Check This Out...

[obscurus]

I can't wait to make maps for this game engine (Unreal Engine 3 - UT2007) - check these screenies out...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fuckin' Unreal

 

[SneaksieDave]

Hrm. I actually thought there were better ones out there? Maybe I'm wrong. The only one I really like there is number 4. The nature scenes look cartoony, and all the ones with chars appear to be at least partially faked. I'm not saying U3 can't do it - we all know it can. But these pics are just odd looking. The marine guy's lighting is all wrong, so he's probably just an overlay, and the other guy's lighting is terrible in the last shot, so he's also probably been digitally added afterword. Haven't companies learned not to fake up photos for distribution? If they're not retouched/added to... um, then the lighting needs tweaking for character models, badly.

 

Anyway, the few movies that are out there show off Unreal tech 3 MUCH better. Those are indeed incredible.

[Renzatic]

I think the big shot with Malcolm and the snobby dude is a photochop...but it's the only one. The rest look awesome to me, even if it is still a little on the plasticy side.

[obscurus]

Yeah the fourth one is the best, and there are better ones out there - I just selected a few at random, while I can't say I am a fan of the Unreal stylism with their big chunky characters and cartoony look, it certainly gives you an idea of what the engine is capable of, even if they have been playing around with photoshop. I am looking forward to discarding all those cartoony bits and replacing them with dark, gritty realism, Thief (Dark Mod?) style... in about 6 years when I can afford the PC hardware to do it :lol:

 

And hey, you gotta admit it is still better than the job they did on T:DS. I think a lot of it is the lighting, too. They could have done it a bit better, but hey, it's only a tech demo...

Edited June 10, 2005 by obscurus

[sparhawk]

It seems to be typical for UT that the screens always look a bit comic style.

[Subjective Effect]

I not all for mad detail in characters. They just need to look good. The guns are waaaay more complex than necessary.

 

But the 1st 3 nature scenes are just my cup of tea.

[Fingernail]

Doom 3 could look ALMOST as good, considering most of those textures are 2048x2048, and probably multiple of those on characters. It's just insane texture res, which makes normalmapping look better.

 

Of course, there are a few other additions; Precomputed radiance transer, spherical harmonics, etc, and of course you can still use traditional lightmaps.

 

And you gotta respect the modelers/texture artists behind it. It takes considerable effort to make any engine look decent, especially next-gen ones. But then, what do they pay them for ???

[oDDity]

And I remember a tech demo video from a a while back in which they said the charcater models would have u to 10k polys.

They said there would be more texture on one character than an entire level of the original UT.

THe softer shadows make it look great though.

Edited June 10, 2005 by oDDity

[obscurus]

The top 3 screens are from the speedtree RT website - they have licensed an engine that does real-time trees & vegetation, and it has been incorporated into Unreal Engine 3. This thing can handle some very impressive tree geometry, including wind physics, in RT. There are some nice examples of what it can do in a range of engines, some standalone demos etc at SpeedTreeRT

 

I wonder if this will make its way into Doom 3 code?

 

The downside to all this is that it takes a lot more time and effort to make something that looks that detailed - Without proceduraly generated trees etc, it would take years to make maps with that much detail, and game developer tools are gonna have to start involving procedural geometry generation a lot more, or games will be decades between concept, development and release....

 

Are the days of a lone mapper making levels gone?

Edited June 10, 2005 by obscurus

[sparhawk]

I doubt it. Id doesn't like to license external code if they are not forced to. Of course this doesn't mean that others, who license D3 wont do this.

[kwc]

I must say I'm impressed by the U3 engine.... these screens don't really do it justice...

 

Once the hardware has become advanced enough to run games with this engine as well as current systems run D3, I think someone ought to make a Thief-like mod on it... damn, from what I've seen, this engine is entirely capable of rendering huge, detailed cities and I distinctly remember someone at Epic saying it will support streaming (huge, seamless worlds) and a very advanced occlusion system for visibility calculations. I think THAT is a crucial advantage to U3, and not insanely high res textures and displacement mapping... The screens (and videos) that impress me the most are those which show those unbelievably HUGE and realistic looking vistas. Now that's something to whet my appetite... I'm not too big on sci-fi sounding specifications about pixel-this and vertex-that.

 

Not even mentioning their visual scripting system. I hear modding for U3 will be extremely simplified, while at the same time allowing for more complexity. Some screens on the unreal technology site do seem to show AI programming with minimal code. And the same goes for shaders. I once read an article in which some Epic guy bragged that with U3 engine, one is able to implement drastically different playing mechanics within a single level in a matter of hours.

 

Now, whether all this cool stuff will actually make it into the final build, remains to be seen, but looks like they're pulling it off well...