
A first look at Unreal Engine 5 - HammadB
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/a-first-look-at-unreal-engine-5
======
flipgimble
Let me throw in an anecdote that may amuse some: I was working for a now
defunct large game company when Epic and Tim Sweeny came in to demo Unreal
Engine 3 very early before the PS3 and XBox360 were launched. This was about
2004. Their demo blew away executives in particular. They showed multicolored
lights casting multicolored shadows on a single high detail character. One of
the lights was behind a stained glass window, projecting beautiful patterns.
Soon after a deal was signed to use the engine throughout the entire studio.
In retrospect that was a good decision and I have a lot of respect for Unreal
Engine and Epic in general.

Edit: found the video of the demo levels that shipped with very early UE3
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m7T5ay_8DI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m7T5ay_8DI)

However UE3-generation games that finally shipped had none of the visual
effects from the early demos. The multicolored shadows could only be rendered
with multiple passes, at least one per light, which proved to be too expensive
for larger dynamic game scenes. It took years of work from the demo to shipped
games, and an army of unnamed engineers to wrestle the technology into a
product.

UE4 had a great early demo of dynamic global illumination using something like
voxel cone tracing if I remember correctly. To my knowledge that tech demo was
never incorporated into the engine and never shipped.

Epic is famous for their demos, and I love them for it... at least now that I
no longer work professionally in that field. If anything it charts a long term
technical direction for interactive entertainment.

~~~
artsyca
Dude I spent a large portion of my early career as a web developer making
rounded corners on divs using all sorts of kludges

~~~
Apofis
Rounded corners using tables and gifs?

~~~
Jetrel
To invoke the old "rule 5" of explaining things:

Until surprisingly recently, there was no built-in way to make a rectangular
element on a webpage have rounded corners. People had to use all sorts of
dirty hacks to make a final product that "looked like" it was a native, built-
in feature. Usually in the old days it basically amounted to various forms of
"putting a picture of a rounded corner" (often a gif) in each of the corners
of the element you were putting on the page.

There were a lot of different ways to do that, but one of them was to use
"tables" \- tables these days are usually only used for what their genuine,
semantic intent is: for drawing a literally spreadsheet-like table of data.
But back in the earliest days of the web, they were the only controllable way
to visually lay things out on any kind of grid, so despite the fact that they
were "supposed" to have nothing to do with visual layout, they'd get used all
the time for that - often getting used to do visual borders and stuff.

So to do rounded corners, you'd basically make a table that was a 3x3 grid. In
the corner elements of the grid, you'd have tiny pictures of rounded corners;
in the side elements of the grid you'd basically have nothing (they'd be
really skinny elements, either very wide or tall). Then the middle element in
the grid would be gigantic, and would hold your actual content.

~~~
sirmarksalot
I was about to weigh in on how 9-slicing is absolutely a valid strategy for UI
components, and give you an example from my professional work, only to realize
that I can't think of a single example that wasn't, "hack around some library
that doesn't have border-radius".

I'll be glad for the day when 9-slice is a truly obscure technique.

~~~
artsyca
Nine slice put a lot of food on the table but I started to question my purpose
in life

Border-image came and changed the game in the early 2010's... Doing exactly
that in essence

------
ksec
In the past, I have always looked at Demos from Games and thought this is very
good and getting _close_ to movie quality. But that "close to" remained "close
to" for quite some time. Even though It is improving every year but you can
still tell it is gaming graphics. Even if some of the shots are not real time
and pre rendered, they are still gaming like.

That Unreal 5 Demo was the first time ever I thought this is Hollywood Movie
quality GFX ..... ( Apart from the Character ). IT IS STUNNING! And this is
done Real time on PS5!

Edit: I am sorry for the tone and block capitals.... I am seriously geeking
out.

~~~
simias
At the risk of sounding a bit negative I personally find that graphics have
plateaued since about the PS3. Sure, there are more polys, sure, there are
higher res textures, sure, there are more complex and dynamic lights. But you
don't really have the kind of gap we used to have between, say, the PS1 and
PS2 for instance. Diminishing returns and all that. The problem is that, in my
experience, this eye candy only matters for about 10 minutes when you get into
a game, then you stop really paying attention to how it looks and you focus on
the gameplay and story etc...

Meanwhile all the dynamic stuff is still fairly primitive IMO. At around 4
minute in the video they briefly mention the water effects. They don't really
spend a lot of time on them and for a good reason, they don't look
particularly good.

When I was a kid in the 90s I definitely expected future games to look a lot
better, but I also expect gameplay and world interaction to progress
massively. Fully interactive environments you can interact with like in the
real world. You could destroy everything, dig holes, build things, have
advanced physics, great AI for NPCs etc...

It saddens me that the AAA video game industry is almost entirely focused on
eye candy first and foremost. That being said I concede that I'm clearly in
the minority, after all the Uncharted games are generally considered to be
good games when I find them incredibly boring.

I hope that now that we can reach near-photorealism in games they'll have to
come up with something new to keep pushing the envelope.

~~~
hombre_fatal
Your only commentary here is that it doesn't live up to your expectations. You
wanted more.

And then you wonder why AAA studios focus on graphics?

> That being said I concede that I'm clearly in the minority

You definitely aren't in the minority. r/gaming is full of people racing to be
most unimpressed by a good looking game.

All the HN comments pointing out flaws with "don't get me wrong, it looks
decent!" could be predicted the second I read the submission title.

~~~
skohan
Maybe it's just because I am old enough to remember playing Super Mario on a
CRT, but that attitude sometimes astounds me. Like I have read many
assessments that the latest Doom game's incredible framerates are nothing to
be impressed by, because the game is "visually underwhelming". I think a lot
of people don't understand how difficult real-time computer graphics are to
implement, and I have difficulty viewing the world through their eyes.

~~~
geddy
You can appreciate the technology behind it, but once the graphics in a game
(which you play to escape real life) begin to mimic real life, it can feel
underwhelming.

For instance, a game like Okami on PS2 is far more impressive to me than some
4K tech demo. When it comes down to actually playing a game, I don't give a
shit about the polygon count, I give a shit if it's fun to play.

~~~
tekknik
I love some pretty gfx as well, but I have the same feeling. Lately I’ve been
finding the simplistic gfx of minecraft and terraria just fine especially
given the mechanics are rather deep and enjoyable (for me at least). The
simple graphics even add a bit of charm

~~~
geddy
Same here! Minecraft captured the hearts and minds of nearly _every_
demographic, even with "rudimentary" blocky graphics. Never would have
happened it went for realism.

Lately I've been playing this great mountain biking game called Lonely
Mountains: Downhill that uses this gorgeous minimalist aesthetic. I'm also
playing Trails in the Sky on the PSP. Those graphics just age beautifully.

Sometimes the simpler, the better.

------
crazygringo
Wow. It seems like real-time lighting and detail are getting to the point
where they're so indistinguishable from reality...

...that now it's the actual quality of the models themselves, and even more of
character motion, that are going to have to be the next steps in better
graphics.

I'm stunned by the lighting and detail, absolutely stunned.

But at the same time, especially when you get into the architectural rooms,
everything's far too "perfect". No grime, no crumbling edges, the motion of
the ceiling opening is far too smooth, no vibration or catching, etc.

Likewise, the character's ponytail isn't bobbing like real hair at all.
Sometimes her movements seem to be anti-gravity and bizarrely robotic. The
leather over her shoulder seems to float rather than rest, and twists as if it
were made of gelatin rather than stiff cowskin.

Not that these are criticisms at all -- I'm well aware of how hard they are.
It's just fascinating to me to see, once rendering is basically "good enough",
how the flaws in modeling come to the fore.

And so where are those advances going to come in? Are there going to be
procedural-generation advances in creating realistic grime and imperfections
and irregularities? Or deep-learning advances for realistic bodily movement?
And why is it so damn hard to get clothing to actually fall on the body right,
instead of always looking like a stretchy foam skinsuit?

~~~
sterlind
All sorts of rendering tricks had to be played before RTX. Now that we have
real-time ray tracing, models are becoming more important than shaders (see
e.g. Minecraft. It looks like a real world made of Legos - the blocks make it
look artificial.)

Maybe once real time photorealism is cracked, we'll move to a completely
Newtonian global physics for some games, with some analogue of "atoms" the way
RTX models "photons."

I'm not in the industry, this is just something I'm wondering about. What
would Minecraft be like if blocks were the size of pixels and the physics were
real?

~~~
zamalek
> Maybe once real time photorealism is cracked, we'll move to a completely
> Newtonian global physics for some games, with some analogue of "atoms" the
> way RTX models "photons."

There is an extreme amount of doubt about whether the tech is real (myself
included). These people have promised the world, have incredible videos, but
have nothing to show in terms of a demo you can download and run yourself.
Still, they claim to do what you describe and have videos demonstrating it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J62z_7JaYMw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J62z_7JaYMw)

~~~
sterlind
Holy shit, wow! I hear you on the skepticism, but did you notice how the
vehicles shimmer during some of the editing? I think think they're optimizing
by joining adjacent voxels together until they're deleted, at which point they
get replaced with new polys, and it causes a ripple effect.

That type of detail suggests to me that it's a real (clunky) demo, but maybe
it's running slower than advertised.

I can also understand not releasing a demo.. the code would be too valuable to
risk reverse engineers.

~~~
robmaister
It's possible that it's an async compute task, which could potentially miss a
frame and show old data (instead of the whole frame missing vsync).

Also this demo is supposed to be running on a PS5 devkit, which means that
you'd need a devkit to run it, which means that you'd need to sign NDAs and
join their developer programs and whatnot.

Having worked with current gen consoles (meaning I can't go into any amount of
detail), it's not a trivial thing to get a demo like this running well on PCs.
This demo is likely making use of every platform specific feature available to
them.

That said, the demo might be accessible through some back channels if you're
already a UE4 licensee and have a PS5 devkit.

~~~
zamalek
The link I shared wasn't UE5, and their other videos specifically indicate
that they are running on PC - unbelievably modest PC hardware at that.

> it's not a trivial thing to get a demo like this running well on PCs

This old tired argument.

The current theory for how the meshing is done is something similar to mesh
shaders (available on commodity PC hardware since 2018)[1]. This "PS5 platform
specific feature" running on PC in 2018[2].

As for the lighting, NVDIA have already had this "platform specific feature"
on PCs for some time now. It's called RTX. In 2018[3] (using DLSS), in 2020[4]
(no apparent DLSS usage, but it may have improved).

Both next-gen consoles are essentially PCs. Their primary advantage is tightly
coupled hardware (e.g. memory latency, the absurdly fast PS5 SSD). While
dedicated raytracing silicon on AMD is currently unique to PS5 (AMD claims
they can emulate DXRT on Navi), it has been around for more than a year in
consumer hands in the form RTX.

[1]: [https://devblogs.nvidia.com/introduction-turing-mesh-
shaders...](https://devblogs.nvidia.com/introduction-turing-mesh-shaders/)
[2]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRfZYJ_sk5E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRfZYJ_sk5E)
[3]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkhBlmKtEAk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkhBlmKtEAk)
[4]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2744rWPvNuE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2744rWPvNuE)

~~~
robmaister
I work in AAA. I'm talking lower level things like picking which "type" of GPU
memory to allocate, access to specific registers in shaders, etc. PC didn't
have real async compute capabilities until DX12, for example.

On the CPU side yeah it's 100% just a normal computer but nothing will be
interrupting your threads. I think Windows 10 tries to do in it's new game
mode too.

Sorry for assuming the link was the PS5 one. I have a UDN account and their
login setup sometimes just dumps me to their homepage, so I made the
assumption that it was the same video that I had seen everywhere else.

~~~
zamalek
> PC didn't have real async compute capabilities until DX12

Indeed it didn't, and DX12 is extremely old tech. Consoles don't have async
compute _right now._ (Edit: apart from the PS3).

~~~
robmaister
AMD GCN absolutely supports async compute[1]. Radeon cards for years would
only make use of the ACEs in pure compute contexts, as OpenGL and DX11 had no
concept of a secondary command queue and could not make use of them. This is a
big part of the reason why Vulkan/DX12 require so much boilerplate to get a
triangle rendered.

The PS3's SPU definitely counts as async compute especially with how it was
used later in the console lifecycle[2] once people had time to familiarize
themselves with it.

However, in the current gen consoles, you don't have to deal with a different
ISA, command queuing, and shared memory between the GPU and CELL processor.
You are only writing HLSL/GLSL/PSSL and setting up an aggressive amount of
fencing to transition resources between readable and writable states within
the GPU.

[1]: [https://www.anandtech.com/show/9124/amd-dives-deep-on-
asynch...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/9124/amd-dives-deep-on-asynchronous-
shading) [2]: [https://www.slideshare.net/DICEStudio/spubased-deferred-
shad...](https://www.slideshare.net/DICEStudio/spubased-deferred-shading-in-
battlefield-3-for-playstation-3)

------
robmerki
I am always skeptical of tech demos like this, but if Epic has truly created a
way to show full quality assets at runtime without manual LOD / optimization,
then this is going to be a huge process improvement for game development. Same
goes for this lighting. Baking lights is such a burden, if they can simply do
all of this at runtime then making beautiful games just became that much
easier.

They also bought Quixel, which gives all of these photo realistic assets to
any Unreal Engine developer (even if you're some kid building a game for
free). Not sure how Unity can keep up with this.

~~~
6gvONxR4sf7o
Don't you still need to do some of that just for file size and data transfer,
if nothing else? In the demo they said it had hundreds of billions of
triangles. Google tells me you can get down to 18 bytes or so per triangle,
but even if we assume a lower bound of just three bytes per triangle
(amortized storage of 1 vertex per triangle of an x,y,z point), we're talking
about on the order of terabytes to just store that scene, right?

~~~
omikun
That's assuming 6 bytes per vertex, 3 vertices per triangle? Most assets use
triangle strips, which averages closer to 1 vertex per triangle. They also
said the souce mesh is in billions of triangles, but their Nanite pairs that
down to 10's of millions. At ~1 vert/tri * 6bytes * 100mil tri, that's 600MB
of meshes. Keep in mind this is just a demo, so they can pack what would
normally be an entire level into one room. A whole game might end up be
equivalent to a couple of demos after they manually optimize even more.

~~~
6gvONxR4sf7o
I was going off of this:

> Thus, when vertices are shared, the total amortized storage required per
> triangle will be 12 bytes of memory for the offsets (at 4 bytes for three
> 32-bit integer offsets) plus half of the storage for one vertex—6 bytes,
> assuming three 4-byte floats are used to store the vertex position—for a
> total of 18 bytes per triangle.

From here: [http://www.pbr-
book.org/3ed-2018/Shapes/Triangle_Meshes.html](http://www.pbr-
book.org/3ed-2018/Shapes/Triangle_Meshes.html)

And I they said hundreds of billions of triangle, not just billions (timestamp
6:29), but another commenter made a point that's obvious in retrospect that
it's a ton of reused assets, not hundreds of billions of totally independent
triangles.

------
gautamcgoel
What a magical demo! That made my day. I had largely written off console
gaming as a never-ending sequence of brain-dead first person shooters. I'm
glad to see real innovation in the graphics space - coupled with advances in
AI and NLP, I think we could see a crop of incredibly realistic and meaningful
games in the next few years.

IMHO, a key innovation that still needs to occur is a shift away from flunky
and unintuitive hand-held controllers to a more natural and vibrant method of
input. I really liked the scene in the movie Her, for example, where the
protagonist is playing a video game and uses hand gestures to control his
avatar, all without a physical controller. Wii and Kinect were the first few
steps in this direction - I'm not sure what the next steps are.

I think voice input and NLP is an incredibly fruitful space to explore -
imagine what video games would be like if you could actually talk to the
characters, instead of merely punching and shooting them.

~~~
m12k
To play devil's advocate - games with this kind of production value require a
huge investment in asset production, which means they tend to be very
conservative when it comes to gameplay, because they want to be damn sure it
doesn't flop. So until the production of something like this comes way down in
price, the games that look like this are likely to be clones of existing
successful games, e.g. Uncharted, brain-dead first person shooters, etc.

~~~
dvtrn
I thought Horizon Zero Dawn hit the right balance across gameplay, visuals and
story narrative in this current generation of gaming and received all the
praise it deserved. Now, I’ll say in my opinion, not one thing was
overwhelmingly novel in comparison to the rest, but the attention to detail
given to each of those elements elevated the collective experience in that
particular title, the result was a game that felt incredibly fresh and easily
replayable.

------
Priem19
While this is completely amazing, a caveat: graphics are way less important
than we think it is. I still remember every nook and cranny from Tomb Raider
3's jungle level, and when I think about it I imagine being deep inside a real
jungle. It didn't matter that everything looked jagged; my imagination could
go wild.

This is probably a flawed opinion, but sometimes I think the more realistic
games become, the less work for our imagination. I don't mean to say that we
should stop upgrading graphics. What I do wish to say is this: if you have to
choose between optimizing gameplay or graphics, choose gameplay. If you can do
both, do both. Having access to a ridiculously powerful easy to use engine
does not automatically mean you can do both by just jumbling high detailed
props, foliage, terrain together and be done with it. It's counterintuitive,
but it takes even more skill and a keen eye to create beautiful and immersive
environments in a nearly photo realistic engine than those used 20 years ago.
Why? We live in a perfect photorealistic real world, so we immediately spot
things that just look weird and unnatural in game. Whereas in old engines our
imagination corrected for all those things.

~~~
rland
I have a sister opinion to this take, which is that artstyle is far more
important than graphics, and there is a very important difference between the
two that is often ignored by large game studios. \\*

Your graphical capability can push a hundred million triangles, but choosing
the color, composition, and visual coherence of those triangles is more
important to how people interpret your world than anything else. Humans have
an extremely attuned visual processor that infers so much about the way the
world behaves solely by the way it looks.

The reason that classic games can be immersive despite a low poly count is
because the artists have made the visuals behave in a way that is coherent
with our internal model of the game world.

An example of this is Portal. The portal gun is an interesting gameplay tool,
but the game was able to fully take advantage of it because the artstyle of
the game was very tightly coupled with the mechanics. They did a great job of
making sure that the visual environment offered clues to how the game
mechanics worked, which made it so easy for people to quickly grasp how the
portal gun operated in complex environments. Had the artists failed, Portal
would have been "oh yeah, I remember that game -- the portal gun was a neat
gimmick but it felt clunky."

The easy way out is to just try to make your environments and game mechanics
as realistic as possible, essentially borrowing that creation of intuition
from the real world. But the most creative games have worlds whose completely
novel or alien mechanics are coupled with art direction that preserves this
coherence, which makes the world just "click." Putting more triangles on
screen makes for much prettier art, but the true substance of a game is
something completely different.

\\* not on purpose; it's just extremely difficult to pull off.

~~~
throwaway17_17
I am super late with this reply, but it can not be stressed enough that
artsyle is far more important than ‘graphics.’ You referenced Portal, which is
an excellent example. I’d cite ARC Stystem Works’ Guilty Gear and Dragonball
Fighter Z as equally excellent. They don’t follow the real world intuition
principle you mentioned (which I think is a great point) but they put 100% of
their ‘graphical’ effort into ensuring that the art style of the subject
matter is conveyed consistently and as envisioned.

------
trynewideas
buried lede, perhaps: retroactive to Jan. 1, "Unreal Engine royalties waived
on first $1 million in game revenue"

> Unreal Engine End User License Agreement for Publishing: This license is
> free to use and incurs 5% royalties when you monetize your game or other
> interactive off-the-shelf product and your lifetime gross revenues from that
> product exceed $1,000,000 USD.

~~~
chongli
I’d be really curious to see what a talented programmer or two could do with
the engine by themselves, without bringing an artist on board. Is the Unreal
engine flexible enough to do low fidelity, 2D games or are you just better off
coding up your own engine at that point?

~~~
jfkebwjsbx
"Low-fidelity", 2D does not mean no artist.

Pretty much every game needs someone talented in art or design. It can be one
of the programmers, of course.

Unreal is not a good choice for a 2D game, anyway.

------
aeturnum
It's great to see that graphics continue to improve, but I think the
pipelining of reproducing physical space characteristics is most interesting
to me. One of the things they mention in the video is using tools to measure
how real spaces echo and then reproducing those echo characteristics in
virtual spaces. Techniques like that have enormous potential for allowing us
to use virtual space and actual space collaboratively. We'll always have
games, but I'm excited to see how, in the next twenty or thirty years,
technology that started in games starts to allow us to interact and socialize
in new ways.

~~~
bkanber
Ah, convolution reverb. We've had it for a long time in DSP. Basically what
you do is pop a balloon (create an "impulse" \-- you can also clap your hands
or use an electric arc) and record the echo. This gives you what's called the
"impulse response" of the space.

Reverb is really just thousands of echoes, and echoes are just the original
sound delayed back to you. So what you can do is use the impulse response in a
FIR filter, convolve it with the original signal, and you've recreated the
same reverb with a different sound.

This technique has been quite accessible to audio engineers (and mechanical
engineers) for a few decades now. But you really only go out and sample
impulse responses when you really need a very accurate model of the reverb. In
most cases someone will just use a precanned impulse response.

~~~
willis936
This is one area where hardware accelerated ray-tracing has me excited. I like
the idea of walking sound sources to the observer. Unlike light, you need to
account for the speed of sound through mediums, which adds an extra layer of
cool imo. You also don't need to update at the audio sample rate, since most
objects will not be moving very fast (unless you want trans sonic simulations,
which would be exotic and cool).

Forget all of the little hacks. Sound processing is cheap. In 2020 it is
unnecessary to select from a set of pre-baked filters and applying them to
some predefined volume (ie this room is echoey, this room is absorbant, etc.)

This is one area where software has regressed then stagnated [0]. It doesn't
make any sense, other than it wasn't prioritized. I think it's only a matter
of time before engines go back and finally complete the audio simulation
problem.

0\.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS_Fbueh7F4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS_Fbueh7F4)

~~~
bkanber
I suppose it's a matter of acceptable approximations and cost. If only 2% of
players have a high quality surround sound system, and only half of those have
a good ear, then you really only have 1% of users who can tell the difference
between raytraced audio and the heuristic "hacks" that sound engineers have
spent decades developing. So I don't know if audio raytracing will become
mainstream in games anytime soon. But I also suppose that if one engine does
it, others will follow suit.

Same thing with this Unreal 5 demo. Most users would not be able to tell the
difference between rendering 16B vs 8B triangles per frame.

~~~
willis936
You don't need a high quality sound system or a good ear to tell the
difference though. You just need a pair of headphones and to be a human with
hearing. Evolution has been at work for eons. Every human born is a powerful
audio processing machine. I can't give you a rigorous proof or hand you a
double blind test to try for yourself, so you'll have to accept an impasse or
start going down a rabbit hole consisting of studies on pre-baked ray-traced
FIR filters of known geometries and the audibility of group delay.

I am convinced every human can hear the difference. Computation is cheap.
There's no reason not to solve the problem.

~~~
bkanber
You should submit a patch to Godot, then! Force Unreal and others to implement
it too.

------
skohan
The real-time GI is amazing. Ray tracing is going to be a game changer, not
only in terms of visual quality, but also because it's one of those rare times
in computer graphics where the more advanced solution is actually making it
easier on graphics programmers by replacing a bag of dirty tricks with a
unified, physically based solution.

One interesting note: they say the GI is "instant" but you can actually see
that they are using temporal stabilization to achieve this effect, and there's
a slight lag between when the light changes and when the GI finds its resting
point. I suspect removing this lag will be one of the things which makes
graphics feel "next gen" when GPUs can handle enough rays per pixel to handle
GI in one or two frames instead of a few dozen.

~~~
_bxg1
I tried to figure out whether the new GI used raytracing, and it doesn't seem
like it is? If it is using raytracing hardware it isn't nearly as impressive.
If it _isn 't_, then it's sheer magic.

~~~
olavgg
Shadows are too sharp, so I don't think they use raytracing.

~~~
_bxg1
It certainly isn't _completely_ raytraced, because current hardware can't
support that. If they use the new hardware, they're using it in some kind of
mixed mode. Whether that means only for certain materials, or whether they're
able to use it to do "fat rays" that approximate only the general direction
for indirect light, or whatever else. But direct, hard shadows are quite cheap
(comparatively) on today's regular, rasterization-based rendering systems, so
that part isn't surprising.

~~~
skohan
It certainly isn't fully path traced, but the result does look to me like they
are using ray-traced GI. You can tell by some of the details, like colored
bounce lighting which I am not sure can be achieved with this level of detail
using other methods.

The current standard for getting real-time performance for ray tracing is to
limit the number of rays and bounces, and stabilize the results temporally.

I.e. to get a "physically accurate" result you would have to send hundreds, or
thousands of rays per pixel, and bounce them up dozens or hundreds of times.
With this method, instead you send maybe even one or two rays per pixel, which
gives you a noisy result. But you store the result, and accumulate it over a
number of frames, and apply de-noising, and over time you end up with a high-
quality result.

I believe that is why when the light moves, the GI lags for a fraction of a
second in this demo.

~~~
longtom
Another trick is in stead of tracing multiple bounces per ray at once, to
compute one indirect bounce every n-th frame using intermediate results from
the previous (not the current) frame and then spatio-temporally smooth the
results, possibly with on-screen bilateral filtering of the past few frames. I
think one can see they do this when they move the light source. It takes a
while for the indirect bounces to fade out. Perhaps they use screen space ray
tracing for this (meaning no indirect bounces for occluded geometry).

------
johncoogan
Does anyone have any theories as to how Nanite actually works? I've never
heard of virtualized micropolygon geometry before and it sounds a bit
buzzwordy. Do we think they are just loading the full model into GPU memory,
or are they baking down various LODs and normal maps at compile time through
some automatic process? Either way, it's a huge workflow improvement. It's
just unclear what's actually happening...

~~~
alkonaut
“Micropolygon” I assume means Reyes rendering, I.e that the polygons are
created on demand from underlying geometry. Instead of various LODs you
tessellate when rendering, specifically for the view so each pixel has ~1
vertex. Walk closer to the statue and it gets more triangles in tesselation.

~~~
Miraste
But how is it running so quickly? I've seen adaptive rendering implementations
before, but they couldn't run in real time. If they are really using billions
of polys they can't store them all in VRAM. Is the PS5 SSD fast enough to
recalculate polys for every model in the scene every frame (Or even every few
frames)?

~~~
alkonaut
No details yet, but hopefully that will follow soon.

I don’t think the SSD but rather the GPU would be doing the tesselation...

Here is a good presentation on micropolygon rendering (note: nothing says
nanite works like this at all):
[https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15418-s12/www/l...](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15418-s12/www/lectures/25_micropolygons.pdf)

~~~
Miraste
> I don’t think the SSD but rather the GPU would be doing the tesselation...

Ha, I phrased that badly. I meant that, if the high-poly models can't all be
stored in VRAM at once, is the SSD fast enough to load them back onto the GPU
every frame?

~~~
alkonaut
If the tesselation is performed on the GPU (surfaces uploaded to GPU in some
non-triangle representation e.g image geometry/SDFs/patches) then I don’t
think it’s ever viable to have the tesselated triangles loaded back from GPU
memory even to RAM (never mind disk). This isn’t a lot of data. 2 triangles/1
vertex per pixel is just 8K triangles and 4K vertices every frame, that can be
overwritten each frame. This is _tiny_. It’s <1MB!

~~~
Miraste
Ah, that makes sense. I was thinking the problem lay in loading the original
meshes, but I didn't consider they could be using a smaller non-triangle
format. I really hope they share more about how this works.

------
lumens
Extremely impressive.

That said, I am struck by how the inaccuracies in physics modeling start
sticking out like a sore thumb the closer the visuals get to realism. After
gawking at the ground and falling rocks in the first scene, I kept getting
stuck on the weird movement of her ponytail. Also the landing of the first
jump across the chasm.

Picking nits for sure; incredible work here.

~~~
xsmasher
The more accurate the rendering is, the more accuracy you expect of everything
else.

A game with cartoonish or simplified rendering can get away with one attack
animation, one "working" animation etc; but once the rendering becomes
realistic, you need better animations and physics, etc.

------
gfxgirl
So I'm going to join the naysayers here and say while the graphics look
absolutely phenomenal the game itself looks the the same game I've been
playing for 20-25 years.

A 3rd person character who walks through caves, canyons, ruins, slides through
tight places where the camera moves in close, can only climb on areas painted
with the "you can climb here color" and then pushes or pulls a few knobs for
"puzzles"

It could be the original Tomb Raider (1996) or God of War (2005) or any
Uncharted or all the other similar games in between. I'm sure others can name
the same game that's been skinned over and over and over.

I love pretty graphics but I'd really like to see the tech used to give me a
new game, not just an old game with prettier images.

~~~
dougmwne
This is a tech demo. Epic will be able to demonstrate their engine more
effectively in a familiar genre. If they were to showcase this using a
completely original game genre concept it would distract from where the focus
should rightly be, the pretty graphics. As far as I know, this is not a game
that's being developed or released. If you are not interested in 3rd person
action games, don't buy them.

------
VikingCoder
I've been wondering for a while Unreal doesn't just make the Unreal Browser.

You download and install it.

Then you give it a URL, and it streams down a map, and downloads DLLs
containing behavior custom to that map. While you're in a map, you can walk
through a portal to another map. Or you can just keep moving in a direction,
which streams more and more map.

If you're in a multi-player environment, you connect to a server for that
environment. If you're in a solo area, you're just running locally.

Isn't this what the Oasis (from "Ready Player One") is supposed to be like?
What stops them from doing this?

~~~
freeone3000
How do you make money from this? Who would buy it? Why would anyone use it? Is
there a point beyond "this is a cool thing", which is pretty well captured by
Roblox and Second Life and VRChat

~~~
VikingCoder
1) How do you make money from this?

How do you make money from anything on computers? With Ads, with Paid
Memberships, Paid Access to content.

2) Who would buy it? Why would anyone use it?

Isn't that kind of like asking "who would buy the internet? Why would anyone
use the internet?"

Remember when Chromebooks were announced and everyone laughed because it's
"just a browser?!"

Well, imagine if you were browsing, except it looked like Unreal engine when
you got to 3D content. Rather than looking like crappy WebGL content.

3) Is there a point beyond "this is a cool thing", which is pretty well
captured by Roblox and Second Life and VRChat

Do you think Roblox, Second Life, and VRChat look as good as Unreal Engine 5?

Would you enjoy playing content in Unreal Engine 5 without having to install
an entire game first?

~~~
hobofan
> Do you think Roblox, Second Life, and VRChat look as good as Unreal Engine
> 5?

The main bottleneck is the price of asset production. Producing assets on the
level of this demo videos is magnitudes more expensive than what you would see
in those other platforms. So for someone to be able to turn a profit with
that, there would need to be either a bigger willingness to spend, or an
explosion in player base.

There are also likely technical challenges. I'd imagine that very few people
have both the storage capacity and bandwidth to sustain such a system. You see
people on here complaining about websites being a few MB heavy. In such a high
quality 3D browser, you would need to load multiple GBs per scene.

~~~
VikingCoder
I think there's a chance the player base would grow if there were one app you
launch, and then you're in 3D world. I think it would help in discovery.

On the technical challenges, yes, you need bandwidth. Just like you need
electricity to play a console game. Yes.

But maybe Stadia is a good way to limit how much bandwidth you really need?
Load the data on the server, and stream the rendered views.

------
underdeserver
Holy forking shirtballs, that looks amazing.

There's still some weirdness - I found the water movement (around 4:10) a bit
odd, and the lightball in the cave seemed to be directional even though it was
a ball. But my god, that's beautiful.

The end scene with the flying reminded me of the (fully rendered) Avatar ride
at Disney World. I stood in line for two hours for that.

~~~
mthoms
Watch the characters' hand. When she first reveals the ball, it glows in every
direction. Then she moves her hand position to "focus" the light forward.

~~~
underdeserver
Yeah, but I don't see 100% sync between where she moves her hand and where the
ball glows.

------
madrox
The lede seems somewhat buried here. The tech they spend most of their time
talking about has more to do with development iteration than graphics. Not
having to optimize LODs or light maps mean more time spent generating models
and iterating on a scene. As with other kinds of software development, game
dev quality is all about how quickly you can iterate. As for the rest, this
demo says more about the PlayStation 5 than Unreal.

As a consumer, I'm expecting to see a graphics jump in the next generation of
games (as you would expect) and some fun new lighting details (yo, RTX!), but
not much beyond that. However, this will likely lower the cost of developing
cinematic games like Uncharted or RDR.

------
Razengan
Graphics tech has been good enough for a while. I wish developers would start
giving more love to improving other areas like physics, AI, and speech
synthesis, that can make a game actually _feel_ and play more realistic than
just eye candy would.

But I guess those other technologies depend more on the CPU/RAM etc. which
consoles lack in, so they don't want to bother with that.

Here's an example of how games have actually been going backwards in almost
all other areas except graphics:

Far Cry 2 vs. Far Cry 5:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCeEvQ68jY8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCeEvQ68jY8)

~~~
Wesxdz
Woah! The AI and physics in Far Cry 2 is an order of magnitude better. It
makes me wonder how the games regressed to be so bad (maybe devs just don't
care as much anymore?), given that Dunia Engine is used by both games. 'the
game's director, Clint Hocking, noted that internally, much of the design of
Far Cry 2 was haphazard'

~~~
Razengan
> _It makes me wonder how the games regressed to be so bad (maybe devs just
> don 't care as much anymore?)_

Console limitations might be one reason. Apparently everything has to run on
every platform under the sun or you might die impoverished in a dark alley, a
mindset that has inflicted other horrors, like Electron, upon us.

~~~
Wesxdz
I remember I liked Electron on first glance, but then realized it was a drag
how slow it was. I really hope this doesn't get worse to the point where we
need to consider x platform x proprietary GPU architecture. It will make
centralized engines like Unreal the only commercially viable options for big
projects with less money or exclusivity than say BOTW.

------
ben7799
It mostly looks amazing but also very uncanny valley.

The development process improvements sound most promising.

I was amazed until the the character started climbing the rocks.

Seems like no one at Epic has ever climbed a rock in their life.. it sent the
whole demo back to PS1 land. It doesn't even look like a super hero rock
climbing, just looks totally wrong. Almost no part of the body ever looks
angled correctly to reflect gravity being a thing, like the physics engine
switches off.

That and her ankles are fused and never plantar flex so the walking looks
bizarre. Again, it's all amazing but now it becomes uncanny valley cause you
notice the weird remaining stuff.

~~~
impalallama
I Noticed that they panned up within seconds of showing water because (I
assume) of how wacky the fluid dynamics look.

------
zarkov99
This is stunning, but scary. Even if my descendants survive plagues, nuclear
war, climate change and malevolent AI's, they might not have a chance against
the allure of these simulated worlds.

~~~
pradn
We've had super fun & addicting games for quite a while now, and, though
gaming is not a niche interest anymore, a good chunk of the population prefers
to do other things, like watch TV. If anything, the fear of alluring
entertainment sapping people's will to do other things is borne out with
television. The average American watches something like 5 hours of TV a day.
That's just incredible. In my mind, switching from that to video games is a
lateral move - you gain the sociability of video games, but lose out on the
often more complex stories of television. (Great video games get up to the
level of prestige TV, but most have narratives only as good as basic cable.)

~~~
zarkov99
I believe the amount of time adults spend on video games has been growing
fairly fast relationship to tv. At least for younger men.

------
SketchySeaBeast
Everyone should just keep in mind the first look at Unreal Engine 4 all those
years ago before getting too too excited. Big step forward, absolutely, but it
won't be as seen here.

~~~
the_pwner224
I'm not sure whether your comment was about a time delay before release of the
engine, or whether you're implying that computer hardware won't be fast enough
anytime soon.

In the video they said it was running on a PlayStation 5. There was a section
in the demo where they had interactive gamepad controls so it appears it might
have actually been running real-time on a PS5?

I never thought I would be saying this but storage might actually end up being
a bigger issue than CPU/GPU performance. The new MS Flight Simulator has to
stream the world over the internet because the entire map is 10 petabytes. In
the UE5 video they said the demo scene was 13 or 16 billion triangles... I
imagine that will take up a huge amount of disk space.

Modern AAA games are already 50-150 gigabytes each, and this is only going to
grow as models and scenes become increasingly detailed.

Edit: finding holes in their demo - this may be a video compression artifact,
but the big open scene at the end appeared to be of much lower quality. This
is something current AMD GPUs can do where if you move around it dynamically
lowers the resolution to prevent FPS from decreasing. Perhaps they also
dynamically lower resolution in the big open areas? IDK how much of a benefit
that would make, but you can never trust these marketing videos...

~~~
seba_dos1
This is a demo. You can easily see that it's structured in a way that allows
to easily mask loading of the new scenes and that there's not a lot of
interaction going on - pretty much the only interactive thing they shown was
dynamic illumination (which is something they were promising since early UE4
demos, and I believe that's what GP mostly meant) and particle system.

You can be sure that demos like that (especially early ones) make tons of
compromises that are neatly hidden on the video but that usually wouldn't be
viable in context of a regular video game - at least without severely limiting
your game design choices.

~~~
Spivak
But real games have always and will continue to use the same tricks. This demo
could be put directly into a Tomb Raider game and would be fantastic.

~~~
nsxwolf
The Tomb Raider-esque parts where the character is jumping and climbing didn't
look right. She's missing some kind of "weight" or something in her animation
that makes it look like she's not really doing those things. Lara Croft's
animations are much more convincing.

~~~
doikor
This isn't supposed to be a real game but a tech demo of engine capabilities.
Expecting them to spend as much money on getting climbing animations as good
as a AAA game is kind of crazy.

When it comes to animation the interesting stuff were the "automated"
hand/foot placement animations like the hand on the door they mentioned.

~~~
nsxwolf
Fair. It certainly makes me appreciate the little details in games like Tomb
Raider and Uncharted more.

------
forgot_again
I guess this might sound unreal, but I literally have not looked at AAA game
graphics in over 10 years, so this looks absolutely stunning.

Back in 2009 my 360 died. I had been an avid console gamer before that, but I
never replaced the Xbox and in 2010 went off to college, where I mainly played
N64 with friends as well as games on my phone.

After I graduated I was busy with work and life and never got back into the
gaming cutting edge. Sure I played StarCraft once in a while for old times'
sake as well as different old Total War games cause they're awesome, but never
the sort of major AAA release I used to play all the time as a kid.

I also never really looked at modern graphics since I didn't have friends who
played modern games and never watched videos showcasing what games looked
like.

So coming from 2009, this is absurdly good.

------
OctopusSandwich
That looks so good! I hope they add few VR related features. I tried running
the default VR scene with Unreal 4 and couldn't get it to work.

Unreal looks better than Unity but I found it difficult to get started.

~~~
etaioinshrdlu
It took a good deal of fiddling but I was able to get this starter project
working with Valve Index: [https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-
US/product/steam...](https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-
US/product/steamvr-input-for-unreal)

It included teleporting and picking up objects, full hand tracking and finger
positioning.

Overall, it seemed like a decent foundation but clearly needed a LOT of work
to be ready for a full game. The skillset and toolset is very different than
what web/app devs and backend devs use.

------
fxtentacle
Wow, we'll soon be down to only one game engine.

Crytek has financial worries. Plus it's the most difficult to use, because
it's almost all C++.

Unity is very accessible thanks to C# scripting, but has bug issues (and no
source code).

Unreal Engine looks amazing, is cheap or free for indie studios, and has
source code included.

If they can make UE slightly easier to develop for, they'll dominate the
market.

~~~
swalsh
There's a possibility Valve might release Source 2

~~~
unixhero
Half Life 3 confirmed.

~~~
chupasaurus
Dota 2 Reborn is the first game on it, full release was in September 2015.
Also Dota 3 was a joke over 7.0.0 patch which had changed all of the core
mechanics in the game, but to be fair it had breaked the chains from WC3 map
mechanics.

~~~
unixhero
It's okay. I forgot for a second that memes and internet humor are frowned
upon here. I guess that's okay. The signal to noise ratio of HN is astounding
(in a positive way) as a result.

------
kidintech
Very late to the discussion but I might be missing something; a majority of
you are bashing this by saying "it's just a demo"/"games never end up looking
like that":

a) If this demo is runnable at real time fps on ps5 hardware ($400-500 WITH
markup)...that's a technologically phenomenal feat in itself.

b) If the engine IS capable of running something like this...they are not
lying. The responsibility for "good looking games" then falls on to game
studios to deliver instead of halfassing something just to hit a deadline.

Where am I wrong?

~~~
Jnr
You are correct. I am personally excited that this technology exists, but I am
also sad that we will have to wait a few years to see an actual game to
utilize this.

The engine releases sometime in 2021 and then it will probably take a few
years for some other studio to develop a decent AAA title using this. That is,
unless Epic Games releases something awesome on their own soon.

------
hpoe
So I don't care much for graphics quality, I started moving towards the
terminal and CLI for most everything in my life about ten years ago,
ultimately I feel that graphics falls under unnecessary fluff and eyecandy
that distracts from "real" data, gameplay, etc.

But that flight scene at the end of the demo, how realistic it was, how it was
seamless, how detailed it produced a physical reaction in me, a feeling of
like "WOW" throughout my entire body as I watched it. That was amazing.

~~~
dx87
Graphical quality can be a way of conveying "real" data. Here's a video where
they cover the importance of graphics in fighting games, such as allowing
characters to have larger move sets because the better graphics allows moves
to be visually distinct to players.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSxk7THBnxY&t=2s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSxk7THBnxY&t=2s)

~~~
hpoe
You kids are spoiled nowadays with all your fancy graphics that substitute
flash for performance, I played Warcraft Orcs and Humans for weeks, in all of
it's beautiful pixelated, 8 bit glory. Now get off my lawn, zug zug.

mild \s

------
kriro
I haven't looked into UE in quite some time as I use Unity for most of my
stuff (not a game developer, just building quick prototypes for AI,
simulations, dabbling in AR etc.) but the demo looks pretty stunning.

I tend to do a technology pass once a year or so to see if I might enjoy
switching engines. From my last check my takeaway was that UE always seems
more technically advanced but Unity is easier to work with/rapidly prototype.
UE now seems to have a 1 million revenue barrier (I think for Unity it's 100k)
which seems attractive for game devs. As a programmer the inclusion of
ProBuilder/Grids in Unity is a godsent as I can quickly muddle together
greyboxings and be done with graphics (combined with the recent Blender
overhaul I almost feel like I'm semi-useful on the graphics/asset front now).

So quick question to the people who have used both (I'd also be interested in
Godot feedback)...is that basic assessment still correct? Unity stronger for
quicker prototyping, Unreal stronger high end? If I wasn't one person but a
small team with an artist I'd probably pick UE as the artists will likely use
their own tools and not build stuff in-engine.

------
DenisM
For all the advancements the demo is still essentially monochromatic.

As I recall this is done to avoid the difficulties of rendering how two
adjacent differently colored objects bleed their colors onto each other. No
color - no bleeding.

I'd prefer color over pixel accuracy.

~~~
jeffbee
That my reaction to this recent UE4 demo. The whole world is monochromatic,
and this seems to be an adaptation to the limits of the technology.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKu1Y-LlfNQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKu1Y-LlfNQ)

------
crangos
Looks impressive, especially the reduced friction for artists. The demo hints
at several shortcomings of the engine, though, especially the nanite componet.
Stepping through the feature highlight (whatever the youtube compression lets
through), during dense scenes geometry often gets washed out, looking less
detailed then an authored model would probably look. Hard edges often appear
fuzzy, and the fuzziness is not temporally stable.

------
petercooper
I really, really, really want an Unreal Tournament 2021. It's a shame they
haven't pushed that series as a showcase for the engine anymore.

~~~
ww520
Still playing UT99. The original Unreal Tournament is just something done
right.

~~~
bloodorange
UT2004 was brilliant too.

------
CarVac
The only things I can possibly criticize is the global illumination lagging
behind environment changes (presumably because it's iterative) and the water
simulation not being movie-quality.

Otherwise it's simply astonishing.

~~~
vmception
that water simulation was pretty bad and blurred out, I went over it a few
times. I don't think this is a limitation of the engine because I have seen
plenty of games use Unreal Engine 4 and do it differently.

------
atum47
I just saw the tech demo on the ps5, really really impressive, the dynamic
light, the zbrush import, the huge amount of polygons... I'm saying this with
some experience as a 3d artist (zbrush) and a programmer.

------
vasili111
All this for sure looks amazing. But I do not think it will bring anything new
to gameplay. There is no big gameplay changes in past 15 years. All shooters,
all MMORPG, all strategy games and etc are based on the ideas of 2003-2005
years. Graphics are improving but most games have similar gameplay. I think
the biggest next impact to gameplay and game industry will be engine that will
be able to have huge zoom ability + ability to handle more than 30 000 players
on the same map (of course that also depend on server software and not only
game engine). Like traveling from space on ship to planet and after landing
and play as a regular 1st person game but all of this with lots of players on
the same world (more than 30 000). I think that is next big thing that will
change game industry.

~~~
jayd16
This ignores AR, VR, and other recent genres. We just had No Man's Sky come
out doing exactly what you describe. Other procedural infinite space games
exist.

~~~
vasili111
> This ignores AR, VR, and other recent genres.

They sounded promising but they did not made actual revolution in games. They
are not mass product used by most players.

> No Man's Sky come out doing exactly what you describe. Other procedural
> infinite space games exist.

I said "able to have huge zoom ability + ability to handle more than 30 000
players on the same map". There are no games that have those both at the same
time. Only those 2 in one game is what I am saying.

~~~
keenmaster
Play Half Life: Alyx and you might change your mind about VR. I think it
convincingly shows that VR is the future.

My setup:

\- OG Vive with deluxe audio kit and the wireless kits. (Both kits completely
change the Vive and are in my opinion critical)

\- GTX 1080 Strix (factory overclocked)

\- 7th 6700k

If I’m having this much fun on first gen hardware, then imagine next gen
headsets with higher resolution, wider FOV, eye tracking, foveated rendering
(enabling graphical fidelity more similar to big budget 2D games), a better
developer ecosystem, more extensive haptics, built in wireless, more players
(for social experiences and multiplayer), and increased comfort.

------
neogodless
Somewhat tangential - I was hoping I could download and run a demo to see how
things look on my hardware. What are your favorite downloadable graphics
demos?

------
seanwilson
What's going on behind the scenes to explain the jump in graphics quality?
Hardware? Algorithmic?

Does this involve some breakthrough somewhere or is this incremental?

~~~
random_ind_dude
The graphics look good because of two things: Quixel and global illumination.
Quixel is Swedish company that Epic acquired in 2019. Quixel does high-
resolution scans of actual physical objects(photogrammetry) and makes them
available as textures in Unreal Engine. The sheer rock faces that you see in
the demo are Quixel megascans of actual rocks.

The other thing that makes the graphics look impressive is global
illumination, which provides real time dynamic lighting of the environment,
instead of baked in (pre-rendered) lighting. The demo seems to only have a
single light source - sunlight in the cave, light from the crystal looking
thing in her hand while inside the room. I am not sure how well it look like
in actual games when there are multiple light sources.

The rest of the stuff doesn't look too different from current gen games.

~~~
seanwilson
What makes this stuff possible now though? New global illumination algorithms?
Better scanning techniques? Or mostly better hardware?

I don't know how it compares to other games to be honest. If it's a big jump
though, I'd be interested to know what's being done different and why it's
being done now.

~~~
eigenspace
The big thing people keep not understanding is how big a deal the the PS5's
SSD infrastructure is. This engine is based around the idea of being able to
grab (very large) assets from the disk only milliseconds before they're
needed. In current video games designed to be playable with a HDD (spinning
disk drive), they need to make sure that if it's possible for a player to look
at an asset in the next 30 seconds, it needs to be already loaded in to the
VRAM (the ram of the video card).

The PS5 (and XSX, to a lesser degree) put a ton of work into making is so that
data can be moved from storage on the disk into the GPU as fast as possible.
It does this through having shared ram between the CPU and GPU, having a fast
interconnect and having dedicated hardware so that data from the SSD can be
decompressed without ever going through the CPU.

On a PC with PCIe 4.0, you can basically move the same amount of textures to
the GPU in the same amount of time as these new consoles, but there's going to
be way more latency because data has to first be loaded into the CPU's RAM,
then decompressed by the CPU then go through a bumch of software layers to
ensure compatibility and sent through the motherboard to the GPU's VRAM and
only then can the GPU use the texture to draw something on screen.

The PS5 and XSX built a highway between the storage and GPU that doesn't need
the CPU, or compatibility software to be involved at all. That opens the door
to a ton of new graphical techniques that used to just not be possible because
of VRAM limitations.

------
mcphage
> Unreal Engine 5 will be available in preview in early 2021, and in full
> release late in 2021, supporting next-generation consoles, current-
> generation consoles, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android.

I wonder if they consider the Switch a current-generation console.

~~~
badRNG
I'd sure hope so if iOS and Android are on the list.

~~~
mcphage
I'm pretty sure that most high-end iOS and Android devices are significantly
more powerful than the switch—I mean, they generally cost hundreds of dollars
more.

~~~
sk0g
High end smartphones now cost around the same as the new Xbox and PlayStation
combined would, or about as much as a solid mid range gaming PC...

------
Geee
The tech here is impressive but so is the content they have created or it.
Even more so. It's kind of insane that game art isn't usually given the credit
it deserves. Everyone seems to think that the engine just produces these
images somehow. Look, the artists had to actually design all this architecture
and statues etc. It's not an easier job than actually being an architect...
Producing content at such level of detail is very expensive and time-consuming
and it just doesn't come automatically with the engine.

------
rayalez
As a newcomer to Unreal, I have a question. Is C++ really that verbose and
difficult to use, or does it get better as you gain more experience?

I'm relatively new to gamedev, I've spent several months learning Godot, and
now I'm trying out Unreal. Unreal has many exciting things, but from what I
can see so far, C++ looks like nightmare. It seems like everything I'm trying
to do takes me 5x lines of code and 10x the time compared to doing this in
Godot. Also the code looks far less readable and way more confusing. Granted
I'm new to Unreal and C++, but I didn't have the same problems with other
programming languages I've been using.

So my question is - does this get better/faster/easier when you get used to it
and gain more experience? Or is this something you struggle with every day?

I know that Unreal has Blueprints, but they also seem pretty slow and
limiting. I've been watching a tutorial where a guy has spend 40 minutes
explaining how to do a thing in Blueprints which would take me like 3 minutes
and 15 lines of code to do in Godot.

I really want to use all the sexy exciting features unreal has, but
C++/Blueprints are really holding me back.

~~~
voppe
I've been using UE4 for VR development as a hobby for the last year or so. I
have to say that I was against Blueprints and had quite to fight with myself
to give them a chance, but once you get used to it it's not _that_ bad. IMO
still worse than pure code and sometimes much slower to write (complex
arithmetic operations are painful), but at least it's not C++. Also, sometimes
a visual representation of what your code is doing helps you simplify your
code architecture when it gets too convoluted.

------
soulofmischief
Whatever the tech actually delivers, as braggadocios as the claims are (they
would render hundreds of utilities and workflows obsolete), I am astounded by
their licensing update.

I'd long migrated to Unreal for technical and workflow reasons as well as
having an open engine, but this just seals the deal. A lot of indie studios
could get their big break self-publishing this way.

------
muststopmyths
This looks nice, but I'm not sure what the practical gameplay consequences for
the new tech are. I sure as shit am not going to ship a terabyte of original-
quality assets in my game.

It would help me produce cinematics more easily though, I suppose.

Real-time global illumination looks dope. No more overnight lighting builds :)

~~~
randyrand
why not? PS5 can download/delete as you go.

~~~
muststopmyths
Bandwidth ? someone has to pay for it. users might have bandwidth caps and/or
have to pay as well.

Not to mention that streaming high-quality assets from the network is not
going to be fast.

------
throwawaysea
I've always been excited to see these demos over the years, from childhood
until now. Although they may not be what is actually implemented in a real
game, Unreal, id, Nvidia, etc. have always managed to spark that feeling of
giddy euphoria, a glimpse into the future, with these demos.

------
ketzo
No one seems to be talking about the announcement at the end of the page:

> Friends, matchmaking, lobbies, achievements, leaderboards, and accounts: we
> built these services for Fortnite, we launched them across seven major
> platforms - PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android. Now we’re
> opening up Epic Online Services to all developers FOR FREE in a simple
> multiplatform SDK!

> Mix and match these services together with your own account services,
> platform accounts, or Epic Games accounts, which reach the world’s largest
> cross-platform social graph with over 350 million players and their 2.2
> billion friend connections across half a billion devices.

Free SDK for online game services? That's an insane boon to any small studio /
solo development of a multiplayer game.

------
cdolan
Is it just me or does water still look terrible?

UE5 has better water than this, but not by much in my opinion (Halo 3, a 10
year old game): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4eFg-
lnpDM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4eFg-lnpDM)

~~~
nailer
I'd say the Halo 5 video is better, but it's likely due to the artist.

~~~
cdolan
The artist at Epic using UE5 didnt do the best job on the water, you mean?

~~~
nailer
Yes.

\- The UE5 demo is showing off the deformation in the water but has a poor
quality material that looks a bit like blue hair gel.

\- Halo doesn't have any deformation, just a really lovely material.

------
willis936
I think it is interesting that the first thing they talk about is LOD. UE4 is
famous for its bad LOD implementation. Look at FFVII Remake [0]. It's an
insanely high budget game made in UE4 with top-of-the-line assets, yet some
textures never load in to their high resolution versions. UE4 has earned this
stain. Since they're talking LOD first and foremost, maybe Epic actually fixed
their UE LOD issues this time around.

0\.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyGl5C3Uwak&t=10m40s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyGl5C3Uwak&t=10m40s)

------
surfsvammel
For someone with zero insight into these kinds of things. What happened with
Id software delivering game engines? Do they have competing software or are
they not doing that sort of thing?

~~~
alibert
They are still doing in house engine. id Tech is now at version 7 and is used
by their latest game Doom Eternal (running on Vulkan exclusively). Extremely
well optimized for any configuration spec and run great especially on AMD GPU.

------
rubber_duck
The environment demo is very impressive - wonder why they didn't put a bit
more effort in to the character, it would have been insanely impressive if the
character detail was next-gen.

~~~
goldcd
I'd just assumed it was a "hey, wouldn't this be great if Lara Croft was
standing here instead" place-holder.

------
cosmotic
Even with all the amazing lighting and polygon counts, they still have
screenshake from a 2001 game, only now even more uncanny. "Is this a video
game or real li.... never mind"

------
alkonaut
Are there any technical details available for nanite and lumen works?

------
jerome-jh
OK there are N=10^6 triangles and that shows the raw GPU power. True indirect
lighting would be N^2: this is both impossible and not worth the cost in terms
of realism. So maybe they do it on a low LOD geometry or even a dirtier trick.
A low LOD is probably also used for collision detection. Keep in mind that
these people's job is to trick you, to the letter. Maybe there is not much
more than a larger GPU and an simplified creation process in this demo.

------
PossiblyKyle
Multiple comments here agree that the water is not the engine’s strong suit,
but the thing that bothers me the most these days is not the water, but the
wetness (or lack thereof). Why can’t nobody do wetness well? In most games
you’ll play, you can dive deep into the water and when you go out your model
will stay completely dry. If Naughty Dog managed to do it well on a PS3, so
can the game engine as a feature on the PS5.

------
soygul
I wonder if the background in the flight scene is pre-rendered. If not, then
PlayStation 5 (which the demo is running on) is going to be a beast of a
console.

------
LinuXY
Any chance we can get a scalable network backend to go along with the render
enhancements? Fan-out workers on actors and a KCP implementation would great!

------
liamcardenas
Game Devs: Is Unreal Engine the premiere game engine at this point? UE has
been a popular engine for a long time and with the recent _massive_ success of
Epic Games, I have a hard time imagining Unity or even in-house engines are
able to match the engineering that goes into this. That said, I am not
familiar with this at all — which is why I’m asking.

~~~
jayd16
When you say "At the point" do you mean now with UE4 or what we think UE5 will
bring? Unity will probably be a bit behind because they seem to focus on
mobile more but they're not usually significantly behind.

UE sort of seems to have a technical advantage on some platforms and Unity
sort of has more of an outreach to smaller teams. Most games are not trying to
be on the cutting edge though.

You can ship a game on either engine just fine. In my experience, licensing
plays the biggest role in the decision.

------
chermanowicz
Just for fun, somewhat unrelated, here's what is possible on an 8 year old
engine (if you want to melt your GPU/CPU a bit)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8kEIOBoRGk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8kEIOBoRGk)

------
rplnt
> you can download and use Unreal Engine to build games for free as you always
> have

That's a very stretched-out definition of always. Unreal used to be one of the
most expensive, if not the most expensive, game engines you could license.
It's been only few years they adopted this free model.

~~~
asutekku
It’s been six years already. While not necessarily “always”, that still pretty
much covers the current generation.

------
theandrewbailey
I have to wonder how much of this requires ray tracing hardware. I've noticed
for many, many years that the quality of models and textures has been 'good
enough', but lighting, for the most part, still sucked. Ray tracing seems to
solve a lot of lighting problems.

------
micheljansen
Interesting how these demos used to be about how awesome everything looks.
That still matters, of course, but previous gen engines already achieved
cinematic photorealism. Now it’s all about ease of use and workflow. No more
need to worry about poly counts, normal maps etc.

------
klmadfejno
Can someone help me articulate my issue with this? Looking at a lot objects,
they seem unnaturally detailed. Like the bugs, or the statue at around 6
minutes. Something about it makes me really uncomfortable feeling physically.

Is this like a weird infinite depth of field kind of thing?

~~~
freeone3000
There's no distance blur and the entire shot is "in focus". These shots would
be impossible to take with a camera. In addition, if you game a bunch, you'd
expect LOD to drop with distance, but here it doesn't.

~~~
Jnr
You can take a shot with small aperture and have it all in focus.

The problem here is probably some sharpening filter.

------
knorker
Here it is on youtube, so that you can play it without it stalling:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC5KtatMcUw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC5KtatMcUw)

------
guevara
I really liked the fluid simulations. It's always been something hard to get
right in games. Albeit, it did look pretty janky in the demo but I hope we can
get some quality fluid simulations in games soon.

------
gonational
Was anyone else unimpressed by the water simulation (when she walks in it)?

Did it just look fake just because it was too clean / blue, or did the motion
and its reaction look like something from Morrowind 18 years ago?

------
VMG
does it run on linux?

~~~
acomjean
Unreal engine 4 does, so I suspect yes.

You'll probably have to compile it yourself, but it isn't hard. (I did it).

[https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-
US/Platforms/Linux/Beginner...](https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-
US/Platforms/Linux/BeginnerLinuxDeveloper/SettingUpAnUnrealWorkflow/index.html)

------
gok
Demos are always beautiful but how about fixing some of the stuff that makes
playing UE games unpleasant? The ridiculous load times, the random stutters
and pop-ins, crazy high memory usage...

------
Thaxll
For people not working in video games in might seems super impresive but I can
assure you that major publisher have similar rendering visual in there in-
house engine. Super cool none the less!

------
rydre
[https://youtu.be/00gAbgBu8R4](https://youtu.be/00gAbgBu8R4) \- did Epic
manage to pull off what Euclideon Holographics could not?

------
revel
I remember seeing Mario 64 and thinking "this is it, graphics can't get any
better than this"

My tiny, 12 year old, N64-powered brain would explode watching this video

------
LockAndLol
I hope they name the authors of the theses that they used to achieve this.
It's inconceivable to me that some dude sat down and decided how everything
should be coded.

------
gigatexal
This is insane. The next decade of gaming is going to be amazing.

------
danielscrubs
It's impressive, but personally the Far Cry 5 engine is more so. Why? Because
it focuses on the Achilles heels of game engines: humans and forests.

------
apelin
I guess we'll have to see if Unity will havea response on that. Have to say
thou, having billions of triangles without sacrificing FPS is exciting.

------
dzonga
people that make games n game engines are fucking incredible. with tools like
these the future is bright for film-makers on a limited budget. which is
beneficial for a diversified high quality movie industry. imagine something
like game of thrones, instead of actual humans. just have it all entirely done
via unreal 5. you'll still need good writers though.

------
aswanson
holy...This is crazy. I really want to learn game engine architecture. Anyone
have any links/recommendations for starting developers?

~~~
kmfrick_
Read the Game Engine Black Books by Fabien Sanglard at fabiensanglard.net !
They are among the most beautiful books on game engine I've ever read. I read
the PDF and then bought them both to support him because he really, really
deserves it. The other articles on his website are also really well-written
and super interesting!

~~~
aswanson
Thank you.

------
holoduke
Amazing graphics. No other words. This level alone must have 40gb of game
asset data. Expect first games getting over 1tb soon.

------
ngz00
That is pretty impressive, but I was distracted by the lack of anti-aliasing
and the rough edges on all the models when back-lit.

------
bovermyer
And now I need to pick my jaw up off the floor...

That is some seriously impressive tech. The developers should be VERY proud of
themselves.

------
hrdwdmrbl
Did anyone else think that their water wasn't very good? It seemed very thick.

------
mathnode
Epic Online Services; this is the big take away for UE5, graphics will always
improve, but user experience is key to long term success.

We can now all sit back and watch Epic eat Valve’s and Microsoft’s Lunch right
in front of them, like some kind of sordid picnic.

I look forward to seeing the pricing details and revenue options based on
player base and time.

------
seemslegit
"Virtualized micropolygon geometry" sounds like a laundry detergent ad.

------
leonfs
Does anyone know in what language was the engine developed? Is it still C++?

~~~
capableweb
You can access the source code via GitHub if you follow these steps:
[https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ue4-on-
github](https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ue4-on-github)

Did a quick `cloc` run of the codebase, shows the following:

    
    
        github.com/AlDanial/cloc v 1.84  T=86.60 s (949.0 files/s, 297044.5 lines/s)
        ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Language                             files          blank        comment           code
        ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        C++                                  20720        1622066        1102650        7943910
        C/C++ Header                         46048        1443245        2403181        5914335
        C                                     3123         311091         384178        1319332
        Python                                2625         164396         219571         693345
        C#                                    2587          71616          99526         472242
        XML                                   1429           4589           4985         420621
        HTML                                   518           9623           1370         124409
        MSBuild script                         225             10            551         122808
        JSON                                   231             59              0         122326
        CMake                                 1655          18686          38278          97625
        Bourne Shell                           348          11335          15567          69747
        Objective C                            351          12507          15181          59608
        Objective C++                          124           7159           3992          34551
        Expect                                  20           3889             46          32132
        INI                                    341           5658           1719          27645
        make                                   682           9220          13527          25996
        Markdown                               156           7829              0          25333
        Windows Module Definition              145           1871            144          23754
        CSS                                     32           2699            553          23212
        Java                                   102           3035           3832          18332
        Pascal                                  15            798          26566          15507
        JavaScript                             103           2125           2208          15486
        Perl                                    76           2253           2218          11634
        HLSL                                   123           2518           3934          10942
        DOS Batch                              238           2492           1080           7361
        TypeScript                              32           1550            983           6242
        Windows Resource File                   70           1013           1348           3628
        GLSL                                    38            685            487           2994
        XAML                                    13            201             87           2861
        ASP.NET                                  7            538              7           2687
        Ant                                      4             54            216            799
        SAS                                      1             14             22             32
        Bourne Again Shell                       1              0              0              9
        ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
        SUM:                                 82183        3724824        4348007       17651445
        ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

~~~
leonfs
Is that for UE4 or UE5? In any case, thanks for the reply.

~~~
capableweb
Not sure, the git remote is `git@github.com:EpicGames/UnrealEngine.git` and
the commit at the time I run cloc was
`f8f4b403eb682ffc055613c7caf9d2ba5df7f319` which is the head of the `release`
branch.

But, if UE4 was/is mainly, you can expect UE5 to follow the same path, they
are not gonna rewrite 20720 files into a different language just for fun.

------
choeger
Hundreds of billions of triangles? How much main memory has the PlayStation 5?

~~~
bluegreyred
i believe the latest rumors suggest 16GB unified GDDR6, but the relevant tech
here might be sophisticated caching technology that also leverages a fast PCIe
4.0 SSD

~~~
choeger
PCIe 4.0 is in the order of Gigabytes per second. Hundreds of billions of
triangles would demand hundreds of Gigabytes. There is no way they can
calculate this stuff in real time (and tbf, they never claimed that they did).

So presumably, the engine now does that kind of stuff at load-time. The
bottleneck is then the place on the SSD and the scene change pace. This fits
quite nicely with the repetitive statures, but it leaves a question mark for
that final flight.

------
tumidpandora
I definitely got one thing out of the demo.. PS5 is so freaking awesome!!!

------
jerome-jh
I am quite disappointed she does not leave footprints in the sand, at 1:30.

------
wildpeaks
It's a total game changer.

Time for everyone to learn Unreal, Houdini, and Mari.

~~~
Pfhreak
It'd be my default engine if it had language bindings other than C++.

------
dt3ft
This is history in the making. Just leaving my trace here :)

------
cryptozeus
What a Demo ! Hopefully PS5 delivers this level of gaming.

------
brauzi
Wow, how soon until AR/VR is the standard in gaming?

~~~
nineteen999
As soon as the majority of the audience clamor for it? Ie. possibly never.

Only a minority of gamers/audiences really want to experience VR or binocular
3D and are a prepared to wear cumbersome headsets or 3D glasses right now. I
think the hardware has to improve a lot for it to become accepted as standard.

------
agumonkey
It's a tech demo so I cannot expect more but it feels bland to me. More like a
live interactive movie. I see no potential for gaming.. the visual and
geometric complexity dwarfs the usual gameplay IMO.

~~~
ohitsdom
> no potential for gaming

I'm very confused by this. This demo gameplay is pretty representative of a
few genres of games like Tomb Raider. It also translates well to different
types of gameplay, so I don't get your dismissal.

~~~
agumonkey
But I fail to distinguish what more this new gen will give to the latest TR
game. At this point it's gpu porn, more rocks that one can ever count.

------
rydre
Looks impressive. Lets see what Unity has upcoming.

~~~
rasz
Who knows, maybe they will finally fix freezes in Escape from Tarkov
(confirmed by devs as engine problem) after 4 years of promises.

------
vmception
so PC gamers, with 8K textures and UE5, what would you like to see aside from
pushed framerates?

~~~
Leherenn
Active worlds.

I've played open world games like the Witcher 3, or Assassin's Creed Odissey;
and damn they're impressive games. Assassin's creed in particular was really
amazing, you could wander through ancient Greece and just enjoy the sights,
visit the cities.

With the kind of things demoed here it will be even more amazing.

But the games feel somehow lifeless, as if you're the only one really living
in there. Sure there are some NPCs, but they are all reactive, not active. You
can roam the countryside for a while and come back to civilization, nothing
will have changed, except maybe the town will be governed by blue instead of
red.

There's some premises, on Odissey, you have some patrols for both sides moving
around, and if they encounter each other they start fighting. But that's small
scale, and partly scripted at that, there will always be the same patrols
going through the same paths.

What's missing is that you cannot walk on a battle in progress unless it is in
the story. You won't see a city patching up its walls after a siege, merchants
running a real economy, people going on with their lives in general. But
meaningfully, not just walking around the town and going back to their house
at night.

I assume it's really difficult though. First technically, it's a lot of CPU
power. And a lot of work to create AI that meaningfully impact the world.

Then it's how to design a game in a world you cannot really predict. It could
be purely open box, a la mount and blade, but I think it could be more, with
an underlying story line that would adapt to the changing world.

Of course you don't need to do everything at once. In this case, simply having
the 2 armies stateful (e.g. a set number of troops with some replenishments,
but not always the same soldiers in the places), with troops moving across the
countryside, and 2 AIs vying for power across the land would be fantastic

~~~
Wesxdz
Do you have any ideas for approaches to this not including the dominant
behavior tree paradigm used in Unreal Engine? If this type of true AI behavior
has to be built on a case by case basis per game per behavior (pathfinding,
animation, mechanics): it's gonna be a few decades to get there.

------
one2know
I'm sorry but an unreal engine 5 video needs to start with graphics, tim
sweeney, or not start at all.

------
perseusprime11
The Demo was unreal!

------
arminiusreturns
After the many fiascos of UE4 and the shit Sweeney and Epic have pulled I dont
really care, I'm sticking with blender and godot.

~~~
Pfhreak
Many fiascos? Are you talking about how epic didn't pay dancers for their
dances in fortnite? Or the crunch they pushed on their workers to ship
fortnite content?

I'm trying to think of others, maybe you could expand a bit?

~~~
arminiusreturns
Just a bit of background first. I bought in heavily to the ue4 ecosystem as
soon as UE4 was released, back when it was $20/mo. After about 3 years I had
enough and moved to godot and blender and being away from that ecosystems it's
deficiencies grow ever more glaring.

It started with promises that the editor would treat linux as a first class
client. Those were lies, as not only did a community fork do more work than
epic for years because they refused PRs, but the launcher still hasn't been
made available for linux, requiring people to use Windows just to get
marketplace assets. Now I get it, linux is a small subset of the community and
it's their choice, etc, so I moved on with only a few hundred in marketplace
assets lost, my personal choice and not a huge deal...

Then there was paragon (at least I got a refund). Then they completely changed
fortnite. Then it was just one thing after another. For example, epic was bad
enough with exclusives, but they actually even pulled Metro Exodus from steam
even after it was taking pre-orders! They promised they wouldn't do it again,
and then did it again with Anno 1800. Then they started buying studios to
remove old games from steam. They even started "bribing" crowdfunded games
that magically moved away from steam despite originally promising steam
release. (Shenmue 3, Outer Wilds, Pheonix Point)

Their security was breached multiple times, with one single breach being over
9mil accounts. Multiple people with credit card issues who chargedback'ed
immediately got a refund and then had their accounts suspended. (epic getting
around chargeback fees).

Epic is ~%40 owned by Tencent and has been found to do questionable things on
systems.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/PhoenixPoint/comments/b0rxdq/epic_g...](https://www.reddit.com/r/PhoenixPoint/comments/b0rxdq/epic_game_store_spyware_tracking_and_you/)
[https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-steam-data-
reddit/](https://www.pcgamer.com/epic-steam-data-reddit/)

They bought easy anti cheat (EAC) and then completely stopped all efforts to
support linux (Valve had been in talks with them and discussing the linux
issue). (a pretty big deal for the linux community as it affects many games
present and future)

They started paying off mods at the fortnitebr reddit sub which caused a mod
exodus and a lot of hubub.

Tim Sweeney on linux: "Installing Linux is sort of the equivalent of moving to
Canada when one doesn’t like US political trends. Nope, we’ve got to fight for
the freedoms we have today, where we have them today."

Tim Sweeney doesn't understand the difference between first and third party:
"Steam’s the largest PC store and already has PC exclusives such as DOTA2,
Counterstrike, and Portal. Valve has every right to make deals with developers
and publishers to secure more exclusives, just as Apple, Microsoft, Sony,
Nintendo, and Epic Games do!"

They bought "views" on youtube at least a few times (see Shenmue 3 trailer)

There is no gifting in the epic game store, and if you use the same payment on
other accounts (like family) they will lock that payment method.

They killed Rocket League on linux and macos.

The epic games store barely functions, with no user reviews and plans for the
devs to "opt in" reviews so they can select only the reviews they like. They
did enable OpenCritic reviews though. Broken or no cloud saves, achievements,
mod support, forums, or wishlists.

This is only a partial list!

It wasn't until 2019 that the Fortnight dev crunch thing came up, and honestly
just calling it a "crunch" doesn't seem to do the issue justice when
contractors were under a culture of fear to work 70-100 hr work weeks!

When someone has a repeated pattern of abuse and lies and gaslighting, you can
be sure thats what they will continue to do in the future, and that is what
both Epic and Tim Sweeney have and are going to continue to do. Anybody who
buys into the UE4 or UE5 ecosystem is probably going to regret it... unless
Epic pays them off like they have plenty of times before.

~~~
Pfhreak
Some of those are very valid concerns, others don't really seem like fiascos.

Paragon: Epic returned all purchases and made all the assets free on their
marketplace. That seems like a pretty consumer friendly way to shutter a
product that wasn't doing well.

Exclusives: Paid exclusivity made games like Satisfactory possible, and I
believe that all the exclusives are timed? Making games is expensive and
unpredictable, exclusives ensure devs can take more risks without worrying
about going bankrupt.

Security is a serious concern for sure.

Acquisitions: As far as I can tell, Psyonix is the only game studio they've
bought, and they haven't pulled their game from Steam? Are there others?

Tencent ownership: What's the _actual_ concern here? There's a lot of
sinophobia in gaming circles these days. There's plenty to be concerned about
with the CCP and Tencent, but what's the specific worry about them having a
minority stake in Epic?

Linux support (Rocket League, Editor, etc.). These are data driven decisions.
Rocket League, for instance, had 0.3% playership across Mac and Linux
combined. They were updating their game, and fixing bugs for that small of a
community just doesn't make financial sense. They issued 100% refunds, which
seems pretty reasonable?

> Anybody who buys into the UE4 or UE5 ecosystem is probably going to regret
> it

As someone who worked in the industry for years (but never for Epic), I highly
doubt this. I've worked with UE, Unity, and CryEngine/Lumberyard and there's a
huge difference in support and tooling between them.

~~~
arminiusreturns
You asked for the negatives, but please don't get me wrong. I really like the
interface and many of the features of UE, and the tech behind it. It's just a
shame I felt forced to move away from it. Also, please keep in mind I'm not
the typical person who is trying to get into gamedev on the side, as I'm a RMS
loving, linux-only, most of my stack is gpl sorta dude.

On the last point, you may be right, I might have been a bit hyperbolic but
there are cases where I have seen it play out. One of my favorite games in the
potential department was Mortal Online, but it constantly struggled with UE3
limitations despite official Epic support and moves with Atlas, etc (heres to
hoping Mortal Online II using UE4 is good). UE4 has great graphics but as you
know there is more to a game than that.

~~~
fartcannon
I think you were totally right. His counter-arguement basically boils down to
'so what' which is pretty bad.

Some thing's are more important than others. Buying and removing support for
already supported systems is an incredibly anticompetitive move and shouldn't
be forgotten.

~~~
Pfhreak
First, not 'his'.

Second, I explicitly asked for evidence of any of the concerns, as many of the
claims either didn't raise a specific concern (e.g. Tencent ownership) or
didn't seem to be corroborated by evidence (e.g. Epic buying studios to pull
their games off steam).

I'll ask you the same, can you provide examples of Epic buying games and
removing support for systems? The _only_ example I can find is Rocket League,
and that decision was coupled to a desire to remove technical debt and
unrelated to Epic's purchase of Psyonix.

~~~
arminiusreturns
You did not "explicitly ask[...] for evidence of any of the concerns".

"I'm trying to think of others, maybe you could expand a bit?"

