Unreal Engine 5 Tech Demo, [UE5 Developer Availability 2022-04-05]

Curious what happened to all this. Why we didnt see anything in actual practice.
Were they running it on a very very expensive setup?

 

Guess it will be awhile before we reach that kind of water simulation. It seems that the 6th generation of consoles introduced some serious focus on water/rain simulation, see MGS2, Mario Shunshine, dungeons & dragons, Baldurs gate ps2 and that other PS2 game where water simulation was very impressive.
Maybe UE5 will take up on this again?

 

I'm guessing the frame time budget for these kind of real time simulations are way too expensive for an actual game, especially when you go larger than a tiny vignette.

 

In the 6th gen Era (and still nowadays)water was polygon based with mesh déformation. On the ue5 demo and old nvidia it's particles based,a lot more realistic but a lot heavier. The nvidia demo ran at 15fps on a 680 a the time it seems.

 

Now i remember, Champions of norrath and its expension/sequal return to arms. Both PS2 but had very impressive water effects, in special for a top-down rpg.

 

How will you know how well it is done? How much experience with robot dinosaur water do you have?

 

Had read in a splashdown ps2 interview in a french magasine that water was particles based, but never found anything about it on internet

 

While more on the cartoony side of things, I've always felt Sea of Thieves had the best water simulation techniques this past generation.

 

Not real-time though, which is actually much better for what they needed to do for synchronization.

 

I love these demos and we’ve been seeing them for many years, but I’m still not sure why no games show this kind of thing even today?

 

Because unless such a scene plays a prominent part in your game, it makes little sense to devote the time and effort to create it.

Your core mechanics and visuals needed throughout the game are already carving out a large portion of your computational budget so how do you contend with a scene where performance needed for physics suddenly jump through the roof.

 

These demos use the entire GPU to calculate the fluid simulation. A game has to account for much more. You would only have a 1-2 milliseconds at best to dedicate to that fluid rather than 33.

 

Highly underrated game …

To be honest I think from Black Flag onwards water got pretty impressive in some games. Even GTA V water is pretty neat.

 

Is that only for the online/multi-player? I would think single player wouldn't require such synchronization.

 

NVIDIA integrated them into their GPU PhysX and WaveWorks library.

The greatest application of this in the old days came in the game called CryoStasis (an atmospheric thriller game set in a sunken ship), which allowed the player to have a water canon and play with water and ice. Timestamped in the video below.



Other examples include sea waves in Just Cause 2 and War Thunder and Just Cause 3, but to a lesser degree.



The greatest modern example is the game Atlas (a pirate game similar to Ark Survival), it's still early access, but features the greatest sea waves simulation ever.

 

Some of those old PhysX effects hold up nicely today, some are straight up looking better than physics we have in games now. We have stagnated so much in terms of physics and interactivity with the PS4 and Xbox One generation of consoles and I really hope with powerful Ryzen CPUs and machine learning being used that will change very soon.

I am excited to see how powerful Niagra is going to be in next gen games made with UE5.

 

No single player. It's a GAaS & requires an Internet connection.

Tommy McClain

 

The water in SoT is essentially an animation. They have pre-generated grids of water and tell each client to "play" a certain type of water depending on ToD, weather etc. There's no interactions with objects beyond ensuring ships, players and small objects like chests etc follow the rough surface plane during the rendering, so that you rise with the wave as it crests etc but waves don't bend around hulls and such.

 

I've always really liked the SoT aesthetic. As somebody who really cannot commit to lengthy periods to engage in multiplayer, it's just a shame that the solo side isn't as compelling.