New Unreal Engine question

Just to clear up any confusion here:

Lightmass is an offline tool that generates bounced lighting information for an unreal scene. It generates DXTC1 textures for all the lit geometry in the world, stored in two textures as colour+primary direction. These textures can get quite big (as you might imagine) given they uniquely texture all the lit geometry in the level. A number of shipped games have used it, I believe the second army of two game was the first.

Also, they store a signed distance fields for prebaked shadows. This basically means a prebaked direct lighting shadow for the sun.

They support cascading shadow maps, so the sun can have dynamic shadows off select (or all) objects, combined with the precomputed shadows. Or a mix (precomputed shadows at distance, etc).

Lightmass can also bake in direct lighting for lights as well. This is pretty common actually.

There is no real-time GI in this system. I am also unaware of any precomputed GI relighting techniques for dynamic objects - other than artist defined techniques.

Their SSAO implementation is a post process operation, which is why it looks a bit wrong - as it will darken all lighting, not just ambient. It is temporally reprojected, so it gets accumulated over multiple frames which is why it is most obvious when the camera is still. The temporal effect was really strong in Gears 2, however it's been toned down since (and is customizable).

Finally, as far as I'm aware, UE3 has always done vector motion blur, right back to gears 1. You can certainly tweak motion blur on a per-object basis now.
 
I would rather call it Illuminate Labs mastery.
They used Beast to calculate lightmaps and lightprobes in ME1 and most likely in ME2.

Same tech was used for Mirrors Edge and that was the secound UE3 game that looked different. ;)
Yes, they used Beast for ME1 but ME2 seems to be lit with a different technique. The heavy use of negative lights kind of give it away. Though I'm not sure.
 
He's probably talking about this guy on Ustream http://www.justin.tv/mrbbg#/w/451316704

Not playing currently but his playthrough is in his archives. What I looked at didn't look special, but I have a feeling the small video size may not be doing it justice.

Remarkably little MOH single player video anywhere. It uses UE3 so hopefully it looks a good deal better than MW2.
 
He's probably talking about this guy on Ustream http://www.justin.tv/mrbbg#/w/451316704

Not playing currently but his playthrough is in his archives. What I looked at didn't look special, but I have a feeling the small video size may not be doing it justice.

Remarkably little MOH single player video anywhere. It uses UE3 so hopefully it looks a good deal better than MW2.
Thx!

Have to say textures and vistas look pretty amazing but oh my...those animations,so last gen :rolleyes:

BTW,where did that blurring/blooming around edges of pretty much everything in UE3 games disappear?:LOL:
 
I think we should do the moh talk in the gaming section.
But i would guess because dice is more used to their own engine.
I find it kinda bad because the dive mechanic could make this game stand out between the cods and other shooters.
 
Yes, they used Beast for ME1 but ME2 seems to be lit with a different technique. The heavy use of negative lights kind of give it away. Though I'm not sure.

It's brief and vague but they mention the new lighting in the ME2 during this video mentioning how the difference is night and day. So I don't know if they are using a new lighting engine or a modified version of the model used in ME1.
 
I was under the impression that Bioware used a heavily modified version of the UE2 for ME1, in which they practically re-wrote the renderer and added all the bells and whistles that makes the game look miles different (and better imho) than any other UE3 game.

I also thought that a similar thing happened with Bioshock and Mirror's Edge, implying that all three of those games were not strictly vanilla UE games.

I questioned whether lightmass was available to dev licensing UE3 because of the apparent huge disparity between epic produced games on the engine and other devs that license it. We've seen many examples of UE3 games this gen and outside of those ones whose devs have heavily modified the engine for their own purposes, there aren't very many that match up to the games Epic pumps out on the thing.

I'd heard (and this is pure hearsay) that Epic generally withholds updates to the engine until the "next Gears" or Epic Game is released. I thought that was the reason for the who Dyack debacle with Too Human?

Please correct me if i'm severely uninformed...
 
I was under the impression that Bioware used a heavily modified version of the UE2 for ME1, in which they practically re-wrote the renderer and added all the bells and whistles that makes the game look miles different (and better imho) than any other UE3 game.

I also thought that a similar thing happened with Bioshock and Mirror's Edge, implying that all three of those games were not strictly vanilla UE games.

I questioned whether lightmass was available to dev licensing UE3 because of the apparent huge disparity between epic produced games on the engine and other devs that license it. We've seen many examples of UE3 games this gen and outside of those ones whose devs have heavily modified the engine for their own purposes, there aren't very many that match up to the games Epic pumps out on the thing.

I'd heard (and this is pure hearsay) that Epic generally withholds updates to the engine until the "next Gears" or Epic Game is released. I thought that was the reason for the who Dyack debacle with Too Human?

Please correct me if i'm severely uninformed...

Well I know for sure Mirror's Edge used Unreal Engine 3, they just a third party lighting engine. Illuminate Labs I think, I only know this because I kept wondering why the lightining and shadowing in that game looked light years beyond the stuff in Gears 1 & 2 and then people linked me to their site. I think Mass Effect 1 & 2 are the same in regards to the renderer & lighting engine. (UE3 + llluminate Labs)
 
The way I see it with ME1 -> ME2, Bioware were just learning how things worked with ME1. Then with ME2 the knew exactly what they could do and more importantly how to do it. They could be more ambitious with the environments now they knew how to use the tools well. Considering they had a turn around time of just over 2 years to complete the second game, its very impressive.
 
I hope the next UnrealEngine or the new iteration would support deferred rendering. More dynamic lights or shadow casting lights would bring those nice Normalmaps into life thus improving the flat looking environment of UE3 powered games, especially those dark and night levels.
 
Well I know for sure Mirror's Edge used Unreal Engine 3, they just a third party lighting engine. Illuminate Labs I think, I only know this because I kept wondering why the lightining and shadowing in that game looked light years beyond the stuff in Gears 1 & 2 and then people linked me to their site. I think Mass Effect 1 & 2 are the same in regards to the renderer & lighting engine. (UE3 + llluminate Labs)

Correct.
 
I was under the impression that Bioware used a heavily modified version of the UE2 for ME1, in which they practically re-wrote the renderer and added all the bells and whistles that makes the game look miles different (and better imho) than any other UE3 game.

I also thought that a similar thing happened with Bioshock and Mirror's Edge, implying that all three of those games were not strictly vanilla UE games.

IMO it was painfully obvious these games ran on UE3.

The only thing I heard or read was that Bioshock was originally developed using UE2 and they basically just updated the renderer in the engine to UE3, though I'm not sure if this is entirely possible or easy.

I questioned whether lightmass was available to dev licensing UE3 because of the apparent huge disparity between epic produced games on the engine and other devs that license it. We've seen many examples of UE3 games this gen and outside of those ones whose devs have heavily modified the engine for their own purposes, there aren't very many that match up to the games Epic pumps out on the thing.

I'd heard (and this is pure hearsay) that Epic generally withholds updates to the engine until the "next Gears" or Epic Game is released. I thought that was the reason for the who Dyack debacle with Too Human?

Please correct me if i'm severely uninformed...

AFAIK lightmass was available once it was developed and added to epics toolset. I imagine the huge disparity you usually see is due to the fact that Epic knows their engine better than anyone else and any features they add to the engine, they can design and optimize specifically for their upcoming game.

I also don't believe for a second that Epic holds on to updates until their next major release. It makes for bad business and while UE3 may be widely adopted this gen, next gen is a new game and there will be other options, so I'm not sure Epic would want to do anything to risk losing clients.

From what I remember and read, the issue Dyack had with UE3 was that the core engine itself wasn't ready or finished enough to be licensed out. Seeing how many early EU3 games were delayed and how the engine itself needed heavy optimization for Gears 1 alone leads me to believe that was the case.
 
The only thing I heard or read was that Bioshock was originally developed using UE2 and they basically just updated the renderer in the engine to UE3, though I'm not sure if this is entirely possible or easy.

They switched to the UE3 toolset.

AFAIK lightmass was available once it was developed and added to epics toolset. I imagine the huge disparity you usually see is due to the fact that Epic knows their engine better than anyone else and any features they add to the engine, they can design and optimize specifically for their upcoming game.

Switching from the old lighting system to Lightmass can certainly muck-up things. It'll take time for the artists. (I certainly wouldn't expect 2009-2010 titles to suddenly use it.)
 
Switching from the old lighting system to Lightmass can certainly muck-up things. It'll take time for the artists. (I certainly wouldn't expect 2009-2010 titles to suddenly use it.)

Yeah I understand, I was just trying to make a point that it's silly to think Epic holds out on tech/updates to their engine until their next major release is out.
 
Yeah I understand, I was just trying to make a point that it's silly to think Epic holds out on tech/updates to their engine until their next major release is out.


Indeed, especially considering:

The Unreal Developer Network (UDN) is a repository of knowledge, documentation and tutorials for the recent builds of the Unreal Engine, providing sections for public news, licensee news, and tutorials and guides for content creation and programming. UDN also includes a search engine covering the complete archives of our content and programming mailing lists which have thousands of entries on thousands of topics. The full slate of UDN content and functionality is only available to Unreal Engine licensees. However, a subset of the documentation and tutorials relevant to mod makers has been made available to the general public. You can visit UDN and see the public documentation by clicking here.
...or even the existence of UDK.
 
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