Empires on UE4 (A collaborative project)

Concerning large maps, you might want to stream those in as well. I am not sure how well that works with landscapes, but everything else can be streamed and therefore be compiled in a completely separate map.

 

Do you have any examples of it running on lower to higher settings, preferably video format and picture to picture comparisons?
That should indicate on what people can run. Im not sure if renegade X ran on that engine, but I can run that perfectly.

 

Renegade X runs on Unreal Engine 3. Or what Lazybum said: UDK

 

Done in UE4, almost real:

[YOUTUBE]rf045VYP3z4[/YOUTUBE]

 

The lightning at the end kinda breaks the immersion

 

Lighting is pretty ok, but the screen space reflections are still the biggest immersion breaker for me. Apart from that, I don't know a better engine on the market right now.

 

Is it really a thing you could only do in UE4 or is it just dependant on the hours of work that are put in (and the texture resolution)?

 

That depends on what you relate to in the statement I made.

 

I was just talking about the detail of the interior in general, do games not look like this because of the time investment needed or because of technical limits?

 

Probably a bit of both.

I know I prefer low fidelity games because assets become cheap to make and stuff just gets simpler all around. I mean, you don't really need a separate hitbox mesh if you're dealing with some Minecraft-tier assets. And if you go that route, then you open the door to voxel-based stuff, which is probably the greatest thing ever for vehicles.

[YOUTUBE]AXhTK7F2iSo[/YOUTUBE]

 

A little bit of both actually. Unreal is one of the few even using PBR/PBS/BRDF (physical based renderer / physical based shader / bidirectional reflectance distribution function). More and more are warming up to the idea that's true, but that's still a bit far out.

This particular scene just looks good, because it looks like you would expect from a real physical flat.
What I have observed over the course of playing games for all the time I already do and even more since I started to 3D model myself is, that some artists tend to overdo it a bit, when the engine doesn't allow them to achieve photo realism. Some try so hard, the objects and environments they create almost seem surreal, even if they are not meant to be that way.
With PBR it is actually easier for an artist to comprehend the whole system, because it is not based on some arbitrary values, but on real, physical measurements.
Before, you pretty much only had your Diffuse, Specular and Glossiness. Say you wanted to achieve a look like gold for example. All you could do is just slide the values around until it looked good enough. To be honest, up to this day I know exactly what all three of these do in a shader, but I couldn't explain to you for the life of me, what their direct equivalent in the physical world is. Because there is none.
Base Color, Metallic and Roughness on the other hand can be directly measured with different instruments. There are already libraries popping up on the net, offering ready made materials, made from those measurements. You don't have to do trial and error anymore. You want to achieve a look like gold? Ok, here are the values, plug'em in and you are done. So yes, I think PBR makes texturing things easier and faster.
Add to that, that sculpting models is a thing since quite some time and reduction algorithms are getting better and better and producing usable low poly models out of high poly, without the artist having to do it themselves.
Additionally texturing got even easier with things like the Substance Tool Set, that allows you to apply the most often used effects to an object procedurally instead of having to draw it all by hand.

All in all, I think nowadays making art assets for a game, that are close to real life is even becoming easier, than something out of a fantasy world.

Of course you also had technical limitations before. PBR needs a bit more power than the older shaders to run. And it probably also took some time for graphics programmers to convert the rather complex math of this algorithm into an efficient shader program.

Just a quick note on what I mean with the screen space reflections and what about them breaks immersion for me:
Screen space reflections are not ray traced, so the engine doesn't gather what it has to reflect on certain surfaces in 3D space, but it is rather something that is calculated once the triangles are transformed to a 2D representation (right before what OpenGL calls "Fragments" are converted to pixels). It's a lot faster, but has one major flaw. You can't see reflections of things, that you don't currently see in your field of view. Take a reflective table for example. You will see it reflecting parts of the wall and parts of the ceiling. BUT the reflection will end, once it tries to reflect things that are outside of the borders of your screen. If you know where to look, you can see that happen quite a few times in the video.

Small addition for Sparatcus' vid:
Games like that are an even different breed entirely. You are basically passing most of the art work required off to the players themselves. There is a lot more coding work to do, relative to how much work artists have to put in than with the more traditionally built games.

 

Yeah I already know that. One of the programmers for the Fallout: Equestria project I worked on before actually programmed a PBR shader for Unity by himself and the game will use it.

 

I actually wonder if were going to hit a point where further engine upgrades will become meaningless, what with models and other jazz being too expensive to make while using the features.

Im curious if were in for some new, less taxing ways of modeling, texturing etc.

 

This is probably why source is still in use, it's a pretty cheap engine to develop for.

 

Just FYI, the artist, who modeled Notre Dame for Assassin's Creed Unity worked for more than two years on the damn thing.
http://assassinscreed.wikia.com/wiki/Notre-Dame

Also that thought is not even far off. At some point it will get too much to just do everything by hand. That's why Euclideon is hyping themselves so much with their scan technology.
But at some point the details just gets so small, it won't even be noticed. Also those methods only help you with things that already exist in our world. If you want to create something fictional, you'll still have to do it by hand.