Unreal Engine 4

ArchivedUser

Unreal Engine 4 is an amazing piece of software that allows developers to produce highly polished games in incredibly short timeframes. This was the main reason I was initially excited about Ashes, because this technology will give IS the power to achieve their (and our!) ambitious dreams. Here is a place where you can post your most and least liked aspects of UE4, or comparisons with other gaming engines such as Unity.

To kick this off, I'll start with a tutorial video on how to create a photorealistic forest in UE4 in an hour! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzoY062kY1s

ArchivedUser

Intrepid released some awesome Unreal Engine 4 design footage on today's livestream starting at about 5m 25s...

https://youtu.be/G4-Sb3dN2hQ?t=327

ArchivedUser

U4 is awesome, graphics and physics... I think that the real problem is with a lot of players together online... True? 

ArchivedUser

JaPeMo said:

U4 is awesome, graphics and physics... I think that the real problem is with a lot of players together online... True? 

Yes, true. IS are completely rewriting the UE4 backend from scratch to cope with large multiplayer environment. It will come down to how optimized their code is to cope with > 64 players in close proximity. Ideally the networking and physics engine won't be the limiting factor even given a beefy client spec, but I expect a boatload of performance tuning ahead in alpha-1.

ArchivedUser

^ 
This is why Intrepid chose U4 as their engine - it offeres a lot as a product but also allowed Devs the freedom to edit codes to make the engine more suitable. It allows them to build up on something without the need of having to make their own engine

ArchivedUser

So what you have seen is still unpolished. The should look even more better once its ready to be released.

ArchivedUser

I fully expect during alpha 1 for calls to go out. "Everyone meet at such and such location, and when we say go, spam as many of your large aoe/visual heavy actions as possible." Multiple server crashes later and patches, they might have it optimized. Or they will have to rethink their whole "we will rewrite the whole backend" pledge and go with some sort of limited instancing, which would suck and totally undermine the core premise.

Another thing that people who are not in the US need to realize, your lag during alpha/beta is going to suck hard. Since the server will be US based for testing, those of us on the other side of the world are going to not see what our true performance will look like, leading to screams of "unplayable" by the clueless.

ArchivedUser

Most MMOs have a custom backend. The network requirements of an MMO are vastly different than an FPS. Using UE4 for client side rendering and physics is an excellent choice. The engine is highly scalable and includes basically every feature you would want for optimization.

The challenge won't be with crashes so much as players setting graphics to high, then walking into a massive battle. You're graphics settings could be fine for months, then you walk into your first city siege and get 5FPS due to a hundred people running around blasting particles everywhere.

I really hope that in the alpha and beta they implement mandatory game logging so they can see what FPS people are getting under varied circumstance.

ArchivedUser

UE4 has a FPS meter built in. The dev should be using this to find trouble spots in the maps and cities.

ArchivedUser

Johndoe said:

The challenge won't be with crashes so much as players setting graphics to high, then walking into a massive battle. You're graphics settings could be fine for months, then you walk into your first city siege and get 5FPS due to a hundred people running around blasting particles everywhere.

I hope they put in a video card check which sets the games graphics for the players PC. This is a common feature on most games these days.

ArchivedUser

I agree with the above. The trick will be getting accurate data on a worst case scenario. You could play for several hundred hours before encountering a worst case scenario.

ArchivedUser

WoW has it's separate "raid" graphics settings. It would be cool if Ashes took this idea a step further and allowed two sets of graphics settings with a further setting for "auto toggle graphic settings when X items within shard".
"Items" being set not "Characters" so that people couldn't use it to tell if someone came into the area, "Shard" being used in this case to refer to whatever system they will use to load balance areas whether it be dynamically growing areas of a set number of characters or set areas always having static resources (or something else if they use neither of those).
The actual code for X items within shard would have to not be a black and white X value however, more like a once at X threshold lower setting until Y lower switch back threshold and/or min time.

Just my two cents worth of idea

ArchivedUser

I remember... Uhmm.. Was it blade and souls... Or gw2 or something... I forgot.. Anyway a mmo i used to play had a setting whereby if you hd it enabled and it detected alot of graphical effects/players to the point of low fps it automatically drastically reduced the particle effect quality and render distance on players. Never hurts having that as default setting when it detects a pc cant handle it to well  

ArchivedUser

Some awesome high polygon character renders in Unreal Engine 4

Khaleesi

Dwalin

ArchivedUser

lexmax said:

Some awesome high polygon character renders in Unreal Engine 4

Yes they are and I have seen them as well. But I was trying to find more info on this but could not find any.
Well here is the video for it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK64twSZrA0

ArchivedUser

@NightshadeRaven
What information are you looking for?

ArchivedUser

Johndoe said:

@NightshadeRaven
What information are you looking for?

The polygon count on the model
The various maps used to make the effect look so good. Also did they use any volumes.

ArchivedUser

I cant wait to build my new pc, get a 4k monitor and enjoying this blast.

ArchivedUser

A nice video by Rens (Technical Art Director @ DICE), who shows off the posibilities in UE 4 environment:

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

Here's a link to his website, which contains some screenshots of the video and more content: http://overview.artbyrens.com/

Excerpt (all rendered in UE 4 by Rens):

ArchivedUser

The next generation of games and hardware that make efficient use of network bandwidth and multiple cores, are going to leave everyone awestruck IMO.

Breath taking times.

ArchivedUser

Herdo said:

A nice video by Rens (Technical Art Director @ DICE), who shows off the posibilities in UE 4 environment:

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

Here's a link to his website, which contains some screenshots of the video and more content: http://overview.artbyrens.com/

Excerpt (all rendered in UE 4 by Rens):

This process is called Photogrammetry its starting to be used more and more in games. But it requires a lot more work to produce stunning scenes. The pictures of the leaf are different map types which brings out the details even more. I dont expect AOC to use Photogrammetry as such but I would expect them to use a process called PRB (Physically Based Materials) Below is a video which explains most of the processes and in some places is quite technical. Enjoy


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFX-ZL7oTPc

ArchivedUser

While on the topic of Unreal4, humble bundle is having a book bundle with UE4 and Unity 5 that teach you basically everything for only $15. Here is the link: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/unreal-unity5-book-bundle

ArchivedUser

Duninn said:

While on the topic of Unreal4, humble bundle is having a book bundle with UE4 and Unity 5 that teach you basically everything for only $15. Here is the link: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/unreal-unity5-book-bundle

I just looked at UE4 books and it only covers 4.11. The current version of UE4 is 4.16. As far programming languages go Unity uses C# and UE4 uses C++. Also books take you down a certain track and not what you want to learn. If you seriously want to get into UE4 we can have  a chat on discord and you can ask me questions and I can suggest where you may start to look to learn more. Not saying spending $15 is a bad idea but your getting 2 game engines and 2 C programming languages.

ArchivedUser

Is it possible to have a crush on a game engine?

ArchivedUser

Hellblade is a great example of the combat capabilities of UE4. The game has no on-screen HUD, so everything in combat is depicted visually or with sound. It is a truly amazing combat experience.

https://youtu.be/ucJTXYy04IY?t=205

ArchivedUser

Anything is possible with animations and programming.