Unreal is Unreal
Parepiptontos to teleutaio Unreal paixnidi ine to Splinter Cell.Pandora Tomorrow k xrisimopoii tin ekdosi Unreal2.5 k Unreal2X (gia XBOX)
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"Nevermind the technical jargon, Unreal 3.0 is the most impressive thing we've ever seen.
At the Game Developers Conference, word spread quickly about Epic's Unreal 3.0 demonstrations. After attendees stopped wondering "What the heck was all that XNA stuff about?" people flocked to Epic's private meeting booth to see, first-hand, what the unreal amount of excitement was un-really all about (har!). The gist: a piece of technology that combines a few incredible tricks to make a robust package -- one that could have a real impact on the next crop of next-generation titles for PC, Xbox Next, and PS3.
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My brain can't fathom exactly how two polygons can become a nearly pixel perfect interpretation of a 3D brick wall, but damned if I'm not super impressed. Maybe this Unreal 3.0 demo will be nifty after all, I first thought. Then it seemed that with every new component of the engine shown, I found myself making a similar mental statement. Eventually I left the closed Game Developers Conference booth with a wish list of titles I'd like to see made out of that technology.
Quite simply, Unreal 3.0 is startling. The demo included undisclosed character models and locales from an unannounced Epic title slated to ship late 2006, but looked so incredible in so many di
fferent ways, I couldn't help but appreciate the visuals, the physics, the lighting, and wish they would all appear in some third-party game before that all too distant future. According to Epic, it's certainly possible that a third-party could license the engine and release a title before even they do. Here's hoping.
At its core, U3 seems to be a complex compilation of optical illusions, next-gen effects, and good old detail. First up is a form of polygon compression. For the layman, there are two basic versions of everything: low detail and high detail. Epic uses normal maps to make the low detail 6,500 polygon stuff look like the high detail 6 million poly stuff. Once their proprietary version of Poly Bumped objects are in place, the team then bombards that environment / character / whatever with a kind of high resolution, per pixel lighting that is plain absurd. Afterward, this 3D thing is bathed in shaders to further enhance the overall quality and lend a deeper impression of 3D to textures that are only 2D. This makes a one polygon image of a metal ventilation shaft panel look fully 3D, regardless of perspective -- if you duck, some slats will even become obstructed by others even though it's still just a 2D piece of art... Insane.
For characters, the final product is something like a cross between the Witch King's Fell Beast and a moving Todd McFarlane toy. It's this way not only because the art style of those presented were reminiscent of my examples, but also because of the sheer amount of detail present across every millimeter of the creatures. Wrinkles, folds, specs, animation. Again, it was insane. Better, nothing had a distinctly computerized, glossy Far Cry look or a super high contrast DOOM 3 appearance. Instead, everything shown fell more on Half-Life 2's "grounded in reality" side of the graphics spectrum, only way more detailed.
Surprisingly, what I found most impressive was not the incredible amount of detail spread across characters and environments, but rather how real-time, totally dynamic lighting was seamlessly integrated into the game.
In a dank cellar of sorts we were led around a room where our presenter suddenly opened a refrigerator concealing a lantern. The lantern immediately poured light out into the cellar, illuminating every area it should, and shading every area obstructed by some other object (table, chair, stack of cinderblocks, pillar, whatever). Using the newly revised physics engine, the Epic rep yanked out the lantern, swung it around, smashed it into some the bricks, and eventually placed it underneath a metal grate of sorts. Every physical interaction, governed by something analogous to the Havok physics we're all accustomed to, altered the lighting scheme. The grate would even obstruct light and allow only a few cracks of it to slip through, illuminating perfect lines of whatever object was above it, even better than Splinter Cell ever could (again, you could always move the light here, too). The shadows of the lantern, as it was tossed around the room and moved to and fro, draped, darkened, lightened, enlarged, and shrunk depending on the distance between it and whatever it was casting its light onto. The ultimate result may be hard to comprehend, but that's only because it's so believable it's just the way our brains expect it to look.
This level of physical interaction didn't stop there, either. It appears that everything governed by physics in U3 has a certain set of parameters applied to it, such as weight and whether or not it's of a specific material, like ice or metal. Additionally, things with moving parts (the human body or a door) can have hinges applied to them and set to only extend to certain lengths, governing how far a man can bend his arm or how wide a door will swing open. With designer designated stress levels, these hinges can break, detach or simply cease to function. Realistically, we can have a man hit in the knee with a sledge hammer and be propelled into a door. His knee would be visibly broken but not gone and the door's hinges would be crushed, forcing it to remain in an open state.
All of this goodness was accompanied by the usual array of graphical effects gamers care nothing about. They amounted to stellar looking textures with plenty of moving imagery and a lot of simply glorious lighting. My only gripe came from the outdoor environments that presented neither the detail, nor the polish of the interiors or even the islands of Far Cry. They did offer up physics governed flora, manipulated by the wind, and a sun that would lighten and darken the sky based on how thick of a cloud it was over, but Epic has yet to address moving water and other such things, which left the exteriors a bit sparsely populated.
Regardless of how good or bad the garden looked, this engine is something truly amazing. Scarier still, Sam The Boss told me conversations he had with many developers at GDC have led him to believe that while these tricks are technically possible on the Xbox today, the next-generation of systems will be all about them. According to our sources, if a game doesn't do this kind of thing in the next two years it's going to look like entirely dated (the Hooters Road Trip of the next-generation era, I suppose).
Pray Epic releases some kind of rolling tech demo soon. Me? I have plans to see the next-generation NVIDIA video card Epic was using in the near future, so hopefully I'll be able to return then with more details and, God willing, media."
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