What I mean is, the renderer, the part of the engine that powers all the visuals is not the native unreal engine renderer. It was rewritten by 3D Realms, so the "unreal ugliness" isn't there, it's "DNF ugliness" . The "plasticy" or "plastic wrap" look that was coined during the Doom 3 era, has little to do with the engine but the artists.

Just because Epic is endorsed by nvidia, doesn't mean they purposefully ruin the experience for ATI cards. That's like saying since ATI endorsed Half Life 2, Source has been purposefully made to not work with nvidia cards properly.

I believe they've fixed the AA issue on new versions. Batman has AA, DNF has AA and the new DX11 AA looks great. Keep in mind, a lot of games take years to develop and by the time it releases, the engine can be a bit dated. Homefront for instance? That version of unreal is 3 years old.

The engine is not without it's flaws (IE: without serious modification, the default player movement code for a first person game, imo, feels awful. Not Metro 2033 awful, but pretty bad) but it's constantly being updated and improved. The reason why developers use it is because it's tool set is fantastically good. It makes development so much easier, unless you're a programmer unfamiliar with Unreal's way of wanting to be written. And developing on PS3... which I hear might've also been improved.

>> ^EvilDeathBee:

>> ^ForgedReality:
Looks kinda lame and unpolished. Typical Unreal Engine ugliness abound. Why won't that stinking pile just go the fuck away and stop snaking its way into games I might otherwise want to play?

Oh please. DNF may use Unreal, but the renderer is a custom rewrite. You would never have noticed "Unreal ugliness" if you didn't know it was Unreal. Are you honestly saying Mortal Kombat 2011 looks ugly? Batman Arkham Asylum looks ugly? Are you saying this looks ugly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzjsTt_DzCw
Unreal only looks as bad as what the artists are capable of, and the newer versions of the engine are looking... unreal.


Actually, I'm not sure you know what I mean. The way the game looks is what prompted me to check if my assumptions were correct. I didn't know it used UE until I looked it up prior to that post, and the way everything is shiny, like it has plastic wrap on it is one such aspect to which I refer.

I don't like the engine because it tends (in my experience) to not be very robust and has several issues which always seem to nag at me no matter what game it is that uses it. Epic endorses NVIDIA, because they give Epic lots of money to do so, likely. As a result, they aren't as friendly to ATI (AMD) cards. It's possiboe it was the cards I was using, but other games never exhibited the same behaviors on ATI and not NVIDIA as UE games did. One such issue would be vsync seeming to behave incorrectly on ATI.

Oh, and don't even get me started on anti-aliasing... what the fuck modern game these days doesn't support AA? Oh, right. UE games. And if you manage to get it working by forcing it in your drivers, (doesn't always work, especially on ATI), then you get a much higher framerate hit than you should. Other engines handle it just fine, but for some reason, UE has a very hard time with AA, even on extremely powerful cards. Shitty engine.

>> ^ForgedReality:

Looks kinda lame and unpolished. Typical Unreal Engine ugliness abound. Why won't that stinking pile just go the fuck away and stop snaking its way into games I might otherwise want to play?


Oh please. DNF may use Unreal, but the renderer is a custom rewrite. You would never have noticed "Unreal ugliness" if you didn't know it was Unreal. Are you honestly saying Mortal Kombat 2011 looks ugly? Batman Arkham Asylum looks ugly? Are you saying this looks ugly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzjsTt_DzCw

Unreal only looks as bad as what the artists are capable of, and the newer versions of the engine are looking... unreal.

Looks kinda lame and unpolished. Typical Unreal Engine ugliness abound. Why won't that stinking pile just go the fuck away and stop snaking its way into games I might otherwise want to play?

>> ^entr0py:

"iOS:Android:NGP"
Why doesn't the 3DS get any love? It's got to be more powerful than any Android phone on the market.


i don't know about android phones, but even my iphone 3gs has like triple the processing power and quadruple the memory of a 3ds.

Perhaps five years is a little long, but there is a big difference between what is technically possible on the cutting edge and what is feasible for a commercial game. The rendering in the video is going at most 15 fps, on what is probably cutting edge hardware. If we want a game to run at 30 fps, we're going to need hardware twice as fast. So in two years you'd be able to run that on the highest end hardware at playable frame rates.

That's the way tech demos have always been.

>> ^bcglorf:

>> ^AeroMechanical:
Those first sequences with the grissly guy and the cyberpunk cityscape are pretty damn impressive. Probably five years away until we get something like that, but damn, that will be cool.

This is rendering on current pc hardware in real time, right now. Unless you are referring to the time needed for a team of artists to put together enough such content for a full game. The technology today can do this, it's just a matter of getting the artists to put it together now.

>> ^AeroMechanical:

Those first sequences with the grissly guy and the cyberpunk cityscape are pretty damn impressive. Probably five years away until we get something like that, but damn, that will be cool.


This is rendering on current pc hardware in real time, right now. Unless you are referring to the time needed for a team of artists to put together enough such content for a full game. The technology today can do this, it's just a matter of getting the artists to put it together now.

Your video, Unreal Engine 3: "Under The Hood" technology trailer, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 27 Badge!

>> ^spoco2:

It's videos like this that make you wonder why you'd ever write your own engine... but then I guess that's kind of the point of the video.


to negate the 200,000k licensing fee also its still the case that unreal teck can be a pain to work with, with core updates braking old code. I also dont think its grate for a whole company to be hostage to another developer that has no investment in them .

I think having your own engine as a company is/can be a really sweet place to be but obviously depends on your resources and types of games you make . I think that adopting an existing engine that has core elements you need for the games you make and then gradually changing it into your own engine is the best lest risky route.

I find that devs that just use the core tool set and don't change an engine end up with games that often feal and look very similar , there were a whole dirth of Unreal engin and Q3 games that feal like mods rather than indavidual games.

What is really nice though is that Frost bite engine really provides the full package , amazing net code very good optimization cross platform , and fantastic graphics in my opinoin interms of Function and game play frost bite is far more Superior to unreal teck , sure unreal by default definitely looks better and can graphicly do more but thats not realy the main piont of games and you can artisticly fudge / hide allot of the stuff shown in these demo vids.

>> ^ant:

Rage doesn't look that good to me. I hope I am wrong!



Yeah I guess we'll have to wait and see. I like the setting even though recently it's getting a tad overused, though Borderlands was really mind-numbing in my opinion. I saw a video of the AI in RAGE and it looked pretty neat.

It's funny, most of the AI in games these days are shit. I feel like the AI in the original Thief is light-years beyond a lot of the garbage out there right now. Maybe it's been that too many games rely on the Unreal engine and pre-fab AI - I don't know. Because even in games that should have killer AI like Splinter Cell: Conviction the AI isn't all that interesting.

No idea. Maybe I posted it at a better time of the day?>> ^vaporlock:

I had this same video up for 24 hours and got 4 votes. I finally discarded it for another video. Hybrid you got 4 votes in 1.5 hours, what's your secret?

I'm consistently impressed by how well designed and developed the Unreal engines really are. They go beyond expectation for me, every time.

source:
While the Unreal Engine 3 has been quite open for modders to tinker around with, the ability to publish and sell games made using UE3 was restricted to licensees of the engine. However, on November 2009, Epic released a free version of their engine, called the Unreal Developer Kit (UDK), that is available to the general public. According to the current EULA, game makers can sell their games by paying Epic the cost of $99 USD at the outset, and 25% of all revenue above $50000 USD.[15] In addition, in the December 2010 release of UDK, it now comes with support of creating iOS games.

No need to buy it anymore. That stuff is free, until you actually make money. Enormous opportunities for indie devs, these days.
>> ^EMPIRE:

oh I had no idead they were using unreal engine, but now that you mention it, it kinda looks like the Unreal engine.
But yeah, buying an already existing engine cuts a lost of development time.

oh I had no idead they were using unreal engine, but now that you mention it, it kinda looks like the Unreal engine.

But yeah, buying an already existing engine cuts a lost of development time.