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[GDC 2012] Unreal Engine 4

Aperto da Turrican3, 24 Febbraio, 2012, 12:43:08

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Turrican3

Citazione di: Il Sensei il 28 Febbraio, 2012, 00:30:34Si ok má chi ti e' venuto a raccattare a termini sotto lá pioggia e senza ombrelio?

[OT]
Ahah verissimo, onore al merito o meglio in questo caso, all'amicizia! :inlove:

Ian_solo

Citazione di: Rh_negativo il 24 Febbraio, 2012, 14:15:34
Le tech demo lo sono sempre.
Detto questo non ho dubbi che il motore sarà bellissimo, performante, versatile ecc... ma pur augurando tutto il bene del mondo ad Epic spero proprio che NON si ripeta lo stradominio dell'UE anche nella prossima gen.
Aldilà di un paio di esempi di SH che sono riuscite ad usarlo bene e dargli il proprio tocco personale in questa gen si sono visti veramente troppi giochi avere gli stessi pregi e gli stessi difetti derivati dall'usare tutti lo stesso motore.

Viva i motori proprietari :gogogo:

Concordo pienamente, l'UE ha rotto le bolas... insomma, tutti personaggi grossi che si muovono in fondali bellissimi ma dall'interazione NULLA! Io sinceramente spero che la next gen non punti più sulla pura potenza "visiva", ma aggiunga interattività agli ambienti. Insomma mi accontenterei di giochi con la grafica di Heavy Rain e Uncharted 3  :lol:

Turrican3

Citazione di: Ian_solo il 28 Febbraio, 2012, 21:20:24l'UE ha rotto le bolas... insomma, tutti personaggi grossi che si muovono in fondali bellissimi ma dall'interazione NULLA!

Temo sia più una scelta degli sviluppatori quella però: ho dato un rapido sguardo al sito ufficiale di Unreal Engine e sembra che, ad esempio, sia tranquillamente in grado di gestire ambienti distruttibili e tante altre belle cosette.

Ian_solo

Citazione di: Turrican3 il 29 Febbraio, 2012, 09:47:30
Temo sia più una scelta degli sviluppatori quella però: ho dato un rapido sguardo al sito ufficiale di Unreal Engine e sembra che, ad esempio, sia tranquillamente in grado di gestire ambienti distruttibili e tante altre belle cosette.

Certo Turry, potrebbe essere soltanto colpa delle SH che adesso puntano anche a uscire con ACTION e TPS che vendono un macello nonostante propongando alla fine la stessa cosa  :'(
Comunque parlando di motori grafici a Colonia l'anno scorso ho visto in sede privata da Bethesda PREY 2 e DISHONORED, questi sono due titoli veramente interessanti che se non sbaglio non son stati creati con il motore UE. Per non parlare di quello di Skyrim.
Anche il motore di ID usato in Rage non è male, anzi! (parlo di pc e non delle versioni console).
E non scordiamoci quelli di Cryteck.
Insomma io spero che nella nuova gen vengano usati più motori per gestire generi di giochi diversi...

The King

ma guardate che la responsabilità non è del motore, ma di chi lo usa.
L'unreal engine 3 sta alla base di Mass Effect, Bioshock e Mirror's Edge: non credo si possa dire che questi giochi siano uguali tra loro, o uguali ai giochi Epic.

Tutto sta nel prendere da base quel motore (che ha grandi vantaggi) e nell'adattarlo alle proprie esigenze.
Poi se c'è qualcuno che lo prende e lo schiaffa nel codice così, allegramente, tanto da inficiare la resa del proprio gioco, beh, non è certo colpa dell'unreal engine, no?  ;)

Turrican3

Mirror's Edge (parlo da ultraignorante della specifica materia, beninteso) mi ha dato l'impressione di essere però piuttosto differente per via della direzione artistica, laddove in titoli un po' più affini come tematiche/ambientazione qualche similitudine di troppo (per esempio nella resa di certe riflessioni) io devo dire che un po' la notavo... boh, forse è un po' 50% "pigrizia" degli sviluppatori / 50% stesso motore, non saprei dirlo con certezza.

Ian_solo

Citazione di: Turrican3 il  9 Marzo, 2012, 21:19:23
Mirror's Edge (parlo da ultraignorante della specifica materia, beninteso) mi ha dato l'impressione di essere però piuttosto differente per via della direzione artistica, laddove in titoli un po' più affini come tematiche/ambientazione qualche similitudine di troppo (per esempio nella resa di certe riflessioni) io devo dire che un po' la notavo... boh, forse è un po' 50% "pigrizia" degli sviluppatori / 50% stesso motore, non saprei dirlo con certezza.

Ragazzi ma Bioshock per quanto bellissimo come scelte estetiche e atmosfera riflette un pò di plasticosità alla UE da metri e metri...
Mass Effect per quanto bello sia esteticamente ha un'interazione nulla con l'ambiente (in tutti i sensi), bellissimi i personaggi principali ma il resto è molto ripetitivo.  :teeth:

Turrican3

Sempre in tema di proclami nextgen (di cui parlavo oggi in altro thread) due filmati dalla GDC 2012 che mostrano cose che a mio avviso non sarebbe male vedere nei giochi che mirano al realismo:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G6vo95BSjw&  www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpfRrQfqD4E


( via NeoGAF --> http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=466097 )

G4_News

CitazioneUnreal Engine 4 demo runs on Nvidia's Kepler

Last year Epic Games showed the next-generation "Samaritan" demo, which used a litany of new technologies to create one of the most impressive graphics presentations to date. At that time, Samaritan ran on three high-end Nvidia graphic cards and a power source the size of a cinder block. Today, Epic Games is able to run Samaritan on a single card, the Nvidia Kepler hardware, which powers their new line of GPUs. But that's not all they can get the Kepler to do.

"That board we ran the Samaritan demo on is the same board we're running the Unreal Engine 4 demos on," Epic Games vice president Mark Rein told Vox Games, referring to a demo of the company's next engine, shown behind closed doors at the GDC and accompanied by a severe non-disclosure agreement.

This means Unreal Engine 4 is running on hardware that will be available to the public very soon.


When asked if that meant Unreal Engine 4 was designed for the next-generation of consoles, Rein said, "It just means, that next big leap in gaming technology, Unreal Engine 4 will power that. We expect that to be consoles, but Nvidia is making PCs do it. Sooner or later, it could be pads doing it. We're not being snobby saying it should be this or that."

Rein clarified that Unreal Engine 3 won't disappear when developers begin using Unreal Engine 4. In fact, Samaritan isn't even hitting the limit of UE3.

"We can get so more out of that card than what you saw in Samaritan," said Rein.

http://www.theverge.com/gaming/2012/3/8/2855732/unreal-engine-4-demo-runs-on-nvidias-kepler

TheVerge.com riporta dichiarazioni del vicepresidente di Epic, Mark Rein, secondo il quale la demo Samaritan gira attualmente su GPU Nvidia basate sull'architettura Kepler, di imminente commercializzazione. Nel corso della GDC 2012 l'azienda ha presentato anche dei dimostrativi di Unreal Engine 4 (coperti però da rigidissimi NDA) sul medesimo hardware.

Secondo Rein l'introduzione di UE4 non segnerà la fine del predecessore, che a suo dire persino con la suddetta demo Samaritan non sarebbe ancora sfruttato al massimo delle potenzialità.

Turrican3

Citazione[...]

UE4 represents nothing less than the foundation for the next decade of gaming. It may make Microsoft and Sony rethink how much horsepower they'll need for their new hardware. It will streamline game development, allowing studios to do in 12 months what can take two years or more today. And most important, it will make the videogames that have defined the past decade look like puppet shows.

Will that be enough? Today's videogame industry generates about $65 billion a year in revenue, and the vast majority of that comes from premium titles that can cost upwards of $150 million to produce (and have the potential to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars on release day alone). But paradigms are shifting: Cheaply developed mobile titles and an unforgiving economy have cast doubt on the future of the blockbuster game. Why go big and risky when you can be safe and profitable? Unreal 4 is Epic's answer to that question. With it, the company is staking its existence on a bold prediction: that the future of the industry depends on ever-more realistic visual spectacle.

[...]

It's late February, a week before the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, where Epic will be unveiling UE4 for the first time outside of the office. Reps from Microsoft, Sony, Nvidia, and the most influential game developers in the industry will be seeing the demo behind closed doors; the NDA-only affair will be Epic's first and best chance to convince them that the future of gaming is unlike anything they previously imagined. "There is a huge responsibility on the shoulders of our engine team and our studio to drag this industry into the next generation," says Cliff Bleszinski, Epic's design director. "It is up to Epic, and Tim Sweeney in particular, to motivate Sony and Microsoft not to phone in what these next consoles are going to be. It needs to be a quantum leap. They need to damn near render Avatar in real time, because I want it and gamers want it—even if they don't know they want it."

While "damn near render Avatar in real time" likely isn't up on a whiteboard in the office, it's the kind of rapid-fire hyperbole that has made Bleszinski the face of Epic to many gamers. For his part, though, Sweeney is a bit more diplomatic. "We're much more in sync with the console makers than any other developer is," he says. "That means we can give detailed recommendations with a complete understanding of what is going to be commercially possible." In other words, Epic has seen the specs of proposed new consoles and is actively lobbying for them to be more powerful. It could be a bad sign for the industry if new, relatively underpowered consoles make an appearance at this year's E3 consumer show (as is popularly rumored about Sony's PS3 successor, the alleged specs of which leaked in April).

[...]

For Unreal 4, yet another quantum leap in hardware has to happen. Creating a game that operates on a level of fidelity comparable to human vision, Sweeney says, will require hardware at least 2,000 times as powerful as today's highest-end graphics processors. That kind of super-hi-def experience may be only two or three console generations away, but it hinges on manufacturers moving toward the power levels Sweeney is looking for today. He needs the next generation of consoles to be good.

In a scant three months of production, a team of 14 engineers has fashioned a video demo to show off the new engine, and it acts essentially as a full-featured, if small, top-of-the-line game—the first title of the next generation.
"I had sleepless nights over this damn thing in the beginning, but I think we got the disasters out of the way," says art director Chris Perna, the man responsible for the look and feel of the demo. Lead artist Wyeth Johnson adds, "In the time I have been here, we have never not pulled it off." Johnson, a six-year veteran of Epic, is referring not only to the company's ability to deliver on tight deadlines but also its track record of wowing the skeptics.

Like so many games, the demo begins with what's known as a cinematic, a noninteractive scene meant to wow players with all the punch of a blockbuster movie trailer. In this case, it's as if H. R. Giger and George R. R. Martin took peyote together. And had a baby. And that baby had a fever dream. But it's not just empty spectacle—it's a crystal ball. Every pixel is spent on visual effects that are impossible in today's games because of hardware limitations. But those limitations could be overcome: In an impressive departure from the usual practice of such demos, this one is running on a single consumer-level graphics card—Nvidia's new Kepler GTX 680.

Here's what the Unreal guys are hoping will singe the eyeballs of executives, hardware engineers, and game developers when they see it at GDC: A heavily armored demon knight sits frozen to his throne in a ruined mountain fortress. As he awakens, lava begins to flow around him and flames engulf the world. A magma vent spews a column of smoke and smoldering embers. He stands, sending up showers of sparks that dance, fall out of focus, and fade into ash. The knight hefts a massive hammer that glows with an inner fire. As he stalks down an empty corridor, a deep rumble sounds and masonry falls from the ceiling—this is no mountain but a volcano on the verge of eruption. When the knight steps outside, we see a range of snow-capped peaks in the far-off distance, rendered in stunning clarity. Behind him the volcano belches black smoke, while burning embers mix with swirling snowflakes.

In previous engines, one floating ember was enough to slow performance considerably; a shower of them was impossible. With Unreal Engine 4, there can be millions of such particles, as long as the hardware is potent enough to sustain them. Game developers overuse features of every new engine, because they are suddenly so easy to implement. In the original Unreal Engine, for example, the ability to render colored lighting led to a rash of games that employed the effect. The same may prove true for UE4′s particle effects, for better or worse. ("Mark my words," Bleszinski says, "those particles are going to be whored by developers.")

In one 153-second clip, the Epic team has packed all the show-off effects that have flummoxed developers for years: lens flare, bokeh distortion, lava flow, environmental destruction, fire, and detail in landscapes many miles away. Plus, it's breathtakingly photo-realistic—or would be if demon knights were, you know, a real thing.


But that's just the opening scene. After the cinematic, Epic's senior technical artist, Alan Willard, starts playing the demo. At this point the view switches to that disembodied first-person perspective made so ubiquitous by shooting games like the Call of Duty franchise and Epic's own influential Unreal titles. Willard maneuvers his avatar into a dimly lit room where a flashlight turns on, revealing eddies of dust—thousands of floating particles that were invisible until exposed. In another room, globes of various sizes float in the air. Willard rolls a light-emanating orb along the floor (think of a spherical flashlight that rolls like a bowling ball) and beams of light wobble and change direction, illuminating parts of the room and revealing the clusters of floating spheres with a kind of strobe effect. At first it all seems perfectly familiar: "Well, yeah," you think, "that's how they'd act in the real world. What's the big deal?" But it is a big deal: This is stuff that videogames have never been able to simulate—the effects simply aren't possible on today's consoles.

In the past, game developers employed a trick known as staged lighting to give the impression that light in a game was behaving as it would in the real world. That meant a lot of pre-rendering—programming hundreds of light sources into an environment that would then be turned on or off depending on in-game events. If a building collapsed in a given scene, all the light effects that had been employed to make it look like a real interior would remain in place over empty space. Shadows would remain in the absence of structure; glares that once resulted from sunlight glinting off windows would remain floating in midair. To avoid this, designers programmed the light to look realistic in any of that scene's possible situations—one situation at a time. "You would have to manually sculpt the lighting in every section of every level," Bleszinski says. "The number of man-years that required was astounding." UE4 introduces dynamic lighting, which behaves in response to its own inherent properties rather than a set of preprogrammed effects. In other words, no more faking it. Every light in a scene bounces off every surface, creating accurate reflections. Colors mix, translucent materials glow, and objects viewed through water refract. And it's all being handled on the fly, as it happens. That's not realistic—that's real.

[...]

Making a splashy videogame used to be something that a small group could accomplish. Now it takes a small army. "Call of Duty was a game that a team of a few dozen could develop on PlayStation 2," Sweeney says. "Now Activision has hundreds of people working on Call of Duty for the current-gen consoles. What's supposed to happen in the next generation? Are they going to have 4,000 people?" To combat the bloat, Sweeney has stuffed UE4 with tools that promise shortened production pipelines and lower production costs (and all the profit that such efficiency represents).

How does that happen? For one thing, Unreal Engine 4 allows developers to see changes to the game instantly, as they work.
Current production pipelines have the least WYSIWYG process imaginable: For example, when lighting elements are altered, computers have to parse the data and figure out how to render the changes. Depending on the extent of those edits, this process, sometimes called baking, can take half an hour or more. UE4 removes that bake time entirely. The effect it could have on studio workflow is staggering.

[...]

The possible applications for Unreal Engine 4—augmented reality, medical simulation, even production pipelines for television and movies—seem to stretch to the horizon. At its core, however, UE4 is a videogame engine, and its first reveal outside the office is on a March morning at the 2012 Game Developers Conference. It's D-day for the Epic team; this is what they've been working feverishly toward. Inside the Moscone Center in San Francisco, though, the mood is less Normandy than it is Camp X-Ray. Thirty people file into a windowless conference room to watch Epic's demo. Around their necks hang badges advertising the names of their employers: Nvdia, Microsoft, AMD, Sony. Video cameras dot the walls, and there's one hulking security guard on each side of the door. (Apparently, when you're showing off progress, ingress and egress are out of the question.)

When Alan Willard walks the audience through the demo—complete with armored demon, dancing sparks, and rolling balls of light—the room falls still. Then the twist: Willard reveals that both the cinematic scene and the following tech demo haven't been running off a game file but in real time from within UE4′s game editor. It's like finding out that the actors on TV are actually tiny people living inside your set. It also helps him show that changes can be made to the game's design and code, recompiled and executed nearly instantly—a technical feat that has been simply unheard-of in game development. And just like that, the silence in the room becomes reverent. The videogame industry has changed.

In June, UE4 will be revealed to the gaming public. The reactions will likely be as spontaneous as staged lighting effects used to be. It's all pre-scripted at this point: Fanboys will wet their pants, contrarian analysts will wring their hands, message boards will explode in either fury or collective orgasm. In all of the clamor and fanfare, though, the simple truth will be lost. Epic has redefined gaming before, and with Unreal 4 the company is doing it again.

But here at GDC, the engineers and executives don't gasp or cheer—these are hardware guys, after all. They came to see the future, and having seen it, they walk out of the room with disbelieving smiles on their faces. They have a lot of work to do.

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/05/ff_unreal4/all/1?pid=2555&viewall=true



Eccolo qua, Unreal Engine 4 (o UE4 se preferite)

Ho dovuto accorciare l'articolo perchè era a dir poco lunghissimo, ma ho evidenziato alcuni dei pezzi più interessanti e comunque chi volesse può seguire il link e leggere il pezzo per intero.

Che dire?
Ci sono affermazioni piuttosto importanti (in primis quella dei tempi di sviluppo pressochè dimezzati, che potrebbe rivelarsi vitale), e altre che personalmente trovo discutibili (una PS4 relativamente poco potente potrebbe essere un male per l'industria) ma vengono entrambe presentate senza il virgolettato quindi non credo sia corretto attribuirle a Epic, quanto piuttosto a punti di vista dell'autore dell'articolo dedotti dalla presentazione.

Staremo a vedere comunque.

Turrican3

#25
Ah una cosa però la devo aggiungere, perchè questa NON viene da chi ha scritto l'articolo ma è un virgolettato di CliffyB in persona:

“There is a huge responsibility on the shoulders of our engine team and our studio to drag this industry into the next generation,” says Cliff Bleszinski, Epic’s design director. “It is up to Epic, and Tim Sweeney in particular, to motivate Sony and Microsoft not to phone in what these next consoles are going to be. It needs to be a quantum leap. They need to damn near render Avatar in real time, because I want it and gamers want it—even if they don’t know they want it.

E' una cazzata.
O meglio, generalizzare in questo modo IMHO è una solenne cazzata (e quel "anche se non sanno di volerlo" finale beh, la dice lunga sul marketing).
A questo punto mi verrebbe da dire, caro sig. Bleszinski, parli per lei e non a nome di altri. ;)

Mystic

io invece sono daccordo con il grande Cliff  :bowdown:

spero che arrivino presto queste next-gen dalla potenza bruta (ovviamente escludo il WiiU quando parlo di potenza bruta :hihi: )

can't wait  :gogogo:

Turrican3

#27
Essere d'accordo (o in disaccordo) con CliffyB è un conto.

Sostenere che qualcosa di molto prossimo ad Avatar in realtime sia quel che vogliono tutti i giocatori trovo sia leggermente diverso.


EDIT/PS: e aggiungo... oggi la sola scheda grafica di cui si parla costa attorno ai 500 euro. :|
Capisco gli sconti per i grandi volumi di cui potranno usufruire Sony e/o Microsoft ( "e/o" = a seconda delle decisioni che prenderanno in merito all'HW, che non è detto siano le medesime), capisco che probabilmente passerà ancora un anno (abbondante?) per il rilascio delle next-nextgen e che quindi questa cifra è destinata ad abbassarsi pesantemente, capisco il vendere in perdita, insomma capisco tutto... però IMHO non ce lo possiamo permettere un altro bagno di sangue stile lancio PS3 (ovvero a prezzi pazzeschi)

Parsifal

Beh però chi tra i videogiocatori non vorrebbe "un qualcosa di molto prossimo ad Avatar in realtime"?  :)

E poi ho da qualche settimana acquistato una gtx 680 per circa 500 euro appunto disfacendomi della precedente 580 anche se al momento non c'era assolutamente bisogno  :hihi: :sweat:

SilentBobZ

Citazione di: Parsifal il 18 Maggio, 2012, 11:53:58
Beh però chi tra i videogiocatori non vorrebbe "un qualcosa di molto prossimo ad Avatar in realtime"?  :)

E poi ho da qualche settimana acquistato una gtx 680 per circa 500 euro appunto disfacendomi della precedente 580 anche se al momento non c'era assolutamente bisogno  :hihi: :sweat:

:sweat:  :sweat: dicamo che hai messo le mani avanti  :sweat:  :sweat: