Here's the video of the developer walktrough:
<a href="http://www.gametrailers.com/video/exclusive-development-unreal-engine/731871" rel="nofollow">http://www.gametrailers.com/video/exclusive-development-unre...</a><p>It's stunning that this runs on a single Nvidia GeForce 680GTX in an editor without any visible lag at all. I wonder why tesselation wasn't enabled though, it may have been because of performance issues.
Coming from a film background, it is clear there is a lot of conflation happening in these articles between light that 'behaves' like it would in the real world, and 'good' lighting. That is why you get quotes like in this article 'I light my scene by dropping a sun in'.<p>In reality, there is a whole lot more to lighting then simply having lights and materials that behave naturally. Sure, this gives you more realistic looking results out of the box, but it doesn't mean you don't have to sculpt and massage and tune your lighting to achieve the artistic result you want, especially for interiors, or scenes with characters in the foreground.
The bit where he made a change to the source code, let it recompile on it's own, got a little alert in the editor when it finished and then had the change apply all without restarting the engine...WOW!
Incredibly stunning tech. Now, I'm gonna go fantasize about an open-source version of this with updates every month (instead of every 3 years) -- as a compromise, I could do without the whole hot-reloading IntelliEditor shebang and consoles support -- a concentration on PC hardware that "will be commodity in 2 years, on mobile in 4 years, but can already be bought as state of the art now" (aka Kepler GPUs) would be enough.<p>To the pros: in your opinion, which of the many FOSS engines out there (many of which carrying a large legacy code-base of supporting soon-outdated modes of operation such as DX9 or lower or GL < 4.0) is the most likely candidate to offer a deferred pipeline incorporating lighting / particles such as we see here in this UE4 demo, at that level of performance and (expected but also demoed) robustness? Again, their "industry" tack (smart editor / console support, "we license only to pro developers" stance etc) would <i>not</i> be required ... only the "metal".
This stuff is really fascinating. Does anyone have any recommended reading or general advice as to how to learn more about game/graphical engine implementation? I mean, from the ground up. (I'm a CS undergrad and the closest we've gotten to learning about this has been the computational geometry chapter in CLRS, but that was a mildly esoteric introduction to everything that is possible in this field.)
The graphics stuff is amazing, but I'd be also interested to know how they achieve hot-loading with C++. It seems to me that Erlang's philosophy (or FP in general) would be of great advantage here - just have the engine handle entity state and make all of the game world manipulating functions referentially transparent. This way one can swap code between world "ticks" (or update cycles) without worrying about breaking something.<p>I don't know how efficient something like that would be though; somebody mentioned cache issues with lumping heterogenous properties together, but maybe this could be optimized behind the scenes.
At this point, seeing this kind of extremely high production value animation used to enact this kind of fantasy scene instantly makes me think of hackneyed backstory and plot focus-group optimized to death to appeal to slightly dull 14-year-olds. You don't throw out that sort of development budget to try out something with even a hint of narrative experimentalness, and you can always rely on there being kids with disposable income who haven't yet been saturated with cliches to the point of fatigue.<p>"This looks very well done, it's probably bad" is a strange heuristic to have.
We've certainly come a long way since Demon Attack and Pitfall! :)<p>I remember 23 years ago, trying to do 'ray tracing' on my Amiga would take... hours for one frame. It looked pretty good, but... wow. This is jaw-droppingly cool.
Why are people getting so excited about realtime global illumination and code hot-swap? CryEngine 3 already supports both, and has done so for the past year or so.<p>Realtime global illumination has been possible for the past few years. I believe Crytek was the first studio to make a game engine with support for the same (www6.incrysis.com/Light_Propagation_Volumes.pdf)<p>And the code hot-swap feature in the freely-available CryEngine 3 SDK isn't just for Lua, there's the CryMono project which adds support for hot-swapping C# scripts.
Very Beautiful! The demo has a nice Skyrim/LOTR feel to it and the lava flows were just gorgeous! If that lava flow generation is completely procedural then I'm extremely impressed.<p>Writing a highly parametrized engine like that with JIT script compilation is plain awesome!
In a way, this system reminds me of Light Table[1] in its ability to change some code/settings and get instant feedback. It totally changes the way people create content because it becomes so much more accessible and so much faster to see changes -- you can play around with a lot of different approaches more quickly, resulting in more room for experimentation.<p>Pretty amazing stuff! Really curious to see the tools that power all of this, as well as hear the architect's (or architects') vision for all of this<p>[1] <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table" rel="nofollow">http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ibdknox/light-table</a>