Unreal Engine 4 videos show off tech demos

As promised, at E3 Epic properly lifted the wraps off its next-generation engine, Unreal Engine 4. While the real-time cinematic teased before is jolly nice and all, the real highlight is a good long look at the tech and tools themselves.

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As promised, at E3 Epic properly lifted the wraps off its next-generation engine, Unreal Engine 4. While the real-time cinematic teased before is jolly nice and all, the real highlight is a good long look at the tech and tools themselves.

"It is up to Epic ... to motivate Sony and Microsoft not to phone in what these next consoles are going to be. It needs to be a quantum leap," Epic design director Cliff Bleszinski recently commented. "They need to damn near render Avatar in real time, because I want it and gamers want it--even if they don't know they want it."

Of course, the PC is used to show off these demos and will happily keep pace with it all.

Square Enix also showed off its new engine, Luminous Studio, with the Agni's Philosophy tech demo. Nvidia was around too, to show off real-time characters on its GPUs with A New Dawn.

If you simply want to watch a pretty thing, here's that UE4 'Elemental' demo:

But the real meat and potatoes is in this ten-minute walkthrough, showing off specific effects and capabilities of Unreal Engine 4. It also demonstrates how remarkably clean and simple the editor and workflow are for developers, which will surely save a fair few hours and headaches:

From The Chatty
  • reply
    June 8, 2012 6:00 AM

    Alice O'Connor posted a new article, Unreal Engine 4 videos show off tech demos.

    As promised, at E3 Epic properly lifted the wraps off its next-generation engine, Unreal Engine 4. While the real-time cinematic teased before is jolly nice and all, the real highlight is a good long look at the tech and tools themselves.

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      June 8, 2012 6:10 AM

      [deleted]

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        June 8, 2012 6:15 AM

        I hope Blizzard uses Unreal Engine 4 for StarCraft III, that would have the best story in video games ever!

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          June 8, 2012 6:16 AM

          Though, giving level designers more control/freedom to tinker with code could actually help with smaller touches that flesh out a world.

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            June 8, 2012 6:18 AM

            [deleted]

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              June 8, 2012 6:28 AM

              lol, this looks great! Will this make developing a game cheaper and take less time?

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                June 8, 2012 6:31 AM

                No, and no.

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                June 8, 2012 6:52 AM

                According to them their new tool set will make it easier to make your games.

                As for cheaper and less time I think no matter how pimped out the engine is if you want some thing to look awesome its going to take time and money and care from any team. Heck if half the games upped the quality of their textures and shadders you would see massive diffs in the quality of games.

                Having said that I can tell you that with the tessellation and the crazy particle effect you can easily pimp out your scene and make it look crazy pretty fast with a team that knows what they are doing. Those new features are going to help out big time in my opinion.

                The thing is those cool features are their and are optional, technically no one has to use them and can just use URE just like they did before with the better tool sets. Personally I think no matter how you look at it URE4 is a hardcore win win for any shop if they where to chose it you have all the degrees of a engine you could want.

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          June 8, 2012 2:11 PM

          doubtful because they at least in the past wanted the game to run on lower end computers around the world so they could sell more copies than a game that only runs on high end machines.

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          June 8, 2012 2:28 PM

          No engine could help Blizzard's writing.

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      June 8, 2012 6:44 AM

      Holly shit!!! That was SICK absolutely amazing engine, god damn this makes me excited, URE is probably hands down the most popular engine around and the majority of shops use it. Man when everyone updates to this engine our games are going to have a ridiculous lvl of detail and graphical base.

      I wish Square Enix did a vid like the second one so we could actually see in game/SDK like the dude did.

      Two rad things to note this sucker can already work on our comps now, dudes with 500 series and peps that have the 600 and secondly I hope MS and S make sure their next consoles can run this engine no prob. I am sure they will they be crazy not too.

      I can not wait, just awesome, thanks for the vids btw. Good times ahead good times.

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        June 8, 2012 7:10 AM

        In some ways the Square Enix demo was more impressive, but based on history, we will see a game from Epic within two years running on this engine and it will look pretty close to this. They have a proven track record of making engines and making games and actually releasing them. Square Enix on the other hand... I have less faith in them actually putting a game out which looks like that (at least in the next 3 years). I'm still suspicious of that company for the crap they pulled on the PS2. The stuff they showed to sell people on the PS2 looked like a PS3 game.

        The guided tour Epic did in the second video really shows us the power of the engine. And not just the graphical power but the power it puts in the hands of the developers. It looks like at least the level editing and scripting is extremely streamlined and slick.

        The biggest issue with AAA games the next generation is going to be the time and money put into developing assets. In game models are now going to be as detailed as pre-rendered models right now. It's going to take a big team of artists to make all the models, texture them and animate them. The art teams on these games is going to need to be HUGE! I guess it's good news for 3d artists... they will be in high demand.

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          June 8, 2012 7:46 AM

          Well said man exactly this, yeah I wish Square Enix did a guided tour of their engine exactly like the URE4 one that would really make a lot of us believe it more so I think.

          For sure the Square Enix demo looked crazy and was very well done, its juts hard to believe the games will really look that good like you said. When you saw the guided tour of URE4 I had a big smile and said see that shit is real its not bull shit looks exactly the same.

          Man I am really looking forward to the next cycle this lvl of detail is crazy makes me so happy.

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        June 8, 2012 7:11 AM

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          June 8, 2012 7:54 AM

          Nutz man such cool tech it cranks the detail and lvl hard core. It makes you think shit before was a bunch of cardboard cut outs old school style in comparison.

          I also think lvl are going to be way more alive and dynamic with this engine that is one thing I personally want to see. We need to move away from static content and lvls we have to start moving to dynamic and alive that would truly be amazing. That cool texture changing effect could totally be exploited for damage effects, wear and tear, plant growth effects etc. Man pair it up with some dynamic tessellation you could make some sick effects. Sure this would take a lot of effort but it has mad potential.

          Also the rendering now really gives it a slick new look soft and just more realistic and less blocky(DX11 owns) and fake this looks more realer if that makes nay sense.

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        June 8, 2012 7:13 AM

        there's a little bit here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9xhFpuIMX4

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          June 8, 2012 7:24 AM

          [deleted]

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          June 8, 2012 8:09 AM

          Shit rad thanks for the link, I really want to believe its real for if we have 3 crazy engines URE4, Square Enix, and Cryengine 3.5 it just makes things 3X more awesome and produces good competition and gives a greater chance a new game will use one of these engines.

          Definitely gives it more credit and makes you think its less baked. I mean it could of been still pre setup I don't like how they are showing all the changes of the stuff and then like a slide show it goes the the chick in the demo. That made me think wait how did they get out of the IDE and go to a slide show, was this all pre baked and the dude is just talking while some dude presses next vid sequence? Also those ui controls for the parameters where weird.

          Time will tell I freaking hope its real for that would be so awesome. Just keep in mind they showed us that jungle demo a long time ago it looked rad and now we have better GPUs and they could of learned DX11 much better, pimped and worked on their engine more etc its totally possible. I am at 85% its real and totally want to believe their games will look like that.

          Its up to them now to put out a game and makes us shit I hope they do it.

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      June 8, 2012 8:03 AM

      As cool as that cinematic looked, I'd take todays overall fidelity if I also can get zero texture popping and better AI.

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      June 8, 2012 9:16 AM

      "It needs to be a quantum leap," Uhhh, yeah! We PC folks have been trying to tell you all the console graphics are shit for years now. All we heard back was: " But the 1080p!" as if it was supposed to mean something. At least now if we get a port it might actually stress my system because of graphics in stead of shitty dumbed down coding.

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      June 8, 2012 10:20 AM

      Will this one also lack AA rendering abilities as well?

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      June 8, 2012 10:41 AM

      Why can't I open both videos in two different tabs, and why can't I full-screen videos from youtube anymore without having to actually GO TO YOUTUBE. That's absolutely incredibly annoying. I don't want to go re-queue the movie just to fucking full-screen it.

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      June 8, 2012 11:35 AM

      I find the video from Square enix way more pleasant for the eyes than this demo.

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      June 8, 2012 12:39 PM

      Man, the more I watch it, the more I'm impressed with the lava. That part where the lava is flowing and the molten stuff is flowing below with the slightly more solid stuff is floating on top. As the streams combine the more solid stuff combines into a single piece etc. That is some really cool stuff.

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      June 8, 2012 2:27 PM

      Landscape at the end seems like Virtual Texturing?

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      June 8, 2012 5:17 PM

      Nice to see them moving away from an inheritance based entity system to a component based one.

      Super curious as to how they architected their native code reflection and hot reloading compilation. I can imagine for the latter doing something like compiling compilation units at a pretty granular level as dlls and having the new dll reloaded after it finishes compilation. Would also be neat to see how they're handling alpha blending using a purely deferred renderer.

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      June 10, 2012 6:03 PM

      I see this has changed a bit since Worldcraft days...

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