New UE3 UDK Trailer

YouTube - 2010 Unreal Engine 3 Trailer

Only the depth of field looked great, although the night shadows were pretty nice as well.

But then it said depth of field for film-makers, which means it's going to be ultra demanding for normal gameplay...

 

As nice as it is, I have doubts that thing will be the norm anytime soon. It's too awesome

Also, isn't it Unreal Engine that's quite friendly to lower specced systems despite being good graphics wise?

 

Yeah UE3, EGO and MT Framework are the best performance/req ratio engines out there IMO

 

Did UE3 get an update or something? I always think Unreal has a a cartoonie look to it. And it's got that annoying look to textures where everything is glossy, everything looks rubbery and plastic like. From the tech demo, those major flaws still haven't been fixed. That's something that Source Engine and CryEngine can do well, things not looking like shiny, glossy, rubbery textures on everything.

Batman AA is a great game running on UE3. But even on Batman, everyone's face looks like glossy rubber plastic. And the clothing etc etc.

CryTek is just so much better than Epic Games. It's a wonder why CryTek fails so terribly to get their engine licensed. I think a lot of people viewed Crysis as a Tech Demo. IMO the reason why the game isn't as long, immersive as you would expect is because it's actually a marketing tool to get other developers to license the game, which didn't happen.

But looking at CryEngine 3 everything just looks so much more real. And it doesn't have that glossy, plastic bump mapping on every texture that UE3 has. It's just so much better and superior in every way: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Kvl31g77Z8&feature=fvw

One thing disappointing. CryEngine 2 is better than CryEngine 3 so far from what I've seen, which is pathetic and sad. I hope I'm proven wrong. But this is nice video of comparison of the two engines. CryEngine 2 on PC on even medium setting looks much much better than CryEngine 3 on PS3. There is a gameplay of Crysis 2 where you can hear keyboard taps and mouse clicks and frankly, the demo looked much worse than Crysis 1. It's pretty sad. Hopefully that's just demo sucking and the release will be impressive. But I have my doubts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WJG14uLA3k&feature=channel

UE3 on the other hand seems to look like a console port regardless if it was made for PC or not, which is terrible. Hopefully CryEngine 3 won't fail like UE3 does on PC

 

I think CE3 still has all the features of CE2 basically, but with added console support and deferred rendering. Besides the shots shown in the CE3 tech demo were console shots, so we can expect much better on the PC.

 

They are just engines so you have to assess them in terms of what they let artists do technically, not in terms of what the artists happen to have done with the engine.

What I mean is that you can very easily make a Cryengine game look bad if the texture artist is bad, the modelling work is poor and its all hand animated by a pleb off the street. The engine gives you the flexibility and the tools to make good looking stuff in game that are reactive to light and motion and what not. Its up to the artists to create a convincing illusion using the engine and tools.

I think I started to get the concept of what an 'engine' is when I was building assets for NWN2 (aurora engine) which is mainly text based. That is, you create your model in 3DS max or whatever. The one in game will be a low poly model but you can start with a high poly reference and use things like light reflectivity to generate stuff like a normal map around the object which you can then wrap around the low poly model. You create the base textures in Photoshop or whatever. In game the textures, models, animations etc are all linked using text files which is why its modder friendly - you do not need to know various levels of machine code like Assembly or C+.

One of the reasons why the old Infinity engine died out (also text based) is because it had been extended up to a point where it became rather unwieldy to keep track of everything you need to link up as the text files became increasingly bloated and confusing to navigate. This is one of the reasons why at some point it became necessary to build a new engine from scratch with all the extensibility and functionality you want in a logical manner. There are still technological limitations too. For example, if you wanted ray tracing shadows your illumination model needs to responsive to it and it all needs to link back to the hardware so you would need to do it through direct 3d. There are limits to the extensibility of this sort of thing too before it simply becomes more efficient to redesign the engine so this functionality is built in from the ground up.

A technical demo may show you some of the functionality but most people get misled by eye candy. For example, Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2 and Batman: Arkham Asylum are all games that were built in Unreal Engine 3 but they are all very different looking games. Part of the reason why Mass Effect 2 looks alot nicer than Mass Effect 1 is simply because the raw art assets (the textures and models) are better made.

 

ME1 and ME2 both look like UE3 games and have that same extremely glossy plastic look. And another part, all UE3 games I've played have an enclosed box, claustrophobic feel to them. It's never a large expansive world like you can with CryEngine.

I have the sense of feeling between COD and BC2. The new COD games feel like they are enclosd in a small box where BC2 actually feels expansive.

 

Yeah it looks incredible, bot those features seem like ultra demanding.

 

Its not the engine, its the designer and artists who use the tool. But I will agree with everyone whos saying models in ue3 look like plastic. But then you get something like mirrors edge or rainbow six vegas whos texture artist probably didnt use the in engine assets and built their own. Cryengine 2 failed because it was pc only, and unfortunately thats not were the money is. UE3 is on all platforms, even iphone now, easy to use, udk is a free build with a 10% of sale deal after 10000.00 dollars made, and its up to most players par for graphics. Cryengine 3 seems like a step back probably because it needed a framework change for ps3 and 360, the guys over at crytek probably reworked the engine to look better in dx9 because dx10 did very little and dx11 cards are pc only.

Its always up to the developer in what they do with the engine, and everyones correct in saying crysis is a tech demo, like ut3 is a tech demo....

 

Thats because games like ME2 and Batman: AA are a series of enclosed boxes. Its also why you can run them on low spec PCs with all the details cranked. Crysis? Forget about it. It still destroys top of the line desktop PCs...