Gotta love videos with useless titles and almost no text in the description...<p>Unreal 5.5 changes: <a href="https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/unreal-engine-5.5-release-notes" rel="nofollow">https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/...</a><p>Page on MegaLights, which appear to be the focus of the video: <a href="https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/megalights-in-unreal-engine" rel="nofollow">https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/...</a><p>Key quote from the above:<p>MegaLights is a stochastic direct lighting technique, which solves direct lighting though importance sampling of lights. It traces a fixed number of rays per pixel towards important light sources. If a light source is hit by a ray then that light’s contribution is added to the current pixel.<p>This approach has a few important implications:<p>Direct lighting is handled by a single pass in an unified manner, replacing multiple existing Deferred Renderer shadowing and shading techniques.<p>MegaLights not only reduce the cost of shadowing, but also reduce the cost of the shading itself.<p>MegaLights has a constant performance overhead, but quality may decrease as lighting complexity increases at a given pixel.
Can someone ELI5 how Megalight works so much better than the prior approach, and what the tradeoffs might be? (Im not a game developer)<p>Reading the link below, the best I can surmise is that they shifted the prioritization from following a lightsource through all the different interactions it has, to the opposite of identifying, per pixel, how each pixel is illuminated via a prioritization scheme for light sources, including any nearby pixels. So it's a per-pixel approximation that results in a something far more accurate than the prior 'declared brute force' approach? Each pixel gets 2-5 inbound rays that have the highest impact.<p>How did I do?<p><a href="https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/megalights-in-unreal-engine" rel="nofollow">https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/...</a>
I supposed I am getting older and that's the reason but I recently tried playing Horizon Zero Dawn LEGO and Cyberpunk and... the lightning was too much. I can't focus on what matters on the screen (can hardly find the hot spots), to the point where I'd tried to lower the quality settings to have less lightning elements and flatter textures. I noticed for those games that I really need high FPS (>60) otherwise I can't focus well enough.
The advanced capabilities of state-of-the-art game engines are extremely impressive in a technical sense. Unfortunately, in recent years this cutting-edge tech is rarely the enabling element in delivering games I enjoy playing. This is one reason I've changed my gaming focus to retro-gaming (of course, the DLC and other monetization-centric sins of big game studios are also a major factor).<p>While there are a few newer games I do enjoy, as far as I can tell, the bleeding edge features aren't needed to create what I find enjoyable about them. For me, I think the issue is that, outside rare exceptions, beyond a certain point increasing fidelity doesn't add value to game play. Admittedly, this is my own subjective assessment. Although I'm not in the game industry, I also worry that the increasing breadth and complexity of SOTA engines requires increasingly specialized knowledge and skill sets to leverage thus raising the bar out of reach of the smaller developers who often create the new games I do enjoy. It would be reassuring to hear from smaller and indie game developers who've found the new engine features in recent UE versions to be both accessible on small-team time budgets and enabling of significant new game play value.<p>Outside of gaming, I think newer capabilities like using SOTA engines for real-time virtual sets during film production are more creatively exciting because they can enable big budget story-telling on smaller and indie budgets.
2min papers released their vid on 5.5 a few days ago at about half the length. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzPxWXEZZcc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzPxWXEZZcc</a>
Very impressive! I have to wonder, as someone in the game development world working on 2D game, what the budget of a game would be to take full advantage of Unreal 5+.<p>City Skylines 2 is a good accessible example (even though it's made with Unity). Via mods, editing a single property takes several hours to make it look amazing. Time is spent adding texture decals, doodads, importing new textures, and playing around with the texture geometry (e.g. adjusting the grassy area size).<p>It seems like this depth of detail requires exponential time investment on the devs part. Small wonder CS2 launched with very few building options?
There's two things going through my mind after watching this video:<p>1st) What an amazing piece of technology this tool is.<p>2nd) How many years I would probably have to spend to learn all the ins and outs of that program from scratch.
Can't wait to play all these stunning Unreal 5 games at 1080p 60fps (upscaled from 720p with DLSS and frame gen) on my $2000 RTX 5090 that draws 500W. Truly next-gen.
While this looks astounding compared to where computer graphics was decades ago, it still often looks fake, both the terrain and the characters. Why is that, what is left to improve? Obviously character motion (maybe more variation so every motion captured playback is not identical), but even the cities and nature have some quality that seems fake. Maybe it's a limitation of my monitor, the fact that it can't display true daylight colors with UV? But live film or video looks reasonably real on the same monitor. Something (or several things) is still missing, the results still look Unreal.
Slightly on topic for anyone interested; Unreal Engine 5 now runs on WebGPU!(unofficially through my company, a third party)<p>Demo here:<p><a href="https://play.spacelancers.com/" rel="nofollow">https://play.spacelancers.com/</a>
What are the performance requirements for all these new fancy features? What kind of systems (console, PC+video card) can actually use them at a predictable frame rate?
Blender has the famed Donut Tutorial, which is a blast if you're even slightly interested in learning about it.<p>Does Unreal have something similar?