supercomputer.' It's just a poorly optimized engine.
That's what I've always liked about Sweeney's approach with Unreal - that an engine's processing performance is just as important as what it puts out. A lot of engines go along the lines of throwing in as many features as possible and as quickly as possible, and put it in the consumer's hands to get hardware that supports the monstrosity they're constructed. The smarter developers make it a goal to bring those features down to the consumer's level.
malau on 3/4/2010 at 06:23
Yes, the Crytek engine is 3 years old and it has the cheek to cause problems running on a PC with double or 4 times it's recommended spec ! THAT makes it a poorly optimized (but beautiful looking) engine.
str8g8 on 18/5/2010 at 11:33
strange to read so much unreal-0-phobia ... I think UE3 is by far the best choice for T4 because of the editor alone. If they use an in house engine, then it seems unlikely we would get an editor at all. People complaining that UE3 can't do lighting or can't do detail or can't do characters are clueless. It all depends what the artist chooses to do with the tools.
I think some of the lighting effects in UE3 are fantastic. I never got on with the stencil shadowing in TDS
Renault on 11/11/2010 at 00:57
Quote:
-Release is minimum 20-24 months away.
:(
Koki on 11/11/2010 at 08:27
Quote Posted by Avalon
Exactly. On "high," the game looks good, but it doesn't boast so many features that it should run like a slug on a gaming 'supercomputer.' It's just a poorly optimized engine.
Ahahahah, are you serious?
jtr7 on 11/11/2010 at 11:08
Quote Posted by str8g8
strange to read so much unreal-0-phobia ... I think UE3 is by far the best choice for T4 because of the editor alone. If they use an in house engine, then it seems unlikely we would get an editor at all. People complaining that UE3 can't do lighting or can't do detail or can't do characters are clueless. It all depends what the artist chooses to do with the tools.
I think some of the lighting effects in UE3 are fantastic. I never got on with the stencil shadowing in TDS
And yet the engine has to be hacked and much code replaced to make the engine meet a Thief game's requirements for sound, light, and shadow, doesn't it? If what I don't like about the look is just designer choice, then the problem must be all the designers making the same aesthetic choices? If there are other particle effect choices, why do they keep choosing the same kinds built of slow-moving and persistent smears of colour? If the specular and bump mapping is as flexible as I keep hearing, why do the designers keep choosing to make the walls look lumpy and waxy/oily/melty and rarely dusty and dull, and too often putting irregularities on surfaces that don't need them, creating the impression of sameness and overkill and reduced contrast in the virtual world? Can the lighting be set to not wash out colours from textures, making each area of illumination in scenes almost monochromatic? I need better examples of what the engine can do with thoughtful design. Are they intentionally copying each other for some reason, so they all look the same enough, even if only in hindsight without a side-by-side comparison, and inadvertently leading us to falsely believe it's Unreal's own inherent code leaving the boring or distasteful impression?
Heavy Rain on 11/11/2010 at 12:54
Same 4-5 vision-impaired people hating on Unreal engine is nothing new here at TTLG, most of whom are sympathizers of ID Tech for inexplicable reasons. Thankfully, no one licenses ID engine these days. Meanwhile plenty of games run on Unreal Engine and produce diverse results ranging from dark-ish Batman: Arkham Asylum to bright and colorful Mirror's Edge. Both of these games offer superb visual fidelity, run well on high settings, that too on moderate machines. OTOH, Alpha Protocol too used UE, but the incompetent designers at Obsidian made it look worse than PS2-style graphics, proving the fault lies with designers and not with the engine.
Sulphur on 11/11/2010 at 22:08
I thought Alpha Protocol looked pretty good, actually. Sweet textures on the PC.
The differences between Batman: AA and Mirror's Edge in terms of lighting have nothing whatsoever to do with the colour palette. The issue isn't whether UE3 can do 'moody' or 'colourful'. The palette used is up to the artists, not the engine.
Going into more detail: For Mirror's Edge, DICE pretty much abandoned UE3's default lighting engine and had to go for another solution to get what they wanted, namely Illuminate Labs' 'Beast'. There's pre-baked radiosity in the maps that lets light 'bounce' from a brightly coloured surface on to one adjacent to it. It's telling that UE3 now has the Beast as part of its package.
My main beef with UE3 is that for all its seemingly advanced features, even with the global illumination system courtesy of the Beast, standard lights for its environments are pre-baked into the maps because the lighting system isn't unified/running through a deferred renderer, so environment shadows tend to be static and thus seem 'fake', whereas that's not the case with something as old as id tech 4 or even Stalker's X-Ray engine.
Plus, I don't know whether it's an engine issue or an artist issue, but a fuckton of games developed on UE3 seem to favour having this waxy sheen to every surface, like somebody forgot to change the phong values for skin and marble and damp rock to 'not plastic'.
