cheapchips
Veteran
So, no Hellblade 2 this year?
Doesn't sound like it, unless they have pre-prerelease versions out with some partners. NT would defiantly be that sort of partner, given the stage time they've had at Epic events.
So, no Hellblade 2 this year?
So, no Hellblade 2 this year?
Hellblade 2 was never announced for 2021. Maybe I missed something.
Shifting to a new engine is a big undertaking, so we want to be clear that we will not be announcing any new projects or titles for some time.
Not unexpected with an engine switch...
So, I'm not expecting anything new out of them for at least 2-3 years. Considering how extensively they modified UE4 to have it run as well as it did within their requirements for Gears 5, I'd be curious about whether they'll have to modify UE5 just as extensively or if UE5 has incorporated some of the modifications The Coalition made to their fork of UE4.
Regards
SB
Wouldn't be surprised if Epic would be happy for them to merge changes and additions to UE5, they certainly did a good job with Gears 5, and thus the seemingly early access for them.
They also don't seem to be working on Gears for their next project. While I can't find it now, just a few days ago I spotted some apparently official concept art for an "insert random project code name here" by an artist from The Coalition. Some very decidedly not Gears super colorful and out of this world trees, guess they OKed releasing it under the project codename as it's just early exploration concept art you can't make much heads or tails of. Interested to see what they'll do next though, Gears 5 was surprisingly fun.
Apparently, the next project is an experimental side stuff to help them acclimate to UE5 and explore its systems since they are Xbox's UE experts. Makes sense too. This will help them get used to the engine and maybe develop a cool new IP in the process before going full steam into Gears 6. Anyway here is the clip from Jeff Grubb, a journalist from Gamesbeat who seem to know a lot about Xbox in general:
Really looking forward to what it may be, and i think it may be good for the team as well. They only developed gears for now, and to work on something else and unload ideas that are not constrained to the gears universe can be good and refreshing.
My realistic interpretarion of the dev's comment about "unloading" assets behind the camera is:
Actual streaming engines don't exactly "unload" stuff. By that, I mean, they don't wipe data out of memory. They tag it as replaceable and it gets substituted by new data when it is needed. Most engines probably have multiple priority levels of how needed and uneeded each asset is so it can prioritize better.
So my guess is, in this game, the SSD is reliable enough that they can knock assets out of the view frustrum a couple levels down in their priority level, and that means that in some extreme cases where there is an absurd amount of asset variety in view at a time, some of that stuff ends up getting replaced, but that is probably not that common, and does not happen to ALL data out of view at a time.
But condidering their portals, and how you can see parts of multiple wildly different levels simultaneously in this game, a View-Frustrum aware streaming system makes much more sense. Say, for when a player aproaches a portal, it prioritizes streaming in the assets that are directly visible from that portal's opening, and delay the stuff behind (that would only be visible after the player character GOES THROUGH the portal)
They will not discard everything because they would need 10 TB game size to be able to do this and maybe faster SSD with tons of unique assets. I think in a few years the biggest constraint will be the size of the game on storage.
They will not discard everything because they would need 10 TB game size
I think in a few years the biggest constraint will be the size of the game on storage.
Another interesting game will be God of War Ragnarok if the game is exclusive to PS5. Some Sony Santa Monica devs describe what they wanted to do for the first fight against if they were not limited by the HDDsaid they would have want each big attack send at high speed Kratos in the air with big destruction and so far he reachs another realm.
I disagree here. I think the biggest constraint will be rendering of those assets. The PS5 has a finite GPU like all hardware. Being able to put more assets into VRAM for the GPU to crunch on will reach a limit of how fast (and how complicated) can it render in a given amount of time. It does no good to throw a trillion transparent triangles, for example, if the GPU can't light and shade them fast enough for the given render target.
There are some big, obvious features we can see in terms of the benefits of the PS5, like the fast load times or the rifts that pull you into a parallel world immediately. But are there any examples of smaller, less obvious things that are cool or that you’re really proud of that wouldn’t have been possible on the PS4?
With the SSD, it’s easy to say there are no load times, and look how fast we can load this other area, but it has all sorts of knock-on effects. We don’t need to be as careful with how we package our data. All of the assets for an area don’t need to be collated on the spinning hard drive to get the right streaming speed out of it. It makes the game smaller on your hard drive; it means we can patch it more easily.
Wait when we will have the detail of the size of the Unreal Engine 5 demo. With rock assets of millions of polygons, 8 K textures, 16K shadow maps.
There is cleary enough power to light and shade this demo. The quality of assets is not a limit anymore .
In 10 years, GPU will be able to render the same assets at a higher level of fidelity but out of new miraculous storage solution, it will probably be impossible to create a game with this quality of assets. Storage size limitation is a reality since this demo. From an asset perspective out of special case like hair rendering or vegetation rendering this demo reach polygon per pixel and a 1 texel per pixel for the scenery you can't go further.
Im not sure whats going on here, seems they are teleporting elsewhere, but some things are the same (or very close) in the new scene in the foreground/background, so perhaps not the best example.
No GPU in 10 years will be able to render a trillion visible triangles in a frame at 60fps.thus LOD is needed, could the above R&C city scene vista contain a trillion triangles? Yes it could (perhaps it does?)I disagree here. I think the biggest constraint will be rendering of those assets. The PS5 has a finite GPU like all hardware. Being able to put more assets into VRAM for the GPU to crunch on will reach a limit of how fast (and how complicated) can it render in a given amount of time. It does no good to throw a trillion transparent triangles, for example, if the GPU can't light and shade them fast enough for the given render target.
I agree forcing yourself to go 4k is a terrible decision, though I dont believe they went for 1080p because of artistic choice but performance, you could argue 1080p @ 60fps looks better 'artistically' than 1440p @ 40fps and I would prolly agreeIMO, the best thing that has happened this gen is that devs are not chasing for native 4K. Upscaling has come a long way and in some titles it can really provide crisp final visuals. We are even living in a world where Returnal devs intentionally chose 1080p over 1440p "because it looked better" for the grimey and unsettling artstyle of the game. Lower resolution was the "artistic choice".
The UE5 demo has only the triangular detail. The lighting/shading is still relatively cheap compared to a full RT pipeline. 8k textures are great if they have a lot of variation in them. 8k textures with very little variation (like that UE5 demo) isn't going to push photorealism. 16k shadow maps can't be streamed in from SSD. They have to be computed on the fly. They are not an asset like textures and geometry.
Of course the quality of assets are a limit. Once they are in VRAM, the GPU has to render them.
1 triangle per-pixel isn't the upper end of quality of rendering. We still have several orders of magnitude of sub-pixel rendering during calculations. I would never clamp my rays cast to 1 per pixel. That leaves me very little accuracy to model plausible lighting, tessellation and shading - all of which should be constraint only by the precision of double values. I'm used to the quality of 16-32 rays per pixel to start rendering.
In short, we still have a long way to go.
I think what most people are point but not quite able to put into words in the on rails section shown is that, even though that scene takes place in the same level as you're showing in this screenshot, the fact that it's on rails has some advantages because it is constrained. For example, if you place the camera/gameplay on a rail, with a fairly fixed speed, you know exactly what parts you need to load in and when. In the gameplay area in your screenshot, you can move in any direction at variable speed. I'm not saying they need to constrain the game to an on rails section for technical reasons, but it would certainly simplify the IO to know what assets and at what LOD you need them and when, and to be able to discard what you know you will no longer need. I doubt you could even turn the camera around during that section. Again, for gameplay reasons you wouldn't want to.
Hold my beer. Also, size is not always of quality.
I wouldn't say its a certainty that these consoles can handle the level of throughput shown in the UE5 demo in an actual game.
It's a very efficient LoD and rasterizer which doesn't bog down hugely with small polygons.I wouldn't say its a certainty that these consoles can handle the level of throughput shown in the UE5 demo in an actual game.
Rendering side certainly is the 'easy' part in this.It is a certainty they can't because the SSD in the console are probably not big enough to sustain a full game with this quality of assets without any compromise.