Unreal 3 Engine

#21 Was the castle in Unreal so detailed anyway? Can't remember that, just some "reflection" mapping and a large open area where the castle reside in.

#22 The funny thing is that in our pursuit of better technology and performance, this UE3 stuff will be old hat by 2006 :oP heck it took good old crytek three weeks to make far cry look just as good as the tech demo running in realtime on a 6800 (minus the hi dynamic lighting effect).

Guess when all is said and done it's the artists that make the game look great. Nothing much in those scenes that wouldn't look the same in any tech demo wether it ran on a 9800 or a 5950.....sigh...anyone got a quarter mill to throw at my game art so I can get normal maps that good looking.

#23 I know its all about content, but those who say that graphics dont enhance gameplay are wrong. I know, as a gamer, that graphics account for alot of good gameplay experiences. Basicly some games wouldnt be fun without good graphics. Why? Because good graphics can add a little to a game, but great graphics can make the game immersive. Half-life 2 wouldnt look as appatizing as it does if I wasnt sucked in by the immersivly photo-realistic opening sequences. I dont know how to describe it, but the wow factor of feeling like your in the world is helped greatly by good graphics, and thats all I can say.

#24

Quote:Guess when all is said and done it's the artists that make the game look great.

That *IS* one side of things that could make content creation easier. The 3D modelers I've worked with often have a bigger problem doing their models with fewer polygons than with many. That optimization is a big time-sink. So if the upcoming hardware capabilities means they don't NEED to do that optimization, I guess that improves things.

Online distribution will remain a problem, though. Packing all those triangles into a zip file...

Quote:Was the castle in Unreal so detailed anyway? Can't remember that, just some "reflection" mapping and a large open area where the castle reside in.

It had volumetric fog, ripples and waves in the water, particle-system torches, reflections on polished (wet?) marble, and probably a couple more special effects that had never been seen in a game like this before. It still doesn't look half-bad today.

#25 Oh please don't forget the LENS FLARES.

Every game released after that for the next year or so had amazingly unrealistic and overkill lens flares. Talk about starting an industry "fad".

:)

Volumetric light lens flares, now that's where it's at! :)

#26 Jay Barnson

The Torches were 2d sprites :P but anyway, good point.

#27 I guess that I must not be a real gamer then since I still find old classic games from the Intellivision, Atari2600, etc. still fun and enjoyable even though they are horribly outdated.

I know maybe if we pull an Atari and attempt to update these classic games with new graphics and such they will sell like hot cakes again ;)

Logan

#28 I'd sugest you have a look at what alienware is unfolding, it might be playable sooner then you think ;)

#29 Yeah the dual CPU/GPU machines for the consumer market got me excited. Not that I can afford one any time soon...but still...

#30 Well the new Alienwares can run unreal 3 w/ the processor bottlenecking it if i read correctly.

#31 Stefan -

We're both right. :) They were 2D sprites, but the sprites were dynamically generated textures which used particle emitters (I'm using stuff like that in Void War right now).

And yeah, gratuitous lens flares. We had a running joke at one company that our engines should not bother advertising polygon counts or frames per second, but instead use "lens flares per second" as a metric.

#32 I didnt say that games with outdated graphics werent fun. I still love to play Tribes 1, and Dod. But what I am saying is that are you sucked in, and totally immersed, in a game that looks almost photorealistic, or a game that doesnt?

Dont say that a game that doesnt have near photo-realistic graphics does a better job. I know that I wouldnt be completely lost in Morrowind if the graphics were poor, thats one catch of the game, it just looks and feels so alive.