Making games look significantly better could easily be done for relatively close to zero increased costs in terms of art developers already budget for.
How do you figure that? Increasing polycount and texture resolution and the amount of maps allowed per material means that it takes longer to make the same amount of content. If it takes longer to make the same amount of content then it costs more money on content to make.
In my experience, the biggest increase in cost for development has been the increase in the complexity of art content.
How do you figure that? Increasing polycount and texture resolution and the amount of maps allowed per material means that it takes longer to make the same amount of content. If it takes longer to make the same amount of content then it costs more money on content to make.
Most character art is already created in high-res and then baked to some low-res model. Not sure about the world meshes/textures.
puff!... I'm not sure about how great moving away from UnrealScript would be, while it does has a performance cost on the game, it also has several advantages on the production/development side. It presents a clean way to manage the whole networking of the game and the language was designed to work on a state-machine manner out of the box... no to mention that you can use the "class" class to store a class-type on it, or all the properties to interact with the editor.
moving to pure C++ and leaving all this language designed features a side would be (IMHO) a great disadvantage... however, I do believe that Unreal should use more extensively the C++ part of the engine to do most of the game logic on it, and manage on the UnrealScript side only a subset of what it does now, focusing it more on the content side, and not that much on the architecture side (pretty much like CryEngine does now with C++ and LUA).
I think that a drawback of current Unreal's UnrealScript is that you have to write the whole logic of the game on the UnrealScript side, and just very few specific things on the C++ part of the engine.
Cheers!
"lots of shoulddas, coulddas, woulddas in the air, thinking about things they shouldda couldda wouldda donne, however all those shoulddas coulddas woulddas ran away when they saw the little did to come"
How is moving to pure C++ going to make it easier for development versus a nice, more noob friendly scripting language??? Maybe there's something big they aren't telling us, after all they said that you can "build an entire mod" using Kismet. So... is that somehow more like their new scripting language, and you only use that and C++?
Oh yeah, realtime dynamic Lambent blood that actually casts light. I'm also looking forward to that, and makes me wonder if the faked Lambent blood in Gears 3 inspired the material-based lighting in UE4, or the other way around.
How is moving to pure C++ going to make it easier for development versus a nice, more noob friendly scripting language??? Maybe there's something big they aren't telling us, after all they said that you can "build an entire mod" using Kismet. So... is that somehow more like their new scripting language, and you only use that and C++?
Kismet is a graphic programming language. You link components such as conditions, events, etc together like a flow chart.
Sole Creator of Pigment - a procedural, block-base space trading sim.
PhD student working on medical imaging at the University of Southampton.
That looks way better than the screenshots had led me to believe, double so if that's if all that lighting is in realtime with no precalculation as I understood that haphazard excuse for an article to be claiming up above. My biggest question would be how, if they had no precalculation/artist finaggling, they got the interior's ambient so dark compared to the exterior stuff. I suppose Notch managed it with Minecraft of all things, but I don't think I've ever seen how.
And watching it a second time, I notice there's color bleed from object not directly in light, and it doesn't seem like there's any especially noticeable secondary light bleeding through walls either, so secondary occlusion of some kind seems evident (or just trickery and small radii). Whatever it is Sweeney is doing here, it's something I'd love to know about.
Ue4 uses a voxelied light system. I heard it in one of the dev videos. And i think they're just doing a deferred shading pass with the added lpvs.
What I found stunning was the particle system. If they combine this with the new ui and workflow then games will improve significantly as the baking pass can be excluded now. This means that devs can focus more on the game play side.
