Slashdot Mirror

No, there are a few games which use the Unreal 3 engine:
Clicky

Reading comprehension...anything built on the Unreal 3 engine.

Like one of these many licensees:
http://www.unrealtechnology.com/news.php

Native PhysX Support:
http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2007/05/30/unreal-3-thinks-threading

Umm... yeah, there's a few more then that announced on the unreal technology website.

Plus at least one US state is using it and 3 US school boards to make interactive 3d learning modules.

So there must be lots of problems with the engine. Either that or one company doesn't know how to read the UDN.

Agreed, with one thing to note. The game Pariah made by Digital Extremes flopped. I know it's not Epic, but it's Epics closest partner in developing the Unreal Tournament Series of games.

It might not be the engine, it might be the implementation. Besides, have you seen all the features the engine has? It's bound to have a few bugs in it. Windows, Linux, and OSX all do. And if there's so many problems, you'd think more of the companies that licensed it would complain. There's lots of companies using it.

One can only hope they do as bang up of a job as they did with those Halo games...or Thief deadly shadows or even Oblivion.

I wasn't aware that Epic made any of those games. Naive me, I thought that was Bungee, Looking Glass Studios, and Bethesda Sofworks respectively.

Although I know that "Thief: Deadly Shadows" was built on the Unreal Engine. But it wasn't made by Epic.

Something else to consider is sure GoW only solid 2mil copies..
But the majority of that development time is actually split into 2 different titles (at least) and engine licensing.
1- Gears of War .. wee new IP..
2- UT2007 .. I'm wondering if it'll sell as well as GoW? we'll just have to wait and see.
3- UE3 Engine licensing..

Lets do some fuzzy math:
an UE2 Royality-Bearing license ran $350,000 + $50,000 per extra platform.
AFAIK, UE3 License terms haven't been published to the public yet..

According to the front page of http://www.epicgames.com/, there are 21 different annoucements for 'company x licenses UE3'. I figure there are at least few that are not annouced.. and some of those companies are big-boys that may have aquired multiple licenses and or multiple platform licensing.

Now here's the speculation part:
If the UE3 license runs the same as a UE2 license, and there are only 21 titles at base rates.. that's > 7mil just there.. exclusive of price adjustment (something tells me UE3 is more $$) and Royalites (if they use a royal based model still with UE3.. )

Epic in recent years as struck me more as an engine development company, not primarly a game maker.. (don't get me wrong.. i like the UT series ;]

I love Ogre3D, I use it myself for small game projects, but I don't think you could compare it to the Unreal 3 Engine. NASA would have to spend over $350k just to bring the Ogre3D engine upto spec with the Unreal engine, so why not just buy the Unreal engine and save a lot of time and money by not reinventing the wheel.

Ogre3D is mainly a graphics engine (Ogre stands for Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine), where as the Unreal Engine is a complete game engine with graphics, AI, networking code, physics, sound, etc..

Take a look at the list of Unreal Engine features and a look at the Ogre3D Engine features.

Oops - I take the $350K back (heh - I wish!)...no I didn't RTFA (c'mon...this *is* /. after all). They'll of course be using custom license http://www.unrealtechnology.com/html/licensing/ter ms.shtml. But I still stand by the "why not FOSS?" question.
This is precisely the kind of project that could both benefit and benefit from the FOSS paradigm, especially considering the duration of the projects. Who knows what's going to happen to Epic over the next 20-odd years?
I know this is really just NASA wanting some kind of PR exercise, but the concerns of their launch technology (if you excuse the pun) not being available throughout the duration ought to have some sway over how they approach the project.

The Visual Material Editor in Unreal Editor, apparently. From here - http://unrealtechnology.com/html/technology/ue30.s html

Visual Material Editor. By visually connecting the color, alpha and coordinate outputs of textures and programmer-defined material components, artists can create materials ranging from simple layered blends to extremely complex materials and dynamically interacting with scene lights.

One thing that should help immensely witht the ammount of work that must be put into making worlds and characters look good in UE3 is the new "Visual Material Editor" that is part of the new Unreal Editor.

By visually connecting the color, alpha and coordinate outputs of textures and programmer-defined material components, artists can create materials ranging from simple layered blends to extremely complex materials and dynamically interacting with scene lights.

if you wanna know a bit mroe about Unreal Engine 3, check out UnrealTechnology.com

My geforce6600 is dog slow on my athlonXP +2400 for doom3 and everquest2.

Its like nothing is fast enough. After reading about the trillion or so polygons for unreal3 or whatever its going to be called, I need a new card. The graphics are stunning and I wonder if even the x1900 will be able to handle it?

Take a look at the next Unreal engine. Many of these advanced features are already there. The demo video is quite incredible. There's also Project Offset which I'm eagerly awaiting as well.

Er, got the link screwed up: http://www.unrealtechnology.com/

HDR has been around for a longer while than you think. It has been used in games before, it has been demoed before. Some of you may recognize HDR in the form of light blooms, especially from the earlier screenshots of the Unreal 3 Engine, as seen here:
HDR Glow in Unreal 3

Although some say light blooms are NOT high-dynamic range (which is true for the case where you just make something radiate light in a way that washes out details of objects around it - see here), light blooms can be done with high-dynamic range color, which is what the Unreal 3 Engine page mentions in a brief caption for the above picture.

Anyways, there are other games that ALREADY do HDR, such as Far Cry (with patch 1.3 or above). The best place to get a good view of it is ON a beach in Far Cry that is directly in the sun. It is funny that Far Cry has been ignored as the first of its kind in many things, but it really did do a lot of stuff that Doom 3, Half Life 2, etc. did, except earlier. It was also virutally bugless, compared to for example, the stuttering bug common in Half Life 2. Most are misinformed in crediting games such as HL2 or D3 in bringing in the generation of shader-heavy games (aka 'next gen' games).

That being said, if you don't know what HDR is, the Anandtech Article on HL2:TLC is a good read.

HDR has been around for a longer while than you think. It has been used in games before, it has been demoed before. Some of you may recognize HDR in the form of light blooms, especially from the earlier screenshots of the Unreal 3 Engine, as seen here:
HDR Glow in Unreal 3

Although some say light blooms are NOT high-dynamic range (which is true for the case where you just make something radiate light in a way that washes out details of objects around it - see here), light blooms can be done with high-dynamic range color, which is what the Unreal 3 Engine page mentions in a brief caption for the above picture.

Anyways, there are other games that ALREADY do HDR, such as Far Cry (with patch 1.3 or above). The best place to get a good view of it is ON a beach in Far Cry that is directly in the sun. It is funny that Far Cry has been ignored as the first of its kind in many things, but it really did do a lot of stuff that Doom 3, Half Life 2, etc. did, except earlier. It was also virutally bugless, compared to for example, the stuttering bug common in Half Life 2. Most are misinformed in crediting games such as HL2 or D3 in bringing in the generation of shader-heavy games (aka 'next gen' games).

That being said, if you don't know what HDR is, the Anandtech Article on HL2:TLC is a good read.

"I guarantee you there's going to be lots of people who say the whole reason for this game is this controller, we made the perfect game for the controller. And all it'll be is about the controller, and not necessarily a great game."

Really Mark? That never happens in the world of game technology, eh? People using technology for technology's sake, and still build a crap game. How many of the games that utilize your company's Unreal technology are clunkers? See: Unreal Technology. There are some great games in there (mostly the UT games) but some REAL CRAP as well.

Perhaps he should do his engine licensing the same way he segmented the GC playing audience: full UT Engine price for a game on a single platform, half price for 2 platforms, a third for 3 platforms, etc. Seeing as how most developers target 4 platfroms, let's see how well you do with 25% of the market :)

Beyond that, what games push the card? WoW? Doom 3? Half-life 2? Add in Far Cry and UT, and that's pretty much it for 3D games.

It's absolutely all about games sure. Doom 3, Half Life 2, Far Cry and even the modest graphics of WoW will push any single card currently on the market at moderately high resolutions if (and that's the kicker, if) you have the quality turned up.

It's fair to say people don't actually set the high detail options though, they just set the in-game quality to 'High' and leave it at whatever that is. However, you can make them look noticeably much better, specifically you can really improving texture quality and remove jagged edges (both on items and objects, and inside partically transparent textures) - by turning on the appropriate opions in your graphics card control panel. They almost always need to be manually turned on, as games almost never take advantage of them, or make them accessible or activatable in-game.

My single 7800 GT (256MB VRAM) actually stuggles at the high end at 1280x1024 in some areas in all of the aforementioned titles, when I crank up the detail (this is why I got an SLI board), the GTX is a bit better, but I imagine a single one of those would struggle too (and the same for the new ATI's) - especially a game like BattleField 2. For example, if you have AA (e.g. at full 4x or 6x, or higher) and Ansitropic Filtering at 16x (where you can really see a noticeable improvement in games like HL2) and things like options to take care of transparent textures (this usualy applies to grass, trees, fences, and grid-like flooring) performance takes a BIG hit.

So it's not just crazy guys running at ultra high penis-extending resolutions (which is also increasingly becoming an issue for regular players, with really cheap high resolution widescreen TFT displays from Dell, etc) it's people running at modest, standard desktop resolutions (like 1024x768, 1280x1024) but who just want to have better quality in game rendering.

Some games benifit more than others and in different ways. HL2 benifits from Ansiotropic filtering (a lot), Doom 3 is really intensive in some areas with real time lighting (but who's texture quality is otherwise poor really), BattleField 2 particularly benifits from smoothing out textures (with all the trees, grass and fences around). Something like WoW doesn't benifit much from 16x Ansiotropic filtering or AA above 4x, because things are simple to begin with but it's still a bit better as texture quality is improved.

Most new games look great to most people at the default High settings of course (usually without Ansiotropic Filtering on and often with AA off entirely), it's only when you turn some of the quality options up you realise that how much better things can actually be rendered.

If you spend that same amount of money on any console, you can buy more than double those number of games.

You left out a lot of very popular main stream 3D games (just off the top of my head games like BF2, EQ2, SWG, L2, JointOps will all also tax existing sytems with the options cranked up), and then there are upcoming games, like QW:ET and U3 are certainly going to require all new hardware, or top end SLI setups that use the very highest end cards currently avalible - if you intend to play them with high quality textures and edge smoothing.

Even the upcoming Quake IV will solidly test all systems I'd imagine (given it's just Doom 3 with the lights on and more bad guys moving around at once). I played the new Call of Duty 2 demo this week, it's another that is crying out for an SLI setup (or a card like this). It even has a menu option for SLI support, so apparently the developers realise this too. Half Life 2 texture quality, with Doom 3 lighting in large MMO / multiplayer environment is the next step.

To some extent EQ2 actually lets you do this if

I understand that this was a joke, but I'm gonna reply helpfully anyway:

I would venture a guess that Duke Nukem Forever would have similar hardware requirements to that of Unreal Tournament 2007 because it will (supposibly) run on the Unreal 3 engine. Game and graphics freaks should definitly check out the Unreal 3 Technology page

I understand that this was a joke, but I'm gonna reply helpfully anyway:

I would venture a guess that Duke Nukem Forever would have similar hardware requirements to that of Unreal Tournament 2007 because it will (supposibly) run on the Unreal 3 engine. Game and graphics freaks should definitly check out the Unreal 3 Technology page

They mentioned in the article that there will also be a specular map, a bump map, and an 'index layer' which I assume just describes what shader to use for an effect.

This should give a lot of detail, but not any more than what's already been seen in the Unreal 3 screenshots. And we've already seen video capture of that engine months ago...

Then again, the first PGR looked really good, and was quite fun to play. It's just that this isn't the first time seomthing of this detail has been done.

Anything that can run Unreal Engine 3.0 games and more has my respect at least.
I'm pretty sure it'll rally a lot of gamers and fulfill its purpose.

I was about to post the same. The Unreal Engine 3 looks flooring; expect to see games with that graphical quality on your PC soon.

The next Unreal Tournament looks damn sweet aswell.

Anyone care to comment where a card like this Geforce will be REQUIRED?

I once asked RMS in a conference what he thought about products with a short shelf life value, like games. There are not too many ways to create a profit out of a game if you make it open source.

All the content would obviously not be open sourced, and that's really what you pay for when you purchase a game isn't it?

However, how exactly would, for instance, Epic earn money by open sourcing their Unreal Engine? Sure they could make a few bucks off another Unreal (Tournament) game, basically selling the game content. But lets face it, they're not planning on making big bucks on that.

Tim Sweeney thinks this is the direction the industry is headed: "We also see middleware as one of the major cost-saving directions for the industry as software complexity increases. It's certainly not economical for hundreds of teams to write their own multithreaded game engines and tool sets."

Where should Epic get their R & D money from, in RMS' opinion?

Riiight...This is so un-true.
You're on par though, that the D3-engine is getting quite some heavy competition from the Unreal 3 tech, and John Carmack really has to put in quite some work to beat the visuals of that.

Imo, one of the biggest backstabs id gave to themselves, is limiting the multiplayer of D3 to 8 players.
It seems they will be getting back to -real- multiplayer in Q4 though.

Unreal 3 was announced like half a year ago....

Or at least the engine was.
And it looks very sweet.

I think it already has... the Unreal team has been showcasing HDR ligthning for a while now, and it's part of what they have coming in the Unreal Engine 3.

but did you see the site...

Requires IE 4.0 or compatible browser
with activex, java and javascript enabled.

add an extra processor just for the spam bot.

Eh.. this guy still looks unnatural to me. The chains around him STILL look like the flat textures they are, as do his teeth, and the joints on the gun. I'm sure the chains will stretch unnaturally as the creature moves, and the barrel of the gun is still a hexagon.

There's still a long way to go and, in fact, I don't think we'll ever reach the point where a single processor will be capable of creating an image on the fly that matches the quality of a prerendered.

I think this is great. And there is already software to fill out these new specs too.

There is a next generation of engines that make the gap smaller and smaller between real-time graphics and rendered animated films. Take a look at this Unreal Engine 3 page for example.

What makes these new engines exciting is not just the fancy graphics. Increasing the resources on the hardware ultimately allows for a much more streamlined art pipeline, easier engine development and overall a faster and simpler product creation.

All I can hope is that it's working on the Unreal 3 engine, because by the time it comes out, everyone's computer will handle it at 1000 FPS.

And here's an Engine Demonstration.

As has already been mentioned. The entier trailor was entirely pre-rendered. Anyone with any graphical knowledge can tell you that. If you want an idea of what the Xbox Next, or whatever the hell they're calling it, will look like... see the Unreal 3 engine. But, with this next round of hardware... it's going to be hard for even harcore gamers to tell the difference between the systems. It's time for a standardized console! One standard to play them all...

Not from personal experience ; but afaik, UnrealEd (the editor for Unreal) supports setting up scenes as you would in 3d-modeling software (eg. Lightwave) ; and assigns controllers to objects/models etc in scenes, thus making it a bit easier to create a movie-like scene (without or with human 'actors').

As the Parent said ; Doom 3 is really -lacking- those features ; and I think that id is hoping for the community to come up with some decent modtools to make Machinima movies on it.

A shot missed by id, imho : Since of all the mayor engines out now, Doom 3 surely comes most close to real life.

Sidenote ; The latest shown Unreal techbnology also seems wicked and the D3 engine will defenitely need soom future tweaks to keep up with that. . http://www.unrealtechnology.com/

I don't know where you've been for the past 15 years, but nobody does low level programming for games anymore.

Everyone uses Renderware . Just look, over 500 titles released or in development use Renderware and it's not that old. That's 1 in 4 titles (I'm reading this from the site). Grand Theft Auto 3 Vice City uses Renderware. Peter Molyneux's The Movies uses Renderware. Broken Sword 3 Sleeping Dragon uses Renderware. Everyone friggin' uses Renderware. And you know what? They aren't all the same game. Hell, even SEGA, Sony, and Konami and featured clients of Renderware.

Oh, and lets not forget Epic Games or id Software . And don't forget, these are not just for first person shooters. It's a 3D engine with underlying network code. I don't even want to think about how many games used the Quake engines over the years.

To say these development-houses-that-rely-on-high-level-develop ment-tools are suffering would be laughable. I'm laughing right now even. They are the highest profit games companies on the planet you fool!

The Unreal engine is crossplatform but the grandparent had the wrong link.
Check out this page http://www.unrealtechnology.com/.

It supports ps2. Splinter Cell uses the Unreal engine and is available on gc, ps2, xbox and pc.

Paul Rutland

Unreal 3 runs faster on the GeForce too!

Unreal 3? You've got a GeForce that runs unwritten software?

Oh, you must be talking about Unreal Engine 3. I get it now.

LK

Which begs the question, who is this aimed at?

Well, I bet the developers of the beautiful Unreal Engine 3 are using this. Current hardware can't run it at very playable framerates. I remember them saying you'll need 2GiB of RAM to play it maxed out.

I think you're referring to normal mapping, which is what of the latest games are using. Actually, the Unreal 3 tech is pretty cool. They start with a 1-2 MILLION poly mesh, simplify it to 20-50 THOUSAND, and then to raycasting/tracing (I'm not sure what's it called), from the low-poly model to the high poly model to get the normal map, and use that for rendering. They get the about the same amount of geometric detail as the other games of the day, but 100x more lighting detail.

Unreal 3 tech can be found Here.

This technique is called normal mapping. The artist creates a high-poly model (several million polys or so) and textures that. Then, the data is taken from that and applied to a much lower-poly model (about 4,000 polygons). The detail is in the skin, not the model. What this simplification algorithm (it's not really compression) would do is make it easier to go from the high-poly model to the low-poly model. Unreal Engine 3 uses normal mapping and I believe the engine that powers Far Cry does as well- or at least some form of it. The technique used with the box and the wall is called virtual displacement mapping and is freakishly good. UnrealTechnology.com has all the info.

Speaking of linux/unreal issues. Have you looked at the Unreal Engine 3 tech page?

Unreal Engine 3 is a complete game development framework for next-generation consoles and DirectX9-equipped PC's, providing the vast array of core technologies, content creation tools, and support infrastructure required by top game developers.

I mean wtf? Sure it looks nice, but are us linux users being betrayed here? I have always supported Epic, but I will fight them with every ounce of my life if they go to being windows only.