Unreal Engine 3.0 demo wows GDC

Umm

Steam is a content delivery system, not an engine. There's a big difference.

 

Yeah, that roll is appropriate considering there's already a Source-licensed game on the market, while there are (AFAIK) no D3 or FC licensees on the shelves.

Wait, where's the sarcasm avatar?

 

He said "Source".

Not that I know whether it's for licensing or not...

 

Well Source is, quite frankly, very outdated. It's about Quake level technology with a few bells and whistles.

Doom 3 and moreso FarCry are big leaps in terms of rendering over what we had previously.

 

He said "Source, steam/valve."

Yes Source is available for licensing, what do you think Vampire the Mascurade is using?

Source is very outdated now? Yet Crytek isn't? You are aware Far Cry was released before HL2 right? You are aware that HL2 didn't apply reflective coating on everything for the sake of showing off the effects like Far Cry right? You are aware that Source is capable of everything Far Cry is and more right?

Oh wait, I guess you don't.

 

what is source capable of that cryengine isnt? cuz i can think of a few things cry engine is capable of that source isnt.

 

Hmm. . . Let's see. There's instancing and I've heard people mention that the dynamic shadows in HL2 are a kinda buggy. That's it, AFAIK. . .

 

Instancing, like geometry instancing?

r_geominstancing=1 in FarCry's console turns it on, in fact it's on by default on any card that supports it on the 1.3 patch. Dynamic shadows are quite available in FarCry too.

 

i wasnt aware source supported instancing.

 

Hmm. . . A little wording issue. I was talking about what Source was currently lacking in comparison to FarCry.

 

oh, my mistake, ur forgetting a lot of other things tho

 

By all means, make a list.

I guess SM3.0 support would be one, though with instancing that was patched in some time post-release.

 

were talking about engine and not game right?

HDR lighting(not bloom)
realtime shadowing support
per pixel lighting
3.0 shaders

while not really an engine feature, id like to see how source handles the extreme polycounts you sometiems see in cryengine.

 

Source currently lacks Geometry instancing because HL2 has very little need for it. It could be easily added though, which I'm sure they will do eventually just like they did with Far Cry. Currently Valve is in the process of implementing a patch to add fully dynamic HDR lighting, rather then the current static form.

As for the rest of it's abilities.

Code:

Renderer
- Version 2.0 (and below) shaders, bump mapping, LOD on models and world
- Author shaders with HLSL
- Cube and environment mapping
- Dynamic lights, vertex lighting and light maps, many light types including flickering, pulsing etc.
- High-Dynamic Range lighting
- Water with refraction and fresnel effects
- Advanced particle system that can emit sprites or models
- Projected shadows allow for a large number of characters per scene
- Occluder entities for visibility blocking
- Indoor/Outdoor environments
     . Deformable terrain
     . 3D skyboxes extend the horizon and add parallax on distant objects
     . Dynamically rendered organics (grass, trees etc)
- Subdivision surfaces, diffuse & specular bump maps
- Real-time radiosity lighting
- Effects include but are not limited to: particles, beams, volumetric smoke, sparks, blood, environmental effects like fog and rain

Programming

- All code written in C/C++ using Visual Studio 6.0.  Easily and quickly derive new entities from existing base classes.
- Internal context sensitive performance monitoring system
- Graphics performance measurement tools built into the engine
- Modular code design (via DLL’s) allows swapping out of core components for easy upgrading or code replacement
- Dx9 shaders all written in HLSL

 

and which of those doesnt cryengine support?

what is this national ignorance day?

i dont care what they add in the future, the point is source DOES NOT SUPPORT GI. its aging technology with semi high res textures. the ones in unreal 2k4 still look much better. actually the more visually pleasing ut2k4 maps look better than anything in half life 2.

 

HDR lighting(not bloom) -- Reported as coming in a patch.

realtime shadowing support -- Reported as a bit glitchy in HL2, but it's apparently there.

per pixel lighting -- Has it. There may be alot of static lightmaps, but that's all that's needed for static lighting on static surfaces. Dynamic lights are all handled in realtime on a per-pixel basis.

3.0 shaders -- True, doesn't have it.

Given that it's a modern engine and doesn't have to worry about the same things as Doom 3, I expect that it handles it quite well. Even Unreal Engine 2.0 should have no problem with extreme polygon counts.

Anyway, here's some things that come to mind that Source supports that CryEngine doesn't:

Radiosity lightmaps
Ambienty lighting based on radiosity data
Cube-map specular

 

when i meant realtime, i meant affected by light. not just a movign shadow that remains the same regardless of light sources.

oh and source uses vertex lightign according to its released specs, not per pixel.

yea they announced hdr, but lots of games claim hdr and its rl yjust bloom. i will eat my physics book if source ever supports real hdr in the next 2 years.

who need lightmaps when u can do per pixel lighting. besides "radiosity" lightmaps dont look any better than the light maps in ut2k4.

im almost positive cryengine supports cube map specular.

oh its funny that valve claims source supports 'realtime radiosity'.

 

Weren't you the one who was whining about how flat a wall looked in one section of the game?

Oh it doesn't currently support GI, big deal. Far Cry didn't support it either until the 1.3 patch. HL2 also runs much faster then Far Cry, with much more detailed and high res textures to boot.

And your basis for this is....what, exactly.

Source currently supports both bloom and a limited form of HDR. I guess you better be prepared to eat your physics book in the next month when they release the patch.

 

Hmm. . . Looks like it based on a single directional light. Odd. . .

The lights are accumulated in the vertex shader for dynamic objects, but normal-mapping isn't exactly possible in pure vertex-lighting. As such, there is per-pixel lighting for both static and dynamic objects -- certainly where dynamic lights are involved.

Bloom can be done with HDR. HDR isn't a requirement, of course, but bloom is probably the most common effect.

Per-pixel lighting for static lights on static objects is a hideous waste of clock-cycles. Why bother when you can accumulate any amount of lights into a single texture and also account for indirect lighting? It takes a grand total of two instructions to apply a lightmap and at least half a dozen for each dynamic light.

I'm sure that it probably can, though I wonder just how much work it takes to implement, with the current engine. At least with Source there are existing mechanisms built into the editor and shader generators.

Well. . . sorta, though not quite. The raw radiosity data is surely not generated in realtime, but that pre-generated data is processed in real-time for ambient lighting on dynamic objects.

 

First post!

Looking at the recent ATI presentation on PRT, it seems HL2 is doing a basic form of this (limited 'resolution', only six samples used)

But Source doesn't appear to support per-pixel lighting, so shadow maps are the only option.