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Tim Sweeney Talks Unreal Engine 3
An anonymous reader writes "Following the recent unveiling of Epic's Unreal Engine 3, Beyond3D has interviewed Tim Sweeney of Epic about the next-gen videogame engine. The discussion is mainly about the 3D requirements, but they also touch on other technologies that are used or required: 'Off-the-shelf 32-bit Windows can only tractably access 2GB of user RAM per process. UT2003, which shipped in 2002, installed more than 2GB of data for the game, though at that time it was never all loaded into memory at once. It doesn't exactly take a leap of faith to see scenarios in 2005-2006 where a single game level or visible scene will require >2GB RAM at full detail.'"
UT2003, which shipped in 2002, installed more than 2GB of data for the game, though at that time it was never all loaded into memory at once.
This makes sense. I was able to run UT2K3 without a problem, but after installing UT2K4 I've been playing less solely because the game is a bit jerkier, takes forever to load initially, and is less reliable (I get "hardware failures"). I have a suspicion that this is very much related to RAM usage. I'd love to see an accurate depiction of how detail settings affect RAM usage-- ie on such and such a detail level, you use X amount of RAM. How about a patch for the UI to optionally show this? I know it would be useful for about, oh, a thousand users tops, but knowing how much leeway I have in my detail settings would be a damn nifty thing to have.
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
"That's all nice and well, but who actually makes the content that fills up those 2GB? You'd need a pretty large team and several months or years to make that much stuff..."
2D and 3D artists make the content that fills that space. The thing to remember is that it isn't necessarily a linear relationship between how much arist time is needed and how much RAM is being taken up. Using 2x the texture size, for example, doesn't take twice as long to generate. A lot of time spent on making 3D art is in shrinking things down to meet the requirements.
Check out this image I made here. (Note: That's not a game model.) *All* of the textures were originally generated at 3072^2 resolution. They were too high for my tiny gigabyte of RAM, so I had to knock them down to 2048^2. If I had started at 2048, it wouldn't have been much faster to generate them. The source imagery was big enough in either resolution, so short of the extra processing time it'd have taken, it would have been pretty much the same.
The real time spent will be in making something more ambitious. Twice as long? I doubt it. Maybe one day when the game machine has specs that exceed the artist abilities, but we are generations away from that. The tools we have today are pretty darned cool, and they're only going to get better as each generation goes by.
In short, these companies already have the talent *today* to put 2 gigs worth of content on the screen.
"Derp de derp."
the Quake3 engine gave us Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast
The Unreal engine gave us Deus Ex and America's Army
We all know that even if Doom 3 sucks as a game, the engine will licensed and used in an even better game
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
Ummm, no. All pointers in 64 bit programs are 64 bit. The current amount of that address space devoted to user-process memory is 512TB. See this; it's about win64 on Itanium, but I'm sure AMD64 is the same.
Perhaps you are thinking of PAE on 32-bit systems?
Windows is fully capable of providing real 64-bit addressing. It even causes driver problems; you can't use 32 bit drivers in 64 bit Windows.
Current versions of OSX, OTOH, can't. They use memory windowing similar to PAE.
-cough-96k-cough-