Here's a Taste of What Unreal Engine 4 Can Do

Looks great. No will someone be able to make an interesting game with it?

@SathingtonWaltz said:

@TwoArmed said:

So basically, the games will look that good in ~5-10 years.

Pretty much. Sucks.

Not really, I remember first seeing Gears of War characters at Unreal Engine 3.0's unveiling. The engine was released a year and a half later, about a year after that Gears came out. So realistically you're looking at two and a half to three years from now.

@DSale said:

This video was not nearly as impressive as the long-form one with the developer showing off the spinning balls of light. This engine looks very powerful, bravo!

I completely agree, that other demo blew me away!

@Cmdc00kie said:

I really suggest people go to nvidia or the many other places that have the source video of this for the better quality. This video really just doesn't do it justice.

Do you have a link? I've been poking around since this was first released about a week ago, and haven't found it anywhere better than 720p, as a 65MB file, which is astonishingly bad compression level.

@Mumrik said:

I'm sure the real-time demo looked bass-ass, but I just really can't be impressed by a heavily compressed video running 720P or less. It could look pretty mediocre behind all that compression smear and aliasing.

This. 1000 times this. How can you judge whether the visual quality of something that's targeting 1080p real time rendering looks any good when you're watching 720p youtube compressed crap. I spend most of my time playing PC games at 1080p on a big screen, and watching everything pretty much exclusively on bluray. It's very hard to go back, but when I come online, the quality of video I see seems to be getting worse and worse every day.

Dynamic, physical particles. Yay!

Maybe one day CGI animators will realise that realistic outdoor scenes look so much more natural and authentic without lens flares. But I guess as a tech demo they wanted to show that scenes could be depicted as shot from a camera and not from the perspective of some undead lava dudes soulless eyes. gg

This video was not nearly as impressive as the long-form one with the developer showing off the spinning balls of light. This engine looks very powerful, bravo!

I was really hoping that the Unreal Tournament announcer would chime in at the end. Missed opportunity.

@BigDaveisCheapsaid:

@Bribo: The beauty of the UE is that it DOESN'T affect gameplay. When is the last time you saw a top-down dual stick shooter or racing game made with CE? I don't care how realistically your engine can wreck a 3D car when all I want is to use it to make a turn based tactical RPG with CCG elements or a 3rd person shooter or a 3D point-and-click or a 2.5D puzzle platformer or a 1st person shooter or a ... you get the point.

That said I think they're both impressive but UE will always remain the more popular choice for developers who are looking for a versatile engine that can bend to their needs as opposed to an FPS maker's tool kit.

Someone already made a dual stick shooter in UE4. There are videos on youtube. Not only is the engine absolutely gorgeous and has the most advanced lighting and particle engine on the planet, but they have really been focusing on the developer tools for the engine this time around. They have been making the sdk incredibly easy to use and the scripting engine and the fact that you can seamlessly jump between gameplay and editor is HUGE. So the potential is there with UE4 not only to make great looking games but actually more interesting and better playing ones that we have not seen before.

Also, this technology is for next gen consoles but can be run in realtime without much hassle on a PC. They rendered that demo on a single nvidia gtx680 on a high end PC that you can buy right now. So I believe that we will be seeing games reach that fidelity at some point in the next console cycle.

@BigDaveisCheap said:

@Bribo: The beauty of the UE is that it DOESN'T affect gameplay. When is the last time you saw a top-down dual stick shooter or racing game made with CE? I don't care how realistically your engine can wreck a 3D car when all I want is to use it to make a turn based tactical RPG with CCG elements or a 3rd person shooter or a 3D point-and-click or a 2.5D puzzle platformer or a 1st person shooter or a ... you get the point.

That said I think they're both impressive but UE will always remain the more popular choice for developers who are looking for a versatile engine that can bend to their needs as opposed to an FPS maker's tool kit.

I wasn't aware that it's not possible to make any of the types of game you mentioned with CE, but I'm not technically minded so I'll take your word for it.

My point was, I'm less interested in games that look better than I am in games that behave better. Physics, A.I. - that sort of thing.

Voxels? Are Voxels back?

There is some kind of texture pop around the 41 second mark when the camera changes perspectives to the back of it's head. Horn does something that looks like a texture pop-in.

Edit: But, yeah, particle effects look rad.

I actually really dig that swirly particle effect.

@Sooty said:

From a texture quality point of view, this looks worse than the first Crysis game.

agreed, that said this engine is being tailored to consoles where there isn't much ram. pretty particle effects can be done on the gpu, the same with the cloth dynamics. Might be physX infact. fancy textures come second when ram is at a premium.

So how taxing what that be if it were a part of 3D Benchmark?

@Bribo: The beauty of the UE is that it DOESN'T affect gameplay. When is the last time you saw a top-down dual stick shooter or racing game made with CE? I don't care how realistically your engine can wreck a 3D car when all I want is to use it to make a turn based tactical RPG with CCG elements or a 3rd person shooter or a 3D point-and-click or a 2.5D puzzle platformer or a 1st person shooter or a ... you get the point.

That said I think they're both impressive but UE will always remain the more popular choice for developers who are looking for a versatile engine that can bend to their needs as opposed to an FPS maker's tool kit.

Leave it to Epic to make the most generic looking tech demo ever.

Very impressive, but didn't wow me as much as Square's Luminous engine.

I found this demo infinitely more impressive:

You can throw as many polygons, shaders and high resolution textures at the screen as you like - if your tech doesn't affect gameplay, I'm not interested.

I didn't really notice any low res textures, but I did see quite a few framerate drops which I find to be kind of odd for a tech demo... It looks pretty damn awesome otherwise.

when i will see it in action then i will be impressed :)

Skyrim 2?

Those falling rocks acted like they were made of graphite.. Lava physics not very impressive either, but perhaps this is better than current tech??

This is cool but whatever happened to Samaritan?

UE4 looks like it'll be really awesome for devs in the future, plus it looks great.

That swirly animation for the particle effects is pretty ridiculous though. I don't like it.

@TwoArmed said:

So basically, the games will look that good in ~5-10 years.

Pretty much. Sucks.

@SaucyGit said:

I'd get up too if I was sitting on that hardass throne. I question all evil overlords that sit on these in the middle of nowhere.

Yeah man, the fuck's up with that. You got about 7 factions fighting in Game of Thrones. All over a throne that looks ridiculously un-comfy . Put a damn pillow there.

@Walta said:

Yeah yeah well done Epic. But when is Unreal 3 coming out? Wanna shoot me some Skaarj.

Unreal 3 came out in like 08 or something.

I'm not a big tech guy. Is this video showing what UE4 can do during gameplay? Will it look that good when I'm playing it?

Looks good.

@Tarsier said:

giant bomb is really late on the draw with these vids haha

i think UE4 tech is very impressive and exciting for what the future will hold. when i see these effects i dont think 'oh great, now every game is going to have this' i think 'the good games will use this tech in interesting and unique ways' .. this presents an EXTREME amount of potential . . the lighting, the liquid physics, particle physics, etc. . amazing

They were a bit busy, you know, recovering from E3...

Ugh more dirty lens flare.

Not impressed

Texture on that guys hand was shit. Nice lighting and particle effects though.

@Silvergun said:

You know, I think this was a missed opportunity for Epic to turn over a new leaf and call their engine '4real'.

You win this thread sir.

Hey guys, this is not a demo for textures. This is a demo for stable frame-rate while all these crazy fucking effects are going on. And all you have to say is herp derp look at those textures. You clearly have no idea what the point of this video is.

Guys who make tech demos are not artists.

I really suggest people go to nvidia or the many other places that have the source video of this for the better quality. This video really just doesn't do it justice.

a lot of people here are still in denial. this is great news and looks great.

booooooo! We want meat cube!

watching this in HTML5 HD, I have no idea what the "textures look shitty" people are talking about.  They look as sharp as I could think of them looking.   Maybe people are just spoiled.
 Perhaps it is the post processing/HDR that is making people see those textures as muddy, but whoever said they look like the original crysis is insane! 
 Not a graphics obsessive, but I'm really excited to see what the first year of new consoles looks like.  

@Abendlaender said:

Man, Overlord 3 sure looks neat

That it does. Think they might have done themselves a disservice there. I liked Overlord, but this looked like a CG scene with bad art to me, until I saw some aliasing. Still, another developer taking a crack at it could yield interesting results. If this becomes the next Unreal Engine 3, there won't be a lack of examples.

That honsetly didn't impress me that much. Is it just me or are there no shadows on the falling rubble?

The Samaritan tech demo they showed a while ago for UE3 was more impressive to me.

Squeenix's Luminous engine looks technically better.

Yeah yeah well done Epic. But when is Unreal 3 coming out? Wanna shoot me some Skaarj.

The only things that really impressed me were the particle effects and the lava. I guess that 'demon overlords' and 'transforming future cops in dystopias' make for cool demos, but I'd rather see a demo with less emphasis on the "coolness" and more on "look at our technical mastery", via environmental effects and lighting, etc. Granted, I'm not a video geek so I'm probably not focusing in on the 'technical mastery', and it's flying over my head, but the subject matter is definitely distracting from the important stuff, namely the tech. On the other hand, the WiiU "Bird in a Japanese Garden" demo has kinda boring, so I don't know what the hell I want.

Man, Overlord 3 sure looks neat

@Sneakybadger said:

@Sooty said:

From a texture quality point of view, this looks worse than the first Crysis game.

agreed, that said this engine is being tailored to consoles where there isn't much ram.

Looking at what the 360 can do with textures with a mere 512 megs of RAM, I think next-gen Sony and Microsoft offerings will be fine with their rumored 2-4Gb. Everything goes a lot further in a closed system. Plus they tend to use faster GDDR RAM in consoles, not the slower DDR found in standard PCs.

I'm sure the real-time demo looked bass-ass, but I just really can't be impressed by a heavily compressed video running 720P or less. It could look pretty mediocre behind all that compression smear and aliasing.

I like nice graphics, and regardless of what some may say looks better or worse than this, I think this looks great and it'll be nice to see this on next gen consoles if it does.

I'd get up too if I was sitting on that hardass throne. I question all evil overlords that sit on these in the middle of nowhere.