Why was UE3's early deferred shading so bad?

[inlimbo]

Besides the obvious answer of "it was some of the first of its kind." We like to blame the early UE3 "look" on devs building on the engine's stock settings, but that early and frankly awful lighting was clearly a limitation of the renderer out of the box, so unless you wanted to rewrite said renderer you were kinda stuck with something of that look until later iterations. Working within that renderer didn't leave you a ton of options.

So why was it so awful? Did a tools focus and performance on consoles demand that kind of shading early on until the engine could be better optimized down the line or what? It still kinda baffles me that UE3 didn't offer something of UE2.5's lighting systems as option out of the box, considering how much better lit UE2 games were next to UE3 early on, unless I'm totally wrong about that.

edit: I'm in the minority in that Gears didn't blow me away graphically at launch. Some of the early pc demos with much better lighting did, but the game at launch was impressive in select details but also incredibly ugly in other ways. And not just aesthetically

 

[Lurkmass]

https://docs.unrealengine.com/udk/T...Rendering/MartinM_GDC11_DX11_presentation.pdf

Unreal Engine 3 primarily used a forward renderer. The "Samaritan" demo may have been Epic Game's first showcase of integrating deferred rendering on Unreal Engine 3 ...

Also, early implementations of deferred rendering didn't have any advanced features like physically based rendering, complex materials, or screen space reflections to demonstrate it's compelling performance advantages ...

 

[milk]

Yeah, UE3 had "deferred shadows" and decals, which applied their per-object projected shadows and decals(?) as a post process effect, but the actual lighting was done forward.
It was a bizarre mess of different disjointed approaches to everything. It boggles me that it was as popular as it was.

 

[Davros]

I hated the beige coloured light that a lot of UE3 games seemed to be bathed in

 

[swaaye]

I remember UE3 wasn't compatible with D3D9 MSAA and they claimed a D3D10 renderer would come and restore that but I don't remember that really happening. MLAA and FXAA came in and were pretty awful in motion compared to MSAA. Thus began the era of ATI and NVidia drivers hacking in MSAA/SSAA per game.

I think Dead Space and STALKER had more sophisticated fully deferred renderers? STALKER Clear Sky implemented MSAA + alpha test AA with D3D10/10.1 (with help from ATI from what I remember).

 

[DavidGraham]

they claimed a D3D10 renderer would come and restore that but I don't remember that really happening

Gears 1 on PC had DX10 and MSAA.

considering how much better lit UE2 games were next to UE3 early on

Can you give some examples of better looking UE2.5 games?

 

[Pinstripe]

Can you give some examples of better looking UE2.5 games?

Bioshock.

 

[swaaye]

Gears 1 on PC had DX10 and MSAA.

I remember UE3 wasn't compatible with D3D9 MSAA and they claimed a D3D10 renderer would come and restore that but I don't remember that really happening. MLAA and FXAA came in and were pretty awful in motion compared to MSAA. Thus began the era of ATI and NVidia drivers hacking in MSAA/SSAA per game.

I think Dead Space and STALKER had more sophisticated fully deferred renderers? STALKER Clear Sky implemented MSAA + alpha test AA with D3D10/10.1 (with help from ATI from what I remember).

 

[digitalwanderer]

Sorry to interrupt, just wanted to mention I love threads like these because I feel like I learn a whole lot! Thanks all, it is appreciated and most entertaining for me to hear about things I wish I understood better. It makes me understate it just a bit more for every thread like this.

Thanks for the attention, please carry on.

 

[techuse]

I remember UE3 wasn't compatible with D3D9 MSAA and they claimed a D3D10 renderer would come and restore that but I don't remember that really happening. MLAA and FXAA came in and were pretty awful in motion compared to MSAA. Thus began the era of ATI and NVidia drivers hacking in MSAA/SSAA per game.

I think Dead Space and STALKER had more sophisticated fully deferred renderers? STALKER Clear Sky implemented MSAA + alpha test AA with D3D10/10.1 (with help from ATI from what I remember).

MSAA could have been done in D3D 9 it just would have required more work than Epic/game devs were willing to do.

 

[swaaye]

MSAA could have been done in D3D 9 it just would have required more work than Epic/game devs were willing to do.

Considering ATI and NV drivers were hacking it into these games, yep.

 

[digitalwanderer]

I remember that, I just didn't understand it then but wowzers I think I almost do now!

Terry Makedon once told me to give up on the idea of AA working on transparent textures with deferred rendering at one point around that time, I'd so hoped he was wrong.

 

[inlimbo]

Bioshock.

Yeah. And Chaos Theory, even if it was heavily custom. I'm not a big fan of them aesthetically but I think UT2003/2004 and Unreal Championship 2 had much a much better mix of lightmaps and realtime than many early UE3 titles.

I guess i was under the impression that lighting was deferred in early UE3 builds in some kind of hybrid of deferred shading and deferred decals but maybe that was just a side effect of devs sort of using those decals as a replacement for lighting? That it had forward lighting options makes the early state of UE3 aesthetics even more baffling

 

[inlimbo]

Mirror's Edge is obviously the best looking UE3 title of those first four years, with maybe Medal of Honor: Airborne coming in second, and if it could've delivered ME's baked global illumination or even something close to it out of the box that would've been a wonderfully brighter handful of years

 

[Davros]

ps: That beige light I mentioned was also known as the "Piss Filter"

 

[digitalwanderer]

ps: That beige light I mentioned was also known as the "Piss Filter"

Was that a technical name? Like was it an acronym like P.I.S.S.? Or just 'cause it looked like someone pissed on it?

 

[inlimbo]

It's not even the piss filter so much as just how the engine rendered light in the early days. Gears of War obviously pulled a lot of inspiration from Shadow of the Colossus' desaturation but I love the way SOTC looks, desaturated and all. And I love light bloom, a lot of people don't for some reason but I do, I like it in photography and I like it in games - but UE3's out of box bloom left a lot to be desired and played a big part in this ugliness, I think. I don't know. I'm being too hard on Gears. There are some cool sights in the first Gears, for sure. It's just the way it renders lighting and basic materials that really screws with my head.

 

[Davros]

@Digi - the latter

 

[Davros]

I believe Deadly Ninja deserves the credit for coining the phrase
a color filter over the camera so they can have that pretentious sepia tone-ish look. - thanks to swaaye for the explanation

https://imgur.com/p3FknXJ

 

[techuse]

UE3 also had a very distracting “optimization” where everything passed like 5 meters looked to be rendered at half the resolution. Uggghhh the memories. Probably my most disliked engine.