Reality Engine Interview

[tEd]

Computer Games - Why did the company want to create their own game graphics engine?

Tim Johnson - I had initially been developing this game engine as a hobby, with the assumption that eventually there would be a better solution available we could move to for our full game. With all the big companies out there working on games, there had to be, I thought. However, when it came time for us to look at engine solutions we found the choices to be extremely poor. The free engines available were dated and poorly constructed, while commercial engines such as Unreal not only cost a fortune, but still lacked many of the new advancements that had recently emerged in the technology. The choice to pursue our own technology was an obvious and perhaps naïve one at the time, due to the work involved, but it paid off.

http://www.cgonline.com/content/view/646/2/

btw derek smart will use it

 

[digitalwanderer]

Not too shabby looking.

 

[carpediem]

Some nice looking screenshots on their homepage too...

http://www.artificialstudios.com/media.php

 

[pegisys]

Another killer feature we have is network level editing, where you can build a scene over the Internet in the level editor, where other people are also connected to the server, creating different parts of the level, or even running around playing it while you’re working on it! This is really going to revolutionize level production. We’ll be releasing this feature to our official licensees in the upcoming months.

that sounds so cool I hope the engine is mod friendly and they release some of these tools to the public, and it's nice to see someone use hdr to the fullest and not just a bloom effect

 

[_xxx_]

btw derek smart will use it

Yeah, he uses them all!!!

 

[noko]

WOW! This stuff looks amazing. Seems like game engines are progressing faster then other type of 3d programs.

 

[ndoogoo]

Nice, it is just a shame that plastic look is still with us.

 

[Skinner]

It looked (very) good until bloom/blur infected this promissing (gfx)engine too...

Plastic "statue's" and bloom are the plaque we have to get rid off.

 

[suryad]

I dont mind the plastic look frankly. I think HL2 did not have much of a plastic look to it (if I am understandng what is meant by plastic look) and it looked rather dry to me. It looked visually quite real...what we would kind of see if we looked out the window...but in a game I dont think that would be appealing. A little bit of outrageousness is required aka Far Cry. It did not look real to me, it just looked great!!! Real != Great is what I am trying to say.

 

[MuFu]

http://www.cgonline.com/content/view/646/2/

btw derek smart will use it

Hope it has W-buffer support!

Wow, those guys have been really busy.

 

[tEd]

http://www.cgonline.com/content/view/646/2/

btw derek smart will use it

Hope it has W-buffer support!

Wow, those guys have been really busy.

http://www.cgonline.com/content/view/647/2/

he didn't mentioned

 

[DjordySeelmann]

He does:

We've recently licensed one of the most amazing and all encompassing graphics engine you've probably never heard of, to power it. (Editor's note: The engine Mr. Smart refers to is the Reality Engine; for more info, check out Computer Games Magazine's new interview) This is the only middleware graphics engine thus far that doesn't cater to games of any specific genre and was thus selected to lead our graphics march into the future. The end results will blow everyone's mind. Guaranteed.

And overuse of bloom and specularity doesn't come with the engine; it is caused by the one setting the shaders up. The plastic look can easily be resolved by giving the shader a lower spec power; skybloom and such can be scaled down as well, but it will look less interesting.

 

[Reverend]

Pick up my jaw!

 

[RejZoR]

Until you see ANY todays engine in real-time you cannot comment anything.
Doom 3 looks like crap on images (square heads/monster fingers and so on) while you simply can't notice such things in real-time or while playing.
Same with CryENGINE and Source Engine. Heck,even old Chrome's engine looks damn nice in motion with all eye candies (looks very bad on still images)

 

[suryad]

The Splinter Cell 3 game looks just as impressive from first glance...thanks for the screenshot Rev. Considering it is the old Unreal Engine I think the devs did a damn good job on the game.

 

[Hellbinder]

btw derek smart will use it

Yeah, he uses them all!!!

I am still trying to figure out what you are talking about...


He uses all his own Engines and has until now. Until recently no one else was making an engine that was capable of having such large spaces with such large scale with so many gazillions of objects all moving and being controlled by various Ai's in real time. Lets not forget space to planet transitions where the actions on the planets and the stations and the fleets are all being tracked in realtime so that if you traveled all around at once you would see everyones individual scinarios playing out simultatiously and all acting on each other.

Personally w-Buffer or not. I cant wait to see the BCNG game. With ship internals and the like. I like the escapism that Universal Combat offers. Its pretty cool imo.

 

[Hellbinder]

The Splinter Cell 3 game looks just as impressive from first glance...thanks for the screenshot Rev. Considering it is the old Unreal Engine I think the devs did a damn good job on the game.

I thought they used the Serious engine...

 

[vrecan]

Looks and sounds very impressive, but it would be nice to hear from some developers that have actually used it to get a real grasp of how good a tool it really is.

 

[tEd]

Another game using reality engine Metronome

some pics:
http://www.artificialstudios.com/media.php
http://www.tarsier.se/metronome

5 games using reality engine already is not bad for a start.

 

[_xxx_]

Mr. D.S. comes up with a new super-duper idea every couple of months and he than licenses some engine and we never see a game coming out of that. Just a year or two ago he licensed Serious Sam engine and posted a bunch of pics of some landscape...