First Screenshots of Unreal Engine 4

[StalwartUK]

Certainly does look the business. The real question though is can they make a good game with it? By that I mean one that doesn't just exist to show off how good their graphics tech is now.

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

Doesn't look "THAT" impressive to me, certainly nothing original at least (well I can see the usual Perna's style there, which is great but still..yeah it just looks like "TES"-warcraft stuff kind of), I said once that the graphic nowadays cannot really make a leap like they used to, sure you can increase polygons and particles and stuff like that, but it will not look that dramatically different. There is a point where eye cannot catch much of a difference on ultra high poly meshes you know. So there will not just happen breakthroughs on the scale they used to happen. I better go back to 700 polys a chracter, now those were the games! lol

[ambershee]

Anything anyone can think of. Rendering using splines, ray-traced lighting are things that thus far have only been experimented with.

People said the same crap in 2000 - then boom, shaders and normal mapping.

[Leo(T.C.K.)]

Alright but those are specific features, they are cool, but graphic wise not anything is improving much. It is not such a huge difference if you get what I mean. It might look smoother and more fluid and real, but still not a huge leap I believe. Also I chuckled at the MS-DOS to Windows 3.0 comparison.

[N1ghtmare]

Well if the developers get to spend less time working on lighting and particles [as outlined in the article] then they can easily put more effort into other aspects of the game.

[Manticore]

Originally Posted by moonflyer

Is this demo having anything to do with their next big project? I have to ask coz this looks nothing Unreal at all.

Yes; I was thinking that it's a pretty looking screenshot but any engine is only as good as the game you design around it.

Lately all the kudos in that department have been going to Unreal licensees rather than Epic.

Talking the talk and walking the walk are two different things.

[ambershee]

Originally Posted by Leo(T.C.K.)

Alright but those are specific features, they are cool, but graphic wise not anything is improving much.

Spline based rendering would allow for sillhouettes without a single jagged edge - perfect curves. Silhouettes are incredibly important in game art. Fully ray-traced lighting would allow for far more complex, realistic lighting solutions that generate completely accurate reflection and refraction through translucent media (fog, glass or water as examples), casting the appropriate lighting on any surface it touches.

That's a colossal leap in fidelity, right there.

[DeathBooger]

Originally Posted by ambershee

Anything anyone can think of. Rendering using splines, ray-traced lighting are things that thus far have only been experimented with.

People said the same crap in 2000 - then boom, shaders and normal mapping.

Lights fall into the physics category and that whole category is processing intensive. You won't see large strides in that area for another 10 years because processors haven't evolved that much since UE3 was introduced. I don't know why there was even an idea to render with splines. Splines are a pain in the ass to work with when modeling characters and other assets.

[evilmrfrank]

If Cliff mentions trying to get microsoft/sony to make the next gen consoles capable of running Avatar quality graphics UE4 must be capable of running at that quality...

[Kantham]

Looks exactly like a regular UE3 upgrade to me.

I'm just going to guess that they are re-coding most of the previous features for convenience, or something.
EDIT: Well that explains it, consoles.

So after a long break of eye-candy pimp'in, we might likely sight the terrible visual>gameplay ratio monster once more!

[Bgood]

Hi res versions link.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/viewer.php?mode=article&id=283085#top_banner

[NeoNite]

It's like sauron having a bad hair day and everyone has to pay.

[akstylish]

Originally Posted by Capt.Toilet

I may be in the vast minority on this but the engine so far is not impressing me. UE2 to UE3 was a vast improvement, this just looks like a minor update to the existing build of UE3 but with flashier particle effects.

^^^

But I'll hold my final verdict until I see a demo.

[Rambowjo]

This doesn't look like anything more than a UE3 upgrade. Samaritan looked better.

Perhaps they're trying to work a lot more on optimization with this one, getting it to run on more devices. Makes sense, given how the market is currently developing, but it's a little boring for us PC players.

[CyMek]

Originally Posted by Rambowjo

This doesn't look like anything more than a UE3 upgrade. Samaritan looked better.

Perhaps they're trying to work a lot more on optimization with this one, getting it to run on more devices. Makes sense, given how the market is currently developing, but it's a little boring for us PC players.

I'm with that. We've gotten good enough at faking the baked on lighting and so on and so forth that UE4 doesn't look significantly better. A great example is those particle effects- apparently they are actually calculated as little pieces of debris floating down through the air, instead of as huge sheets of particle texture moving on more or less predefined paths. The result may look the same, but it will be much easier to make. The lighting apparently also takes a lot less faking, if the article isn't lying. I'm guessing that is what will make UE4 special- being able to make the same effects as top-level UE4 games with much less effort.

Also, the Samaritan demo was running on three video cards. The UE4 demo was running on one.

[Arnox]

To everyone who says it doesn't look any different from UE3.

That's because we're hitting a peak as to how good we can make things look.

[Manticore]

Originally Posted by NeoNite

It's like sauron having a bad hair day and everyone has to pay.

[Kantham]

Originally Posted by Rambowjo

This doesn't look like anything more than a UE3 upgrade.

Said the parrot to the thread.

Originally Posted by Arnox

To everyone who says it doesn't look any different from UE3.

That's because we're hitting a peak as to how good we can make things look.

You don't say? There's absolutely no need for this #4. They could just name it 3.5, but 4 was cooler.
The number increase is not a gap but a better opportunity for newer/different platform support. We've seen this before (CE2/CE3 UE2/UE2.5).

[UBerserker]

Originally Posted by CyMek

Also, the Samaritan demo was running on three video cards. The UE4 demo was running on one.

The newer video card (forgot how it's called) can also run Samaritan by itself.

[Jrubzjeknf]

Originally Posted by Arnox

To everyone who says it doesn't look any different from UE3.

That's because we're hitting a peak as to how good we can make things look.

Yes, but we also want it to be playable in real-time. That's where the challenge lies.