Well also people are forgetting Unreal engine is 1 engine being overhauled and tweaked over time, as the Doom3 engine is a brand new engine, it's not the doom or quake 1 engine.

It's my understanding both engines are modular...meaning networking, sound, and rendering are all separate, and can be replaced over time. Epic isn't still making changes to the original Unreal engine...

http://www.neworderonline.com/

Well also people are forgetting Unreal engine is 1 engine being overhauled and tweaked over time, as the Doom3 engine is a brand new engine, it's not the doom or quake 1 engine.

But my biggest fear with Doom 3 is not the graphics at all but is going to be the content of the game.

Everyone knows Carmack makes excellent engines bar none, but the rest of id needs to put together a good overall game experience for me to praise it so highly.

O.K, I just had a quick Google and I'll concede that is technically correct -
http://www.lks.ac.th/jongdream/present%20perfect%20cont.html
But in everyday usage, I reckon it's a giveaway.
Anyway, I can hope can't I?, The sooner one of these hyped mega games actually ships the better we'll all like it.

He said "that's been" as in "that has been." This is the present perfect continous and not the past tense, and so it implies an ongoing action rather than a completed one.

~Steve

27 posts about whether or not we need soft shadows in games, and not one of you seems to have picked up on the key word in the comment by Tim.
The key word is "been" as in past tense, they're obviously finished doing that part of the R&D, so you'll be getting soft shadows, end of story!
Now then Tim, how about a screenshot? :-)

Capable of what? Soft shadows? DOOM 3 uses stencil shadows and while the engine still looks very cool, the shadows are so sharp it looks like they could cut you.

Precisely, what the Doom3 does has also been feature complete since a long time on the Unreal engine. The shadows and lighting in DXIW is not different to what we'll see in D3.

But Epic is currently investigating time and money and how to make realistically looking soft/diffuse shadows without the need for a nv60... of course also Id software could be researching in this domain but his is currently unknown...

I like how this ignores the DOOM 3 engine has been (as far as we know) feature complete for a couple years and quite capable of all this. Catsup.

Even if this was true (and it's not), it wouldn't matter for how long the engine has been feature complete. Untill I can buy it, I don't care. Think about it, DOOM3 could be delayed for two years (alright, that won't happen, but...) and thus released at the same time then what-ever-game-use-this-unreal-engine. So what good would it have been that the engine had been "feature complete" for two years? Not only is your argument false, it's also irrelevent.

This comment was edited on Jan 25, 17:43.

Capable of what? Soft shadows? DOOM 3 uses stencil shadows and while the engine still looks very cool, the shadows are so sharp it looks like they could cut you.

I like how this ignores the DOOM 3 engine has been (as far as we know) feature complete for a couple years and quite capable of all this. Catsup.

"The Unreal engine as a whole isn't incapable of doing fairly large outdoor areas - examples can be seen in U2-XMP."

But we're talking about the future Unreal Engine. U2-XMP and UT2004 don't have true dynamic lighting and shadows do they? Unreal has always been able to do huge areas. It's just when you attempt to dynamically light all those extra visible surfaces with all those extra light sources that large areas become impossible.

Primarily shooters?

Perhaps.

http://udn.epicgames.com/Powered/WebHome
http://udn.epicgames.com/Powered/FirstGenerationTitles

Unreal Engine is amazingly flexible. Check out some of the community mods.

Shadows are important in stealth games to find enemies without being in their line of site. Of course, we don't need anything beyond an approximate shape but then UT2004 doesn't need anything beyond two different colours of circle to represent each team, yet we still want a hell of a lot more. I consider lighting to be a very important and underrated part of overall graphical quality so improving shadows is a large part of improving graphics.

Quboid

Currently playing:
CM0304, CoD, FS2004, SC4:RH, Trackmania, X2

"The Unreal engine as a whole isn't incapable of doing fairly large outdoor areas - examples can be seen in U2-XMP."

Some of the UT2004 maps were enormous to the point that they had to reduce their size because their size was detrimental to gameplay. XMP != 2004. I assure you all, after playing UT2004 at a lan party at an Epic sponsored event that UT2004 delivers in its gameplay, at least in the onslaught mode(didn't get to play assault).

This comment was edited on Jan 25, 16:30.

Farcry and Morrowind (and PotC and DF:Black Hawk Down) certainly have water that looks very nice, and look very realistic, however they're not so great when you're in. They could improve that by simply having better effects but even if it looked right, it wouldn't be at all realistic physically. Ripples and waves shouldn't be artwork drawn on the surface, although sometimes this looks excellent (check out Farcry's shores - no nasty line where the water ends, but nice rippling wavelets) and water should move if there is anywhere gravity would pull it into. Likewise with gas - things like clouds in flight sims forming and floating realistically and murky dungeons having mist floating around (which I think would look unbelievably cool - think dry ice from nasty 80's music videos, the way it flows and swirls as things move through it and has it drifts off a ledge - that in a Morrowind dungeon would look awesome) would be nice, sometimes.

I guess I just don't like games trying to be realistic in such a fundamentally unrealistic way. Someday I hope this improves, but I know it won't be a while - polygon tricks are just so much more efficient than point modeling so polygons will have to do until the power becomes available. I believe it will, just like polygons are less efficient than sprites but when the power became available, the flexibility and visual effects took priority.

Quboid

Currently playing:
CM0304, CoD, FS2004, SC4:RH, Trackmania, X2

I mean, it sounds very impressive and such, but is it really what we want, or even NEED, in our next generation engines? The Unreal engine is predominantly used for shooters, why do I need per pixel rendering of shadows? I'm not looking at my enemies' shadows, I'm looking at them, and where I'm shooting them.

We can do pretty convincing shadows in current engines already as well, and usually I just turn them to low so that the shadow looks like a big blob on the ground. More than enough for me. I'm not sure if devoting that much processing time to strictly shadows is what we're really looking for...

Creston

Waves and foam can be tough to do well, but there was a good paper on Gamasutra on it: http://www.gamasutra.com/gdce/2001/jensen/jensen_01.htm (that'd be registration required).

The Unreal engine as a whole isn't incapable of doing fairly large outdoor areas - examples can be seen in U2-XMP. The unreal engine is pretty damn flexible and powerful, so this really isn't about them failing to focus on providing developers with the engine tools to produce great gameplay. Blame the individual developers for their own design choices.

There's also nothing wrong with taking advantage of pixel and vertex shaders in water; if you particularly think they're the things holding everyone back from producing the next and best wet stuff, I'd say you're mistaken. Take a look at some of the Cg (the NVidia PS/VS language) demos that people have done to see what sort of power Pixel and Vertex shaders have. The current technology that's the one up of using polygons is volumetric particles, but frankly, it's not worth it. Grab a high end 3d workstation and render good smoke with those and you're usually talking several minutes and upwards of render time, they're simply not very practical for the graphical payoff in realtime games. Smoke and gas can be fairly well faked using polygons at a fraction of the cost.

I'm still waiting to see something that makes good use of Unreal facial (?) and lipsyncing tech which they've mentioned in the past. That would certainly be one of the things that I'd like to see really well done by the engine in future. The faces in the Deus Ex:IW demo (still not out here) *really* sucked, I've seen better looking faces in much older games than that of Alex Denton in that, so it's certainly something I'm becoming more demanding about.

Yes, Far Cry's water is impressive but there is still room for improvement. I think water is going to be the first detailed effect that will be photo realistic in the coming years, they are almost there now.

And to see what "dynamic stenciling with soft filters" does for shadows.

If you crank up all the effects, the individual leaves on the foliage cast shadows on your gun in FarCry...and they don't have sharp edges...they are diffuse.

-^D^

Check out the Far Cry demo for a great example of how water can look in a game.

Alex
-----------
Spatial Fear
Director/Creative Designer
http://www.planetunreal.com/le/sf/

while liquid is made from a pixel/vertex shaded polygon. Neither of those are very realistic

I dunno ... I've never seen anything as amazing as the water in Morrowind. It looks pretty damn realistic to me. From the videos the water in HL2 looks to be pretty nice too. I can't imagine what you could do to make it better. Waves and foam would be nice. A really weird omission in Morrowind considering how large those moons are.