sebbbi,
After seeing Epic's Unreal Engine 4 demo I thought of you. They are moving in a direction RedLynx's engines have accomplished in shipping products for years: Engines with dynamic effects that can be adjusted in real time and robust tools that allow fast game design as well as instantaneous iterative game play tweaking. Kudos for being an industry trail blazer!
The obvious caveat is graphics: Unreal Engine 4 is on high end PC hardware which affords it the luxury of a host of advanced rendering techniques while the Trials engine is on the Xbox 360. To think what RL would have done with that PC setup
My first question is: Was there anything shown in UE4 that surprised you, good or bad? e.g. What did you think of their use of voxel cone tracing in sparse voxel octrees for GI? I didn't read anything about virtualized geometry (like Lionhead were promoting) or virtual texturing (although the scene of the mountains probably was a hint at that?)
Thinking forward, about 3-4 years to your next engine update on a next-gen console(s), what types of changes do you envision for your renderer and engine? How dependent are these advancement dependent on the hardware released? Is getting 2GB, 4GB, or 8GB of system memory going to have a big impact/deal breaker? (e.g. I hear the voxel tech Epic showed is very RAM intensive). How about the difference between a 1TFLOPs and 2TFLOPs GPU when making a 720p game at 60Hz? Are there techniques you would really like to use that the difference in memory or GPU performance is a "deal breaker" for certain techniques.
For sake of our discussion lets assume your engine is streamlined *but not limited to* a downloadable title but could, of course, be distributed on a Blu Ray disk. The target system would have about 1.8TFLOPs of GPU performance, 4 x86 cores with standard x86 SIMD units, 8GBs of RAM, and a HDD standard.
What highlights would your engine have on this?
What improvements to your current engine would you have? I can think of some of the more obvious low hanging fruit:
* Some of the grass clumps are flat sprites; also when your shadow overlaps any of the blades in the clump the entire clump gets shadowed. A next gen engine would probably have geometry based grass that casts/receives shadows.
* Objects behind particles are very pixelated (e.g. if you have smoke around a tire the tire looks very blocky). A next gen engine would either have a better filter for cut down buffers or you wouldn't need this hack to begin with.
* The edges of Shadow Silouttes are light when they overlap another shadow. This is simply a performance issue on the 360 as PC games aiming for 30Hz have solved this for years.
* Returning to the start of the map results in texture loading delays. I would think a platform with more memory could allow for the game to keep some textures in cache at certain check points to totally avoid this issue.
Other low hanging eyesores that stick out to you that you would like to address that would make a difference?
But bigger picture what direction would you see yourself going in terms of technology? You guys seems pretty forward thinking.
Finally, (a) would having a GPU drop from 2TFLOPs down to 1TFLOPs be a big drop in your opinion? Is it a deal breaker for some important techniques you, as a developer, would really like to implement?
And (b) on identical systems, lest one has 2GB memory and another 8GB of memory, would the disparity between a 2GB and 8GB system be a big enough difference that certain techniques that are a worthy investment on the 8GB just not be plausible? Do you see good work around for this or that the different would just require avoiding research and development in that area?
After seeing Epic's Unreal Engine 4 demo I thought of you. They are moving in a direction RedLynx's engines have accomplished in shipping products for years: Engines with dynamic effects that can be adjusted in real time and robust tools that allow fast game design as well as instantaneous iterative game play tweaking. Kudos for being an industry trail blazer!
The obvious caveat is graphics: Unreal Engine 4 is on high end PC hardware which affords it the luxury of a host of advanced rendering techniques while the Trials engine is on the Xbox 360. To think what RL would have done with that PC setup
My first question is: Was there anything shown in UE4 that surprised you, good or bad? e.g. What did you think of their use of voxel cone tracing in sparse voxel octrees for GI? I didn't read anything about virtualized geometry (like Lionhead were promoting) or virtual texturing (although the scene of the mountains probably was a hint at that?)
Thinking forward, about 3-4 years to your next engine update on a next-gen console(s), what types of changes do you envision for your renderer and engine? How dependent are these advancement dependent on the hardware released? Is getting 2GB, 4GB, or 8GB of system memory going to have a big impact/deal breaker? (e.g. I hear the voxel tech Epic showed is very RAM intensive). How about the difference between a 1TFLOPs and 2TFLOPs GPU when making a 720p game at 60Hz? Are there techniques you would really like to use that the difference in memory or GPU performance is a "deal breaker" for certain techniques.
For sake of our discussion lets assume your engine is streamlined *but not limited to* a downloadable title but could, of course, be distributed on a Blu Ray disk. The target system would have about 1.8TFLOPs of GPU performance, 4 x86 cores with standard x86 SIMD units, 8GBs of RAM, and a HDD standard.
What highlights would your engine have on this?
What improvements to your current engine would you have? I can think of some of the more obvious low hanging fruit:
* Some of the grass clumps are flat sprites; also when your shadow overlaps any of the blades in the clump the entire clump gets shadowed. A next gen engine would probably have geometry based grass that casts/receives shadows.
* Objects behind particles are very pixelated (e.g. if you have smoke around a tire the tire looks very blocky). A next gen engine would either have a better filter for cut down buffers or you wouldn't need this hack to begin with.
* The edges of Shadow Silouttes are light when they overlap another shadow. This is simply a performance issue on the 360 as PC games aiming for 30Hz have solved this for years.
* Returning to the start of the map results in texture loading delays. I would think a platform with more memory could allow for the game to keep some textures in cache at certain check points to totally avoid this issue.
Other low hanging eyesores that stick out to you that you would like to address that would make a difference?
But bigger picture what direction would you see yourself going in terms of technology? You guys seems pretty forward thinking.
Finally, (a) would having a GPU drop from 2TFLOPs down to 1TFLOPs be a big drop in your opinion? Is it a deal breaker for some important techniques you, as a developer, would really like to implement?
And (b) on identical systems, lest one has 2GB memory and another 8GB of memory, would the disparity between a 2GB and 8GB system be a big enough difference that certain techniques that are a worthy investment on the 8GB just not be plausible? Do you see good work around for this or that the different would just require avoiding research and development in that area?
