Unreal Engine 3.0 demo wows GDC

[DegustatoR]

The only game out their at the moment which supports HDR is far cry.

SC Chaos Theory Demo does it too.

HDR and bloom are two different things. You can have bloom but no HDR, you can have HDR but no bloom, you can have them both and you're surely can have none of them.

HL2 doesn't have HDR, only bloom effects. Far Cry was "hacked" to support HDR later which resulted in some very bad artwork-related bugs. The only game out there which supports HDR properly is SC Chaos Theory demo (full version will be released Apr 01 if i'm not mistaken).

HDR = High Dynamic Range and nothing more. When people are talking about HDR rendering they're in fact talking about tone mapping, blooms, light halos and other effects which are done with the help of HDR rendering. It should be noted that many of these effects can be done without HDR rendering, it's just that they won't be that nice looking or that easy to implement in the game.

 

[bloodbob]

Farcry developers kind of people did actually make the art assets but it was to big for downloading so they didn't distrubt it. I didn't know SC Chaos Theory supported HDR so thanks for that.

 

[DegustatoR]

Farcry developers kind of people did actually make the art assets but it was to big for downloading so they didn't distrubt it.

I know that, but i'm talking about something that's available to everyone.

 

[Jawed]

From http://www.ati.com/developer/gdc/D3DTutorial08_FarCryAndDX9.pdf

For prototyping, we actually modified our light map generator
to generate HDR maps and tried HDR skyboxes. They look
great. However we didn’t include them in the patch because…

– Compressing HDR light map textures is challenging

– Bandwidth requirements would have been even bigger

– Far Cry patch size would have been huge

– No time to adjust and test all levels

Jawed

 

[Sxotty]

They should have started a torrent with the patch

 

[MasterBaiter]

They should have started a torrent with the patch

Yeah. It sounds more like an excuse more than anything. Just make all the enhancements an optional patch or something (or an enhancement pack). Perhaps when they release their 64 bit (hehe, I'm not going to hold my breath) edition they'll give us some treats.

 

[KimB]

– No time to adjust and test all levels

I think this is the real reason.

 

[DegustatoR]

They may release it with the upcoming expansion pack

 

[Ragemare]

...but it's better than haveing an engine that only supports the graphical spangles and not much else I.E Doom 3 engine.

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.

I know it has all that and I know some people are thinking about/trying to replace ID's physics engine with ODE. I'v messed around with the gravity gun mod and the inbuilt physics really don't seem that good to me, although that could just be the gravity gun mods fault.

Obviously there's much more to the Doom 3 engine than a graphics pipeline, but compared to other engines in this and the next generation, it's a *bit* minimalistic, not that, that's a bad thing for some developers/games.

So there's my slightly less rude opinion on it.

 

[XxStratoMasterXx]

Doom 3's engine seems to be suited for Doom 3 only or Doom 3-type games.

And because of the narrow focus, it turned out to be great and stable!

 

[pegisys]

Doom 3's engine seems to be suited for Doom 3 only or Doom 3-type games.

And because of the narrow focus, it turned out to be great and stable!

alot of people think that but if you look at some of the mods the are bieng made it will change you mind I have seen modders do some good things with the engine that alot of people doesn't think it can

for example
hexen edge of chaos mod
http://www.planetdoom.com/edgeofchaos/
heres a video of it in action
http://www.ausgamers.com/files/details/html/15077

and here a deathmatch map the is a big well lit outdoor area(that I have tested and it runs quite well)
http://www.doom3world.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=9295

 

[DegustatoR]

Doom 3's engine seems to be suited for Doom 3 only or Doom 3-type games.

Only because we need much faster hardware to render something like UE3-type large open areas using Doom 3 engine's shadows.

 

[Sxotty]

Doom 3 is actually better suited IMO to games like thief series than to Doom like games

 

[Reverend]

Doom 3's engine seems to be suited for Doom 3 only or Doom 3-type games.

Can you expand on that? Why do you say that? "Suited" meaning performance-wise or (lack of) feature-wise?