New Next Gen Unreal Tech Info

Posted: Sat Jan 24, 2004 12:27 pm

A big thanks to an old U2 Forumer Grimstar for the info and to Beyond Unreal for passing the news along. The following quotes are some the Aussie mag Atomic.Atomic: What can you tell us about the key technologies that the next Unreal engine will be focused on?

Tim: We already have polygon count where it needs to be. We're going to be focusing on per-pixel rendering and getting the quality of each pixel on screen as high as possible. So there's a bunch of different technologies there: dynamic shadowing technology, stencil buffer and shadow z-buffers. But the whole idea is that every object in the scene should cast realistic shadows with respect to every light source in the scene, and every pixel you see should illuminate properly that way. Of course that's easy to say and there are some solutions for that, like stencil buffering. But to do that properly you really want fuzzy shadows everywhere because most light and most environments are quite diffused and if you look around you very seldom see a really sharp shadow edge somewhere. So a huge amount of effort and processing power goes into implementing fuzzy shadows effectively in real-time. That's been a significant part of our R&D right there.

The other thing is techniques for encoding, when we talk about textures in the past we meant basically a 2d map containing RGB colour. And now a texture really means that plus a normal map depending on how bumpy the surface and how it’s locally oriented, as well as secular maps and seeing how glossy the thing is at each point.

Atomic: When you say fuzzy shadows, that's what you demoed at the NV30 launch?

Tim: Yeah, it showed basically the technique we're using. Of course it only showed it on one character and now the tech is scaling to really large scenes as we have some pretty good stuff up and running. DX9.0 is really the minimum spec there. We're essentially releasing a game in two years that's really going to bring existing computers to a complete crawl. You know, going back to the days when a new game came out and a lot of people really do have to upgrade their hardware to play it well.

Atomic: To concluded, what can we look forward to from your next generation engine?

Tim: Massive improvement in the realism and quality of scenes with realistic fuzzy shadowing. Incredibly detailed characters - like characters that, if you at and compare them side by side to our existing characters in detail, you might say they're a hundred times more detailed. A lot more use of physics in environments - not to create contrived puzzles but just in a natural way with all objects interacting physically. That's really just talking about the engine and not our game, which we aren't talking about yet.The key thing to take notice here is the game that he talks about that will be out in two years. During my trip to Epic last August we were allowed access to any room that the doors where open but not to the ones that were closed. However in Cliffy's room there is several other Devs. One of the was working on a incredibily cool looking monster. Cliff said not to take a picture of any of that work. Out of respect of our relationship and didn't and won't describe what I say. Let's just say that it looked nothing like anything Unreal and was pretty damn cool.

I am trying to track down my copy of the NVidia FX Demo that they had on their website last year. I know we have some new fans that haven't seen it. Check back with me on Monday.

Posted: Sat Jan 24, 2004 1:46 pm

lol, thats all bla bla bla to me Very Happy

got no idea what he is talking about Razz

Posted: Sat Jan 24, 2004 2:23 pm

hes just saying they will try to make everything as realistic as possible

Posted: Sat Jan 24, 2004 3:12 pm

yeah, i figured that, thats what everyus doing in the game buisnis isnt it?

UO Staff Joined: 10 Sep 2003 Posts: 524 Location: Atlanta

lol, thats all bla bla bla to me Very Happy

got no idea what he is talking about Razz

Posted: Sat Jan 24, 2004 4:44 pm

dragon, they want us to *think* theyre getting better

UO Staff Joined: 19 May 2003 Posts: 190 Location: BoooooM

Fancy words doesn´t really mean anything. It all comes down to how well it runs and how good it looks Smile

-dp-

Posted: Sat Jan 24, 2004 5:31 pm

yep, agreed

Posted: Sat Jan 24, 2004 7:01 pm

Maps which don't show churches?

Posted: Sat Jan 24, 2004 11:43 pm

LOL!
I think he meant to say specular (makes things shiney!! Very Happy

)

I do find Tim's comments interesting though, because they're indicitive of an industry wide shift in focus. Pretty much since the dawn of the 3D card, all we've been focused on is "More More More!" Polygons that is. Video cards had bigger, fatter pipes being fed by blazing hot processors, all for the purpose of calculating more geometry (polygons) per second. But now we're getting up into really high poly counts. Several thousand in a scene is ho-hum nowadays, when we were struggling with several hundred only a few years ago. Instead, the focus is on making those couple thousand polygons look better. Of course, texture maps have been increasing in size and quality for the last few years, but now we're really starting to put more bells and whistles on our graphics cards (and APIs). Things like specularity (shineyness), bump mapping (shadows as faux-detail), pixel shaders (detailed lighting), and other nifty things. In a word, we've managed to create our fantastic worlds out of raw material (polygons) - now we're trying to light them. Its kind of neat actually, because we're stepping into a new era of graphics. We've seen a little bit of it already, and we'll continue to see more of it this year (HL2/Doom3 anyone?) In a few years, graphics cards might not be rated on their ability to force feed geometry, but instead how many lighting operations they can perform in a frame. It really is kind of neat to think about Smile

As for whats it all mean? Not much, frankly. Just that games will continue to get prettier and prettier, just in different ways. So if you're not into graphics, you can safely go back home and continue playing games. You aren't missing anything important. Don't worry, we'll wake you when realtime Radiosity and Raytracing gets here.
/me starts salivating uncontrollably Razz

Posted: Sat Jan 24, 2004 11:54 pm

Irix WAnnabe Joined: 22 Jun 2003 Posts: 122

I've had to upgrade my PC for pretty much every Unreal game I've bought, so no big deal.

When you look carefully at "Real Life", you can notice all the subtle reflections and shadows on everything. They're the difference between looking "Real" and a Cartoon, which UT2K3 looks like now.

Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2004 12:18 am

i dont have a 1000 bucks to spend every 3 years on upgrades...

Irix WAnnabe Joined: 22 Jun 2003 Posts: 122

... but it's ALWAYS been that way. You've always had to upgrade your PC every year or 2 to play the latest games. Every 6 months if you are really obsessive.

Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2004 9:42 am

i havent upgraded in 4 years cept my vid card, and i play everything just fine, i even found out how to play unreal 2 really smoothly