Unreal Engine 3.0 demo wows GDC

It's around a year old now:

http://www2.ati.com/developer/gdc/D3DTutorial10_Half-Life2_Shading.pdf

Jawed

 

You guys actually believe Source can hold a candle to the CryEngine? Seriously, that's the biggest load of crap I've ever heard.

Going to go with hovz on this one.

 

Once you've seen UE3 in person, you realize both look like crap.

 

the source engine supports vertex lighting. theres no mention of any per pixel lighting in any documentation of the engine, but vertex lighting is mentioned many times.

and cry engine supports real time shadowing that reacts to light sources. again are we talking about the games or the engine. if we are going by the games then half life 2 gets completely blown out of the water.

 

Having a bazzilion features specced and somewhat supported doesn`t necessarily equate to looking good, IMO.It only serves if you want to have dudes on message boards posting-"OMG OMG, THE BUUGA ENGINE IZ DA BEST, OMG OMG".

Integrating the above into this particular discussion, one must wonder-after seeing UE3 shots, or even live action form it, how the freaking shnitzel can someone come up and compare what we`ve seen from it and what both source and cryengine have shown?Please enlighten me.

 

I've seen it live action, in motion, controllable via mouse. It definitively looks better than Source and CryEngine games to date.

 

demo coder its an engine with a 2 to 3 year time leap, of course it should look much better.

 

The Source engine could (relatively) easily be adapted to support per pixel lighting, shadow buffers ect. due to it's modular structure and shader system.

But what really matters IMO is it's programmer interface, toolset, AI framework (which is integrated with the scripting), GUI, lip sync and physics integration. To me they seem far more important to createing a great game than graphical spangles that Valve will probably give you in an update to the game engine anyway.

It's not as good as haveing an engine built from the ground up to support those graphical spangles and the other things I mentioned (I.E UE3), but it's better than haveing an engine that only supports the graphical spangles and not much else I.E Doom 3 engine.

Coming from the person who accused the Source engine of being Quake 2 tech with some bells and whistels thats pretty rich. I mean for a start Q2 was programmed in C whereas Source was programmed in C++, considering the fact Valve used C++'s OO features there's a pretty big fucking jump in engine design tech right there.

Claiming one engine is better than another because it has per pixel lighting seems to be missing the point a little when people have added per pixel lighting to Quake 2. I'd say UE3's scripting system and material builder/shader system are more important than the graphical features they make more accessible.

In many ways Source has much more in common with UE3 than it does Quake 2, infact Source has more in common with UE3 than it does UE2. Just take a closer look at the engine's subsystems and developement tools. There's much more to it than vertex lighting and pre-computed shadow maps.

P.s Before you start flameing me for the Doom 3 comment I was being slightly exaggerative. Emphasis on the word slightly.

 

Slight exageration? Have you actually done any work in the Doom 3 engine? As it happens, Doom 3 has a modular design as well...in fact, modders can even modify or replace the physics engine just with the SDK (as well as several other systems), not that the physics is shabby as it is (it can easily hold its own against Havok...though the game Doom 3 didn't really do much to show that). Or how about the powerful scripting? The scripting engine is powerful enough that people can (and have) made gravity gun mods, various enemy grabbing objects/enemies and throwing them, ect. with just scripting. Or how about being able to make spline paths for animating right in the level editor?

Sorry, it just ticks me off the way people think Doom 3 is a graphics only engine...id Software engines wouldn't be as popular as they are if they were just about the graphics.

 

Nothing yet on the market can be considered close to UE3 in terms of the tools it brings and the results it displays on screen.The next incarnations of current gen engines will probably be in the same league, but current ones aren`t, IMO, which is quite normal considering that UE3 is not really that close to release.

 

well john Carmack said it was quake code in halflife 2

http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/johnc/Recent Updates

under the quake 3 section I'm interested in seeing what ID comes up with next since there making a new engine as well

 

Source could easily be updated to achieve the same level set of features as UE3. Source was created 3 years ago so of course it's a little behind by todays standards, but it also has a system in place that allows for easy upgradability.

 

Sure it can...NOT

 

I don't see why not. Just look at the modifications developers have made to other engines, such as Unreal Engine 2.0 (Deus Ex 2, Lineage 2) or Quake 3 (eh. . . pick a game). Heck even the almighty CryEngine was originally released as a SM2.0 engine.

 

I think there are deeper underlying reasons for his stubborn attitude.

 

Well, to be fair, sometimes it is easier to go through a rewrite than to keep patching the same codebase. Some of Source could be kept, but I suspect that fundamentally, most would have to be rewritten to compete with UE3, due to a fundamental difference in the I/O layers (stream based loading, rich object oriented scripting engine with good network support) and the data-structures supported, and shadow types available suggest that large chunks of Source's rendering engine would need a rewrite.

I just don't see Valve as the company to do it. They're too slow, they are not focused on supporting developers and selling a game engine per se, vs selling a game. Valve is more focused on the art, Epic seems more focused on technology, with the initial games, like iD, merely being demos of the engine.

 

I understand what you're saying, but I'm not sure I agree with you 100% about Epic. Yes, they do show off they're technology, but the first games based upon the UE2 were U2 and UT2003/4. U2 was...awful. But UT2004? One of the greatest multiplayer games ever made. It's just an awesome bonus to have it be as beautifully capable in terms of imagery as it is.

I dunno...it just seems like Epic has both the technology AND the game experience in mind. Not just the tech as I've come to believe id was going for...

 

Quick question, since this thread seems to be dedicated to discussing the various engines available.Why does nobody mention the Starbreeze engine used in Riddick?It seems to produce good results.Does anybody have experience in working with it?

 

it's a good engine but it missing a lot that you would get with doom3 or crytec and I dont like how the shadows cast from inside the characters skin sometime. starbreeze is working on a next gen engine now but I don't even know if they were licensing it out

I'll admit that the game wasn't as good as it could have been but I dont think it was a tech demo I've seen modders do better things with the engine than id did with outdoor areas, glass, and water thats just as good as halflife 2

 

Most likely it a 6600GT will be obsolete, by then, I should guess... But then I would think a game engine slated for use in a game sometime next year or the year after ('06-'07) would be too advanced to run on a 6600GT in anything but the engine's low-end settings. Or is it a mistake to think about the U3 engine like that?