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Whats wrong with EPIC/Unreal Engine?

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  • iniside
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    iniside polycounter lvl 6
    What is this Niagara?

    Niagara is new particle system along with new node based editor.
    Not much is known about it but there are few things I gathered:
    1. It will be easier to create custom modules (blueprints!).
    2. Easier/Better integration with blueprint and code. Whatever that means.
    I just hope it means that exposing parameters from particle system and manipulating particle will be easier and more tightly integrated.
    In current system it is very tedious and not that flexible.
  • martinszeme
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    martinszeme polycounter lvl 8
    Oh great! Yeah particles in UE4/UDK are a powerful thing but managing them, editing them can be a bit of a pain. Even maxes Particle Flow, while limited, is still much easier to pick up and work with.
  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
    Is Niagara going to be a lot like Softimage ICE? :D:D:D
    ICE is a visual programming platform that allows users to extend the capabilities of Softimage quickly and intuitively using a node-based dataflow diagram. This enables artists to create complex 3D effects and tools without scripting. Among the main uses for ICE are procedural modeling, deformation, rigging and particle simulation. It can also be used to control scene attributes without the need to write expressions, for example to add camera wiggle or make a light pulsate. ICE is a parallel processing engine that takes advantage of multi-core CPUs, giving users highly scalable performance.
  • dzibarik
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    dzibarik polycounter lvl 10
    Neox wrote: »
    will enthusiasts pay much more per game to make up for the developmentcosts?

    they usually do (see Kickstarter).
  • martinszeme
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    martinszeme polycounter lvl 8
    ZacD, I do hope so. ICE is awesome!
  • Neox
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    Neox godlike master sticky
    dzibarik wrote: »
    they usually do (see Kickstarter).

    sure if you find your niche you can live off of it, i was talking about AAA in comparison. thats totally different budgets and scopes and i don't think can be handled by kickstarter just now. Maybe when a few more projects proofed it is valid source for games for the masses.

    Also how many of the kickstarter games are really pushing the art limits of their generation? Usually its more about new gameplay, ways of storytellng etc. , and i think this is the right way to do it.
  • WarrenM
    dzibarik wrote: »
    they usually do (see Kickstarter).

    Sort of. For every game that makes their goal, how many fail to do so?
  • claydough
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    claydough polycounter lvl 10
    dzibarik wrote: »
    they usually do (see Kickstarter).

    I think it's also important to target yer audience knowledgeably. Konami's new announcement of Metal Gear Solid release for PC is a pretty good example! I am sure FOX engine hype will translate to $$$ rewards from PC sales alone.

    Also its worth mentioning that with the prestige of PC graphics quality there is no accounting how much that hype will help PS4 sales as well.

    speaking of kickstarter...
    some new "EX"-irrational games team making "not" bioshock obviously shock-esque NARRATIVE game featured on gametrailers today.

    ( looks fun and very bioshocky )
    http://youtu.be/J7l55sTQzG8
  • sbiswas
    iniside wrote: »
    5. Epic is not Crytek with dedicated R&D department dedicated to rendering.
    6. Which is shame, but hey, priorities.

    Yeah, thats a shame. Shame!
  • roosterMAP
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    roosterMAP polycounter lvl 14
    I have to say that whenever I talked to the render programmers where I work abt real time GI, they always kinda cringed at the feature. Mainly because... it never really works well. Its SUPPER expensive, and always requires dropping a bunch of processor power to execute. And even if you can get it running at over 30fps at a reasonable resolution (with no other tasks polluting the CPU and GPU) is comes with a whole host of bugs and artifacts.

    The more popular way to make real time GI work (an algorithm called 'voxel cone tracing') is to fill the scene with voxels use them in your lighting solution. The problem is that the voxels need to be RIDICULOUSLY numerous and high res to get rid of light or shadow bleeding. In this case, the bleeding would occur because an "illuminated" voxel is primarily occupying an illuminated space, but with a small portion of is occupying partially occluded space.
    This looks similar to having way too low res lightmaps.

    Clearly a screen space solution is needed, and there is some really cool research being done.
    https://people.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~ritschel/Papers/SSDO.pdf


    We'll see what happens. But personally, I would rather stick with a combination of PBR, nice shadows, and AO.
  • ambershee
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    ambershee polycounter lvl 17
    Screen space solutions can never work, because the whole point of GI is that light can reflect off surfaces that may or may not be within the camera frustum.
  • iniside
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    iniside polycounter lvl 6
    ambershee wrote: »
    Screen space solutions can never work, because the whole point of GI is that light can reflect off surfaces that may or may not be within the camera frustum.

    Bah. It's good solution to complement world space GI. For something like tree branches. Or very localized GI.

    But on it's own ? I agree, screen space GI alone is useless and you are better without it.
    Unless by screen space you mean color bleeding to nearby pixels.
  • OCASM
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    OCASM polycounter lvl 2
    TAN wrote: »
    Also all the new engines are leaning towards the real time GI for obvious reasons. Like Snowdrop ( my favorite) , Fox Engine etc... So it completely LOGICAL to use a real time GI solution.
    Fox Engine's GI isn't truly dynamic since it requires placing light probes in the level and baking cubemaps offline at key TOD values. At runtime the engine simply interpolates between those key values.

    You can use that method in UE4 by capturing cubemaps as textures and then blending them at runtime with post process volumes.
  • TAN
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    TAN polycounter lvl 12
    OCASM wrote: »
    Fox Engine's GI isn't truly dynamic since it requires placing light probes in the level and baking cubemaps offline at key TOD values. At runtime the engine simply interpolates between those key values.


    This is exactly how every engine out there is doing it right now, including CE. The probes are there to supply local information to PBR materials and ambient lighting. And this is not wrong or bad.

    Like I said UE4 has a nice potential future for real time GI but current solution is simply... well... bad :)

    I hope they implement VXGI. It would be real nice to have real time lighting in that engine.
  • blankslatejoe
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    blankslatejoe polycounter lvl 19
    Neox wrote: »
    we worked on a few productions that dropped enlighten later on because of performance issues. its not like this realtime gi stuff is where it should be for most productions.

    I can echo this. It gets pretty results but it's just a tech mismatch for many types of games.
  • OCASM
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    OCASM polycounter lvl 2
    TAN wrote: »
    This is exactly how every engine out there is doing it right now, including CE. The probes are there to supply local information to PBR materials and ambient lighting. And this is not wrong or bad.

    Actually in CryEngine you can't interpolate between cubemaps at runtime so it's much more limited for dynamic day night cycles.
  • Froyok
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    Froyok greentooth
    I can echo this. It gets pretty results but it's just a tech mismatch for many types of games.
    I'm curious to see how it will end then since Unity integrated Enlighten...
  • TAN
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    TAN polycounter lvl 12
    OCASM wrote: »
    Actually in CryEngine you can't interpolate between cubemaps at runtime so it's much more limited for dynamic day night cycles.

    Hey mate. Can you elaborate ? I guess I couldn't understand what you meant exactly.
    You mean probes works fır dynamic GI sources but not for point lights... or something ? :D

    It is interesting and rare to be able to talk with someone who actually understands the stuff (CE) and willing to chat about it :D
  • juniez
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    juniez polycounter lvl 10
    I believe he means that you can't interpolate between differently-colored environment probes so you can't compensate ambient lighting as the ToD gets darker etc. Not sure how true that is, though.
  • TAN
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    TAN polycounter lvl 12
    Thanks junieaz

    I guess that is what you mean ?

    http://www.crydev.net/viewtopic.php?f=322&t=123352


    There is also a video at the last post.
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