Unreal Engine 3.0 demo wows GDC

[Farid]

Oh come on man! These are horribly crappy shaky-cam shots of a demo played on a crappy projector, in an over-lit room with the camera's white balance obviously set incorrectly. People who saw the demo in our suite got to see it on both a properly-adjusted projector and on 12 CRT monitors assembled throughout the room. There was nothing wrong with the color of our demos, in fact we got lots of compliments on how great they looked.

Which bring us back to this:

We need live feed videos of the fourth footage, actually we need live feed footages of all the videos.
Blurry and shaky handheld camera videos hide, too much often, the little details.

Just a little video, Mark, even @640x480.

 

[Matt B]

Also I'd argue that using a limited colour pallette in a game is definitely a good idea artistically speaking! Would you complain that the matrix or fight club is too green?

IMO too many games these days are technicolour monstrosities

edit: Just thought I'd say a hearty congratulations to mark and all the guys from epic, your content creation guys are seriously good.

 

[sunscar]

I wasn't there to see it, but the color is in fact an filming environment issue, not something native to the presentation. The actual imagery has much more blue to it. Feels far less alien and far less like quake, in that light.

Mark, Epic have done a beautiful job with this, congratulations to yourself and they crew. Can't wait for May.

Good luck

Later

Iridius Dio

 

[Varg Vikernes]

The demo Tim gave during his public speech was running on a standard GeForce 6800 Ultra. The demos we gave behind closed doors, which included more than what was shown in public, were run on dual 512Mb GeForce 6800 Ultras using SLI. We chose to run at 1280x1024 because (a) that's the native resolution of the projector we rented and the tools demos always look way (because the fonts are crisper) when run at the projector's native resolution and (b) because SLI is friggin fast we could get excellent frame rates at high resolutions even through we've done very little optmization work.

Even with this early UNOPTIMIZED version of the engine we do these same demos on a Shuttle PC we carry around when we visit prospective licensees and they run just fine on a single 6800GT with an Athlon 64 3400 at 1024x768. A 6600GT could run these just as well at 800x600. A 6600 GT card will be pretty cheap by the time we ship a game with this tech.

I don't know, I see a lof of chopping and skipping in last year's E3 demo which (as you say) was running 6800U (and if my memory serves right you use 2k x 2k normal maps?) so how are we supposed to believe this can run smoothly on a 6600. Unless last year's choppiness can be applied to the engine not beeing optimized back then. And i remember some of you guys saying in an interview (@Eurogamer I think) that it brings a R9800pro to its knees at 640x480. Marketing FUD or just more consequences of the "un-optimization"?


edit: Oh, yeah nice demo btw

 

[hovz]

lets hope it doesnt suck as much as th eunreal engine 2

 

[pakotlar]

lets hope it doesnt suck as much as th eunreal engine 2

how did unreal engine 2 "suck"?

 

[hovz]

netcode, collision detection, consistency

 

[Thowllly]

Would you complain that the matrix ... is too green?

yes

 

[silence]

IMO too many games these days are technicolour monstrosities

yap, every fucking place they could make shiny they did...."look, we can write shaders!!!!! arent you impressed?"....."FUCKING NO!!!! it looks moronic!"

 

[XxStratoMasterXx]

I'm not terribly impressed with the rendering technology. FarCry supports pretty much all rendering features Unreal Engine 3 has, and it's out today. Well, perhaps not as many samples on the character shadowbuffers.

I can't wait to see Id's entry into the next generation and CryTek's entry...

The artwork and tools however, are pretty damn nice, and that's really the key. Give the artists good tools to work with.

IMO too many games these days are technicolour monstrosities

yap, every fucking place they could make shiny they did...."look, we can write shaders!!!!! arent you impressed?"....."FUCKING NO!!!! it looks moronic!"

Heh, shiny is good on some things, for example, I spent a bit of time writing a "metallic" shader for Doom 3, and I assigned it to some of the weapons and it just made it look so much more realistic but for a global thing, it probably would just ruin the look.

That's how game developers should use shaders, tastefully and not overdoing it.

 

[silence]

lets wait for Croteam and Serious Sam 2 8)

 

[XxStratoMasterXx]

lets wait for Croteam and Serious Sam 2 8)

I doubt Serious Sam will match the Triple-A engines such as Doom and CryEngine, but it does look very nice.

 

[silence]

That's how game developers should use shaders, tastefully and not overdoing it.

my worst part of Far Cry was that old "rusty" carrier....it was fucking shining all over the place...what for?....its supposed to be in the water for 40 years, not like they had crew with polishers on daily basis there....

 

[Blazkowicz]

That's how game developers should use shaders, tastefully and not overdoing it.

my worst part of Far Cry was that old "rusty" carrier....it was fucking shining all over the place...what for?....its supposed to be in the water for 40 years, not like they had crew with polishers on daily basis there....

then what were these dozens of mercenaries doing there?

 

[Blazkowicz]

I wasn't really serious about colors.
BTW Epic Pinball is great

lets hope it doesnt suck as much as th eunreal engine 2

UT2003 is the most beautiful thing that ran on my Voodoo5, and it ran well. Sure, it's not doom3 or far cry, but it's nice for ppl who have/had DX7 or powerful DX6 card

 

[Simon F]

Water should have no colour at all,

Drifting OT, but water is actually faintly blue. You just need a lot of it to appreciate that fact.

 

[jvd]

So simon whats the chance of playing an unreal 3 engine game on a video lodgic / power vr 3d graphics board

Sorry had to ask .

 

[_xxx_]

Even with this early UNOPTIMIZED version of the engine we do these same demos on a Shuttle PC we carry around when we visit prospective licensees and they run just fine on a single 6800GT with an Athlon 64 3400 at 1024x768. A 6600GT could run these just as well at 800x600. A 6600 GT card will be pretty cheap by the time we ship a game with this tech.

The engine seems to come along nicely, just please make sure you don't repeat the failure you did with Unreal2 & Legend. If you do another Unreal game, do it in house and make a TRUE sequel to Unreal. Forget outsourcing.

 

[Blazkowicz]

So simon whats the chance of playing an unreal 3 engine game on a video lodgic / power vr 3d graphics board

Sorry had to ask .

I was disappointed not seeing a glide renderer in UE2

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

The engine seems to come along nicely, just please make sure you don't repeat the failure you did with Unreal2 & Legend. If you do another Unreal game, do it in house and make a TRUE sequel to Unreal. Forget outsourcing.

Their most successful games have had an awful lot of input from Digital Extremes. And UT2K4's Onslaught gametype originally came from another company/developer.