Took a few snips from the Tim Sweeney interview in the Feb issue of atomic (Aussie mag):
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.
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.
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