If you have the specs necessary to run it, you can download it and play it for yourself here. Warning: it's huge (over 7GB)

This project was an experiment to see how much geometry and textures we could push in UE4 on modern PC hardware, and as a result, it is fairly system intensive. We recommend 16GB of RAM and at least an Nvidia GTX760 or AMD equivalent as the minimum requirements.

For more fluid frame-rate, and/or screen resolutions above 1920x1080 we recommend at least an Nvidia GTX970, or AMD equivalent or higher (2GB of VRAM for Low texture settings / 3GB for Medium texture settings / 4GB for High texture settings / 6GB or higher for EPIC texture settings)

Also, Terrain displacement is a very system heavy feature. Please note that enabling this feature on a GPU slower than an Nvidia GTX980 Ti may cause a significant drop in frame-rate.

I don't know about 2001, but there are some seriously low res textures in there and stiff animation. It certainly doesn't look much better than a modified version of the source engine.

This trailer misses the exact thing that No Man's Sky trailers realized - you have to show the transition in scale. If you want to impress, you need to seamlessly transition from surface to orbit to solar system to galaxy. If you don't do that, the celestial objects just look like balls with high res textures and the surface shots look like Bryce 3D renders, but there's nothing to connect them.

The short answer is "It depends!"

I know it's a crappy answer, but there are way too many parameters at play. There are many games today that have scripted scenes in them that are pretty cinematic. Think of GTA III, from 2001. The cut scenes in that game still outshine the actual gameplay of GTA V today.

If the scene is scripted, then all the animation, and camera movement can be fine tuned and all compute resources are pooled into the viewport of the camera. This allows the artists to focus all of the trickery on the shot itself, but not the rest of the world. From a PVS or scene-graph stand point, you have pretty much reduced the complexity to just what you are seeing.

I do not know how they made this demo and cannot comment on it with any authoritative capital. I've written 3D engines before (not for videogames though) and can comment on the technology I think I'm seeing here. My comments are just an opinion based on what I know. I do not have access to Unity and have never used it before. But here it goes:

For a scene like this, there should be reduced/canned computation in:

• Collision detection and response
  
• AI
  
• Animation / IK
  
• PVS
  
• Texture Atlasing
  

The shaders, unless they are geometry (the ripping of the skin/flesh in the Adam scene) could or could not be reduced in scope and complexity. I am not sure if they are scripted or dynamic. By scripted, I mean a geometry shader that reads vertex data from a VBO stream or some memory buffer instead of computing the vertices on the fly. It's still real-time, just not dynamic.

Most of the graphics you see here are standard applications of technology that's been around for a while:

• PBR shader
  
• Motion Blur Shader
  
• Depth of Field Shader
  
• Cascaded Shadow Maps Shader
  

The particle system seems pretty standard as well.

This is a great demo and I am extremely impressed with the art direction, but the engine itself is, after all, Unity with PBR for the characters, and maybe Global Illumation for the indoor scenes, which I believe they licensed from Geomerics.

ok, i'll do my best:

"It's where the program does the animation for you using physics (or other) algorithms. As the artist, you place a "flag" in the scene, and attach it to a "pole" then tell the program there's a "45 mph wind from the East".
Then you hit "Play" and you get a movie of a flag waving in the wind."

this is called a sim, and yes it's a type of procedural animation but it doesn't replace some kind of "classical" method of animating. sims are used for all kinds of things: particles, cloth, fur/hair/feathers, crowds, fluid, rigid body destruction, etc, etc. the artists who do this are not animators, they're FX artists and it isn't as simple as plugging in "45 mph wind from the east". not even close. for something seemingly that simple you're dialing in things like direction, turbulence, gravity, plus the cloth properties. once you have your settings, you sim it, which can take days on a render farm for complex sims. if that sim is approved then it goes to lighting, gets put into the scene, has textures/materials/shaders applied, and then gets rendered, which can take another several days on a render farm depending on the complexity. these sims are the only way to get realistic animations for these types of materials. and there are generally many versions made at this stage to get the sim right, fix broken frames, fix intersecting, get the lighting and textures/materials/shaders working right, etc. THEN it goes to the compositing dept for a couple dozen more versions.




"As opposed to regular animation, which can be thought of as glorified stop-motion animation. Each single piece moved by you, individually, for each frame of video."

regular animation is like stop motion except it's not every frame (it's interpolated between keyframes) and is for character animation.

anim and FX are 2 different departments and often use 2 different software packages.

mocap is also not handled by the anim dept. it would be done by match move and/or tech anim.




"You create a flag and a pole. Then the next frame you bend it here, here, here, and here, then click forward to the next frame, and bend it a bit more here, little less here, invert this bend, add another, make this corner whip a bit."

no one in there right mind would do this, it's completely impractical, and would look like complete shit.




"It basically allows less technically savvy artists play in a world where only "nerds" used to play."

the FX people are way more nerds and technical than anim people. you need to be technically savvy for every dept. but the real nerds and really technically savvy people work on pipeline who were probably heavily involved in this project building custom toolsets for it.




"Really kind of lazy way of animating."

no, it's fucking hard, requires a lot of knowledge, a lot of people, a lot of cpu horsepower, is used all the time to get high quality animations, is a collection of several departments other than animation, and is used in conjunction with animation.

You counter that by starting with more mushrooms... =)

ps. Another good example of this is Japanese straw mushrooms (enoki iirc) which have a very crunch texture raw, but can be stewed in sukiyaki for 30 minutes and despite the stems no longer being rigid (more like a soft noodle), they still give an audible crunch when bitten in to.

Dammit, now I want sukiyaki...

You're right, they often get either just the flavor or just the texture, but not often both at the same when it comes to mock foods. Although it seems like every other week a new company is coming up with products that get closer and closer to real thing. Gardein "chicken" tenders for example. I actually find they taste better than the real ones(yeah I didn't think it was possible for chicken to taste any better either!) And hey no cholesterol

I don't see it as a sacrifice, not when I'm the one reaping all of the benefits. The knowledge that I haven't doomed a sweet piggy like the one in the video to stand in a 2x3 foot cage until it collapses is more satisfying than the flavor of the best bacon . Not to mention health benefits, environmental (and some asshat farmer gets less money too is pretty satisfying too haha)

Lions in a cage most certainly wouldn't eat you. They would attack you and kill you out of fear and protection of their territory, perhaps even out of the fun of it, being feline. Assuming they were well fed of course which most animals in captivity are. But they would not bother wasting the energy to eat you when they are fed much tastier and healthier food.
There are also plenty of documented cases were a lions maternal instincts take over and they protect an infant animal. such as this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRUXU172vGg (there is a similar few where leopards save monkeys by returning them to trees etc)
It goes to show that even carnivores with strong killer instincts are able to see compassion, and that they only kill out of necessity to survive. When survival isn't factor anymore the rules are completely different.

Sorry, I've tasted vegetarian bacon and it simply doesn't measure up. Even the seitan fake bacon, which is close, lacks the proper crispness and flavor.

I fully support anyone's choice to make the sacrifice to their lifestyle by skipping animal products, but even the best fake meat alternatives do not completely measure up to the real ones in taste and texture.

Everything dies and, outside of the 'civilized' food chain, most every creature dies from old age or by being eaten (sometimes while still alive). If I were to go into a cage full of lions, I don't think they would have a crisis of conscience over my level of sentience in deciding whether or not to eat me.

To be perfectly honest, I haven't knowingly tried any faux meat product since the late 80's when my hippy aunt force fed me numerous different kinds and also tricked me into eating it by claiming it was real meat. Most of it was terrible, a few actually made me sick. I probably could have stomached a few if they had not been presented as 'meat', but since they were, they were more than disappointing. I'm sure that there have been improvements since then, but I'm subconsciously prejudiced against them (as well as consciously prejudiced).
I have no problem with them being vegetarian, or even vegan, I just don't like the taste/texture of any I've had.
Nothing tastes like death...sweet yummy death!

I think not everyone works for the same reasons. She may just like to work for joy. I know a few people who cannot exist without such structure and ritual in their lives.

For what the point is otherwise, I think the shape of the pasta changes the texture and, I suppose, flavor. Hypothetically.

Yeah... I think the one poster that some other guy did is a better representation. Some odd CGI choices here to, no textures, but let's put high gloss reflections and water reflections. Lists like this will always leave questions on why wasn't ship A included, like the one from Aliens, they include several Babylon 5 ships but not the station itself. Lots of focus on ships from the Halo series, Eve Online, etc... and yeah, some of the scales seemed off compared to what I thought.

Of course far better than anything I could have done.

Oh and yeah @ChaosEngine , I really need to finish the Culture series. I've only read the first one so far. Aside from one fan fiction short (http://videosift.com/video/Something-Real) I haven't seen the series addressed yet.
.

Why does the game look like it's for the original Xbox/PS2? Sparse detail, flat textures, and jerky animations.

Secret for cooking almost ANY pasta: reserve a cup of the pasta water when draining, then mix it back in and let the pasta sit for a bit, mixing occasionally. (Depending on the sauce, you can either mix it with the sauce, or prior to mixing in the sauce.) This will result in a creamier texture, which is frankly quite amazing.

I loved the previous one (and the original ones back in the day). Can't wait for this one.

More than the procedural level design, what I really wished for in the previous one was different textures/models, according to the part of the world the level took place. No matter where in the world the action was happening, it always looked like new york or something.

I don't think the original video had audio, or at least I didn't hear it. Fun to hear them talking about it in Thai, although they don't say anything particularly scientifically relevant -- more like "augh! help me!" (out of surprise) and then some mild cussing about it.

The caption/title I get from the original video says:
"น่ากลัว หนอนทะเล เป็นแบบนี้"

First word is "na-grua" which means "scary", or more directly/literally "worthy of fear". The second word is compound, "nohn-talay" which means "worm-ocean", or "marine worm" would be a less literal but better English translation. The last word is actually 3 words: "pben baap ni", which roughly means "is like this". So an overall translation of the YT video title would be "this is a scary marine worm".

...Oops, and just now I'm seeing the YT description, which has a lot more Thai and does specifically mention Nemertea -- so that is probably correct. It looks and behaves a lot like some of the sea cucumbers that I've seen, although most tend to have a bit more texture or protrusions on their skin. But there are definitely sea cucumbers that are as smooth as this thing. Compare with a similar sea cucumber video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKWSLg5PDiU

Quite similar, but sounds like the Nemertea does this to eat whereas the Sea Cucumber does it as a defense mechanism.
--EDIT-- Whoops, embedded the wrong video. Should be fixed now