Questions for Epic?

[Dave Baumann]

I'll be sitting down to have a chat with Tim Sweeney and Mark Rein in a couple of hours - anyone have anything they want to know?

 

[digitalwanderer]

What are their fourth of July plans?

 

[LeStoffer]

Well, here's a quote from Tim Sweeney from the UnrealEngine3 interview:

PS 3.0 utilizes a wide range of optimizations, from 64-bit frame-buffer blending to looping and dynamic conditionals for rendering multiple light interactions in a single pass without requiring a combinatorical explosion of precompiled shaders.

We have seen this argument from developers before. So the question is whether PS 3.0 is mainly about making life (much) easier for developers or whether it also brings some new and much needed possibilities to their shader toolset.

(Edit: Changed from SM 3.0 to PS 3.0. VS 3.0 have some great new features, so no need to go there IHMO).

 

[Druga Runda]

What was their reaction on the Unreal engine security exploit? Were they suprised, who let them know, and were there any complaints/problems with the on-line community with regards to it.

 

[thop]

Do they really like nV so much or is that their wallet talking? Sorry :?

 

[ERK]

What would you like to see more from future generation GPUs: 1) more performance or 2) more features?

 

[Dr. Ffreeze]

Dave,

I would like to know if engines that are written today, like Unreal Warfare Engine, are written to take full advantage of very large amounts of system memory. If a system had 4 GB to 8 GB of ram, would the Unreal Engine use as much memory as it possible could? Back in the Win98 days many programs gained no benifit from greater than 512 MB. With x86-64 and correct OS support, will new engines be able to gain any benifit from huge 4 GB to 8 GB or ram?

Thankx,
Dr. Ffreeze

 

[AlNom]

Will there be a UE3.X similar in concept to UE2.X (considering that next generation console hardware is still quite different from mass market PC hardware)?

Will opengl continue to be supported?

 

[jb]

Will they have another mod summit like they did for UT2k3? Hey I want to ride in Tim's car again as the one in his Ferrari was just too dam fast the last time

But on a more serious note: Do they expect any major changes to the Uscripting enviroment and/or more support for mods, even though their current mod support is great? (yes I know not a 3d question feel free to trash it).


I would imagine there will be an OpenGL version to handle the Linux and Mac users. If so any major differences between the OpenGL and D3D versions (for example current OpenGL can not do scripted textures so those cool thing like player names on the Hellbinder's Licesne plate don't show up for Max/Linux users)?

 

[Cat]

Will asynchronous PCI-E reads be expected for better/decent performance in UE3? What specific things will benefit from this ability to read-back from the GPU? I've always assumed that occlusion queries, frame-buffer reads, and render-to-texture would be greatly improved, but I don't have any facts to base this on.

 

[Nite_Hawk]

With all the advances in DX9 that have been made, is it becoming more difficult to design engines that can be ported to other operating systems? Will there be opengl 2.0 versions of future engines?

Nite_Hawk

 

[tEd]

Plans for a non-unreal game?

 

[Ostsol]

Heheh. . . Where's hovz? This is his chance!

Anyway, I'd like to know what the IDE is going to be like for creating shaders. Will a mod-developer have to be a shader programmer? Or will there be some high-level tools available to make the job easier? (Or has this already been answered? )

 

[PangCake]

Some questions about multithreading:
Will the UnrealEngine3 be multithreaded?
What are the problems with a multithreaded engine?
Why aren't engines already multuthreaded?
How big of an impact does the OS have on a multithreaded approach?

The obvious advantages are full support of multi CPU systems and multi-core CPU:s, which we will certainly see in the lifetime of the UnrealEngine3.

 

[pocketmoon66]

Following on from the NV dev conference:

1) Did Nvidia get them a 6800 SLI

2) Unreal Engine 3 uses every shadow method in the book but have they concidered perspective shadow maps ?

 

[HAL-10K]

Any special support for dynamic loading game scenes planned like it is needed for MMPG's?

 

[surfhurleydude]

I'm interested to know if Unreal Tournament 2005 will continue to use the aging technology used in Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004 or if they will make a graphics overhaul for next season.

 

[Richard]

Hopefully Tim will not reply with "Will keep it secret until first game using UE3 ships"; I was a tad disappointed with the previous interview. Anyway, my question would be, in UE3 are the shadows limited to geometry or can textures with alpha cast correct shadows as well without using texture projection.

 

[Bad_Boy]

i was wondering if it would be possible to visit epic like those guys that visit valve lol. i live in greensboro and thats not too far from raliegh. ah well had to ask 8)

 

[KimB]

Here's my question:

It seems easy to dream up situations where PS 3.0 would be absurdly faster than PS 2.0. Have you yet come across any such situations when considering shaders you may want to write for a real game? If so, what sort of shader would you be writing?

In a related vein:
Do you expect to have a significant jump in game visual quality when a game assumes that all hardware running that game will support PS 3.0 vs. PS 2.0? More significant than just the fillrate differences?