New Unreal Engine 3 Trailer

[N1ghtmare]

Sorry, but that's a myth. The only DX11 hair on that guy is his back hair.

He uses the hair to balance on the hoverboard and perform stunts.

 

[Molgan]

He uses the hair to balance on the hoverboard and perform stunts.

He also use it to bend time and walk through walls. He's the man.

 

[Jetfire]

Epic would be better off having at least some of their games on rolling engine releases. They practically do that anyway, UT3 is, for the most part, built on UDK already.

lolwut. nothing in the udk would make ut3 a better game.

 

[Bi()ha2arD]

Well, proper lighting for less desaturated maps?

 

[Bgood]

Well, proper lighting for less desaturated maps?

Agreed, it'd be a big improvement.

It's not just visuals though , what about performance increases , newer CPU/GPU architectures won't be optimized for in the older build, considering a 8800gtx was the ultimate card at release.

Patch 2.0 (alongside Titan pack) made a noticeable difference to performance. But it came too late.

 

[DannyMeister]

Better lighting, quicker UI, increased performance across the board, improved uscript code modularity when they broke things up for UDKGame, better toolset for modders, and on and on. All the things UT3 needs since it's actual game play is solid.

 

[Sir_Brizz]

Better lighting, quicker UI, increased performance across the board, improved uscript code modularity when they broke things up for UDKGame, better toolset for modders, and on and on. All the things UT3 needs since it's actual game play is solid.

Exactly. Plus, I'd hope they've made some real improvements to the netcode. One of Epic's biggest problems with past UT games has been their complete avoidance of netcode compatibility breaking patches. However, the biggest problem with UT for ages has been no updates to the performance and reliability of the netcode.

 

[GreatEmerald]

Exactly. Plus, I'd hope they've made some real improvements to the netcode. One of Epic's biggest problems with past UT games has been their complete avoidance of netcode compatibility breaking patches. However, the biggest problem with UT for ages has been no updates to the performance and reliability of the netcode.

Well, Unreal Tournament was supposed to be a netcode update for Unreal. Except that they decided to make it a separate game instead, with it breaking online compatibility and all.

 

[TheIronKnuckle]

I want to see them go back to BSP and abandon all these newfangled superdetailed staticmeshes and whatnots.

 

[ambershee]

Well, proper lighting for less desaturated maps?

You'd have to replace every map file (2Gbs of data) and more in order to introduce lightmass to UT3. We're also talking hundreds of level designer hours relighting all the maps from scratch.

 

[Bi()ha2arD]

We're also talking hundreds of level designer hours relighting all the maps from scratch.

Oh I bet the community would be more than happy to do it.

 

[shoptroll]

At this point, and I kinda hope this is what they do in the future, the only option is to make a smaller release for the next UT and release it as a download only online title for $20-30 and add on to it from there. Strip the game down to the bare essentials: all the weapons, a handful of maps (primarily classic maps) and modes, and support it id/Valve style with free content/engine updates which add to the base game. It certainly wouldn't jive with the current XBox dominance of their retail strategy, but I don't feel that UT3 resonated with the 360 demographic in the first place so I don't think much would be lost by skipping out on the 360 or consoles all together. Plus, this would free them from MS's draconian Live policies as well. I'd be willing to meet them halfway and pay money for a well constructed single player campaign, but I think the core release should be online focused with offline Instant Action vs. bots as the only single player component out of the box.

The arena style shooter has given way to the more serious psuedo-realistic military type games like CoD and Counter-Strike. It's incredibly risky to release anything on the scale of UT2/UT3 for $50... I mean $60 these days. However, games like TF2, Monday Night Combat, Quake Live have demonstrated that there is a demand for more traditional/arcade style shooters in the $0-30 price range. If there's ever to be a new UT, this is where Epic is going to have to compete.

tl;dr: Smaller game, faster iterations, longer support cycle (regular engine upgrades if possible) with a lower price point.

 

[Kantham]

They're mocking us!

SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL SELL

 

[Bgood]

Better lighting, quicker UI, increased performance across the board, improved uscript code modularity when they broke things up for UDKGame, better toolset for modders, and on and on. All the things UT3 needs since it's actual game play is solid.

Anyone interested in PC gaming may find this recent post http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=31520674&postcount=28 an interesting read.

Epic have just incorporated DX11 into UE3. Of course expecting that kind of dev work would be too much. But still... a doubling of performance anyone? Different engines, but UT3 and indeed UE3 games generally are very CPU bound, so who knows what gains could be possible with DX11 multithreading, certainly looks promising.

 

[GreatEmerald]

Anyone interested in PC gaming may find this recent post http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=31520674&postcount=28 an interesting read.

Epic have just incorporated DX11 into UE3. Of course expecting that kind of dev work would be too much. But still... a doubling of performance anyone? Different engines, but UT3 and indeed UE3 games generally are very CPU bound, so who knows what gains could be possible with DX11 multithreading, certainly looks promising.

Huh? But multithreading for CPUs is a strictly a matter of native programming, it has nothing to do with DirectX, which deals with graphics only. And even then, from what I've heard so far, DX11 is just DX10.1 with hardware tessellation support.

 

[Big-Al]

Remember last year when Valve updated all their Source games to the latest engine build?


That was awesome.

(Yes, I understand it was for the Mac release, but still....)

...still people are buying and playing the games!!

 

[ambershee]

Huh? But multithreading for CPUs is a strictly a matter of native programming, it has nothing to do with DirectX, which deals with graphics only. And even then, from what I've heard so far, DX11 is just DX10.1 with hardware tessellation support.

It's not strictly true, but largely this is the case. Dx11 does purportedly have a number of features that make multithreaded programming CPU side easier*. Multithreading on GPUs on the other hand is much more new, and should hopefully allow for some real fun.

*I have not tried it, nor read much into it.

 

[Spiney]

Multithreading on GPUs on the other hand is much more new, and should hopefully allow for some real fun.

*I have not tried it, nor read much into it.

GPU's have been highly parallel architectures since their inception.
The article is all about multithreading the renderer on the CPU side, so synching between CPU and GPU is much more smooth.

Floating point performance on GPUs has completely eclipsed that of the CPU.
The situation today is that GPUs are typically bottlenecked by the CPU because of this.

from the article:

Now why do we have multi-threaded rendering in the first place? Half of this is to better mesh with multi-threaded games by enabling additional threads to directly contribute without having to go through a master thread first. But a second purposes is because multi-threaded rendering helps the GPU just as much as it helps the CPU.

 

[Rosco[CoF]]

Now this would be a great looking engine for a return to Na Pali! A real sequel to Unreal.

 

[Bgood]

Huh? But multithreading for CPUs is a strictly a matter of native programming, it has nothing to do with DirectX, which deals with graphics only. And even then, from what I've heard so far, DX11 is just DX10.1 with hardware tessellation support.

From Anandtech :

...enabling simple parallel creation of resources and display lists by multiple threads could really open up opportunities for parallelizing game code that would otherwise have remained single threaded. Rather than one thread to handle all the DX state change and draw calls (or very well behaved and heavily synchronized threads sharing the responsibility), developers can more naturally create threads to manage types or groups of objects or parts of a world, opening up the path to the future where every object or entity can be managed by it's own thread (which would be necessary to extract performance when we eventually expand into hundreds of logical cores).

DICE:

Now in DirectX 11, with the new support for multi-threading in the API, we can render objects and submit it to the GPU in parallel on all available CPU cores (we’ve tested up to 16 virtual cores). This will be a big performance improvement and allow us to have much more variation and detail on our levels while costing less than before. The multi-threading support also enables us to get faster loading times by loading shaders and other resources in parallel and to efficiently stream in textures & meshes without stalls, which would otherwise result in unwanted jerky performance in the game

DX11 multithreading (command list enabled) drivers weren't available ,until now.This should hopefully go some way to ending the CPU -DX API bottleneck as more studios implement this.