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

@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.

@TwoArmed said:

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

Pretty much. Sucks.

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.

This is cool but whatever happened to Samaritan?

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

Skyrim 2?

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

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.

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.

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

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

@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.

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

@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.

I actually really dig that swirly particle effect.

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.

Voxels? Are Voxels back?

@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.

@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.

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

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!

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

Dynamic, physical particles. Yay!

@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.

@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.

@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!

@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.

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

Unless it's realtime I don't really see what all the fuzz is about, we see about 3 billion cg videogame trailers each day that looks just as good as this, if not better, so why again is this so special?

Wasn't the point of The Samaritan supposed to do exactly what this trailer/demo did? The Samaritan looked way more awesome, I think.

@Castiel: It's special because it's real-time. Watch the other video of the walkthrough.

@ToastMan: Well in that case good job EpicGames. Although I doubt, without being a expert on the subject, that we'Il see any games looking that good this console generation.

Wasn't the point of The Samaritan supposed to do exactly what this trailer/demo did? The Samaritan looked way more awesome, I think.

@Delta_Ass said:

@Napalm said:

Wasn't the point of The Samaritan supposed to do exactly what this trailer/demo did? The Samaritan looked way more awesome, I think.

Samaritan wouldn't be able to run on next gen systems.

Yeah that tech demo was running on a modified version of UE3 that basically couldn't run on anything normal as far as commercially available hardware goes atm. Epic also never intended to license that version of the engine as it is highly unoptimized, unlike UE4 which is designed for making games with and will eventually have all the features or at least close approximations of those developed for the Samaritan demo.

@Lazyaza said:

@Delta_Ass said:

@Napalm said:

Wasn't the point of The Samaritan supposed to do exactly what this trailer/demo did? The Samaritan looked way more awesome, I think.

Samaritan wouldn't be able to run on next gen systems.

Yeah that tech demo was running on a modified version of UE3 that basically couldn't run on anything normal as far as commercially available hardware goes atm. Epic also never intended to license that version of the engine as it is highly unoptimized, unlike UE4 which is designed for making games with and will eventually have all the features or at least close approximations of those developed for the Samaritan demo.

I still believe. The Samaritan... coming in 2015.

I'm impressed. I hope the next gen consoles are up to the task.

From the way Jack Trenton was talking on Spike I'm confident Sony will be up to the mark, but with Cliff having a slight panic attack with this whole thing, makes me think it's not Microsoft's top priority for the NextBox.

Seeing that makes me really want a proper game about Eldar (WH40K). That was basically an Avatar of Khaine.

Welp, time to invest in a new PC.

Wow, particles.

For some reason I was way way more impressed by the Samaritan tech demo rather then this.

A mix of CG like quality and a fantasy setting just makes it hard to really put it into perspective just how incredible this engine is considering this is running in realtime and not a prerendered CG cut-scene. There is just not a proper reference point so instead the reference for perception transfers over to CG cut-scenes which we are familiar with hence it has way less impact.

I don't have a boner for particle effects either.

A zillion times.

@Castiel: this is real time

Unreal 4: Diablo 4 confirmed.

One of the main reasons why UE4 is impressive isn't immediately apparent - it''s that the lighting is global and is done on the fly. That fact alone should save THOUSANDS of development man hours and free up creators and designers to try things they would never have been able to before. It enables on the fly iteration which can only be a great thing for developers and by extension gamers.

@Castiel said:

@ToastMan: Well in that case good job EpicGames. Although I doubt, without being a expert on the subject, that we'Il see any games looking that good this console generation.

they won't because it's next gen tech. this engine currently only runs on über-high-end PCs. Epic wants to throw their engines on everything though, so you can expect to see scaled down versions of the engine run on future iOS devices at some point even. But the current consoles (PS3/360) simply don't support all the tech that's in that engine because they were built soooooo long ago.

I see they still have the problem of shiny textures looking like plastic. His armor looked really bad. Everything else looked holy crap amazing, though.

I really doubt that we will see anything this good looking on the new consoles.

Wow.

I don't get why there are dirty camera lens effects in a setting that wouldn't have a physical camera. Shit looks amazing though.