Why was UE3's early deferred shading so bad?

Another UE2 game with better lighting that many early UE3 games: SWAT 4

It's clearly an AA title on a bit of a budget so there are rough spots and character models are a mess of inexperienced use of normal maps but the fact that it's got a better baked lighting solution (and better bloom, too!) than so many UE3 titles tears at my skull, man. I realize it's probably not using lightmaps generated within stock UE2, and there's clearly some custom work that went into the game's renderer, unless UE2 or 2.5 natively supported normal maps at some point (I don't remember), but it's still a striking difference next to that first couple of years with UE3

It's easy to overlook how much of a mess UE3 was when it first got into developers' hands, and if Denis Dyack wasn't such an insufferable POS he probably could've engendered way more sympathy for SK's side of the whole UE3 lawsuit, but beyond that is there any good reason devs weren't just baking their lightmaps third party for early UE3 development?

 

Speaking of that mess, can anyone confirm that the engine launched with all these features intact or was a lot of that ripped out and rewritten like SVOGI got pulled from UE4?



Obviously that was targeting PC and larger RAM pools than what the 360 or PS3 offered but it's not like you couldn't deliver results close to that on a 360. Plenty of other games did, but basically nothing from the 7th gen running on UE3 came close. Not even Gears 3. Optimizing for tools first is a good thing, I think, even if the performance of your engine suffers as a result and maybe that played a huge part in why UE3 games looked the way they did - but I feel like if you build your game to favor lighting over raw polycounts and all that there's really no reason you shouldn't be able to approach that tech demo on a 360 even with suboptimal rendering and logic pipelines. Tech demos like the above are at least 50% marketing, I realize, but it kills me that they sold this engine on that demo when early UE3 games look almost nothing like it.

Rainbow Six Vegas is the first UE3 title I can remember that even tried to take advantage of dynamic lighting on a large scale but I can't remember if they were using stock UE3 features or heavily customizing it to those ends and still it's not even close.

edit: Dynamic lighting and POM are performance hogs, of course - the game comes first, as it should - but even the lightmaps and how well they blend with the dynamic lighting in that demo feel leagues beyond what early UE3 was showcasing and it just does not compute to me

 

Niiice, I didn't realize you had direct feed of that stuff or that those demos had ever made their way to the public

 

I'll say that watching that breakdown of Gears 1 above and revisiting it recently has given me a deeper appreciation of what it was trying to accomplish at launch, despite its flaws. I think in my mind Gears 2 sticks out more as "that UE3 look" because even with all its showcased engine improvements - and the water simulation, the cubes of meat, the sheer scale all hold up today - it's arguably the flattest looking Gears title to date in terms of lighting, juicy digestive tracts aside. Shadow Complex was a better demo of those features in some ways.

 

Lighting is an obsession of mine to a fault, though, clearly. But it's hugely important in terms of art direction. Good/interesting lighting can give even the roughest, lowest of the low poly stuff incredible character and appeal.

Source engine games hold up so well in part because the lighting is so strong, even when it's all baked. Gears 1 with Half-Life 2's lighting would've been a hell of a thing to see.

 

I guess I'd walk back my blanket assessment of Gears 2's lighting too. Not that there isn't lots of flat, formless lighting in that game, but there are a handful of inspired moments and even a few where it's largely realtime. There are moments. I think the game's biggest problem is that it wants to put all this high frequency detail literally everywhere at the expense of effective contrast. That can play into the lighting too, which can often look like terrible HDR photography. I don't mean that because it's using an HDR renderer, or that it's doing tone mapping, is why its lighting looks so flat - but that it's almost emulating the look of HDR photography, which is a much different beast. If you google it you'll see what I mean: just the most flat, lifeless photography in the pursuit of detail first and photography second.

And it's certainly a different thing when you're actually playing the game versus trying to evaluate it at a distance