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posts about #techdemo more → CryEngine 3: Beauty, Speed, And Interaction
Alone in the Dark 5 Tech Demo
Denver, 2:11 AM
Thu Nov 12
65 posts in the last 24 hours
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@Mommar: That's what it looks like to me. It seems like the engine is more like an optimization than a "new" CryEngine (the way the jump from the original CryEngine to 2/2.5 was).
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10/15/09
I hope and pray it will be popular. #cryengine3
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20 years ago they would have laughed at you if you had predicted this level of real-time realism on a desktop computer costing less than $2,000. "ha ha ha" they would say "ha ha ha ha ha".
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Go outside.
10/14/09
I mean, imagine a platformer that's able to utilize the physics, massive environment, and all that visual beauty. What about an RPG?
10/14/09
So it's been done.
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[www.cryengine2.com]
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And if you thought Crysis need some specs to run, the Editor needed 64-bit to even start (well you could tell it to ignore that bit, but it was like "need 4gb of RAM, so HUNGRY")
Still, its all in all rather impressive editor, not mundanely easy to use but not as hard as making everything in a 3D package
though I only had a dabble, and this was a year or so back.
Nice that they throw it in the the game, map editors with games are aweosmesuace n many brownie points to the developer
10/14/09
10/14/09
Really? really? UE3 is far from the champ of game engines. It's an aging piece of tech at this stage of the game and while it has produced some great looking games, it still suffers from it's share of problems. The only reason it's so dominant in the market is because of Epics aggressive marketing and the relatively low cost and ease of use factor it brings.
In otherwords, while UE3 may be the champ in terms of profit made, Cryengine 2 and 3 are vast improvements over the UE3 tech.
10/14/09
And what share of problems are you talking about?
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10/14/09
What's not true?
Also, by Ease of Use I meant that using the engine itself is rather straightforward from a developer point of view. Good customer support is another issue and one that Epic hasn't been too great with.
As for the UE3s problems then there's the shadow flicker that homernoy mentions, the texture streaming problems that while much better now than when the engine first arrived on the scene, are still noticeable with little effort. Then there's the outdated focusing that often turns the background into a soupy melting pot of shapes and colours. It's difficulty in rendering true AA is also a problem. Rocksteady and Eidos, however, got the help of Nvidia to add AA and QA to the game to get around this problem. Still, it ain't Nvidias job to fix UE3s problems so I guess adding customer support to it's list of problems is right too.
The engine isn't terrible though but it's had it's time to shine and the cracks are beginning to show, it's about time some new middleware whether it be the technically superior Cryengine 3 or another engine.
10/15/09
What methods are you even talking about and comparing?
Outdated focusing? What? You mean texture filtering and general level of detail?
Your confused use of concepts like that makes me also wonder if you view Ease-of-Use as a Pro or a Con :D #cryengine3
10/15/09
UE3 Can't use true AA (supersampling, temporal, etc) because it uses deferred pixel rendering which scale poorly with modern AA algorithms.
When I was talking about the outdated focusing, I was talking about the weird effect/filter that makes everything that's not supposed to be in the players focus a blurry mess. Whether it's how the depth of field is done or how the texture filtering is done, I don't know but I do know it looks like shit. Because I'm unsure of what's to blame, I chose to say "focusing" so that most people should know what I meant.
I don't see how I was unclear in any way about what I mean when I say ease of use.
10/16/09
And super-sampling has been depreciated for 5-6 years already, it's not in use because... Well, see above. It's not a "modern anti-aliasing", and no one uses it.
And temporal anti-aliasing solves temporal aliasing, and that's something different entirely, perhaps you remember the commotion over games like Perfect Dark Zero only having temporal AA? #cryengine3
10/16/09
...it just forces a custom resolve when rendering, putting the AA in the hands of the developer and some can't cope/plan with/for that. That's how modern AA works for games. Welcome to the future(2005-).
That's not the future, that's not even the case...unless you're using an engine that uses deferred rendering which really is just an outdated rendering technique used to cut corners. Also, forcing developers to come up with their own AA solution, when the engine should in this day and age already natively support it, isn't a good thing and if that's the future then I'd rather live in the past with better tech.
Supersampling, while it may now have been superceeded by newer techniques, is still relatively modern, but that's beside the point which is that UE3 doesn't natively support AA.
And temporal anti-aliasing solves temporal aliasing, and that's something different entirely
No, it's not. It's a form of anti-alaising and while it may be used for different reasons than MSAA, etc, it still doesn't change the fact that it's used to solve the problem of aliasing.
It seems this could go back and forth for eternity so I'm going to step out now. I've stated some of the problems that UE3 has and I think I've expanded my points and countered yours well enough to sleep tonight.
You can reply and rebut my comment and I'll read it but I won't be replying. Regardless of whether we agree or not as to the state of UE3 and it's technical prowess, thanks for keeping the debate civil. #cryengine3
10/17/09
Fixed hardware AA, a remnant from fixed function GPUs like the GeForce 1(which used super sampled anti-aliasing btw). Good riddance.
Everything's becoming programmable, fixed function DOT3 gave way to the shader controlled normal mapping which spawned the superior parallax mapping and so on.
AA is nothing different, and applying super sampled AA in UE3 IS trivial, just render at whatever AA level you want and down sample it to the final framebuffer.
Just like how it was done in hardware.
No one is doing that though, not because it's hard, but because SSAA sucks from a performance perspective and that's not the fault of using deferred rendering.
" That's not the future, that's not even the case...unless you're using an engine that uses deferred rendering which really is just an outdated rendering technique used to cut corners. "
Not true at all. And what corners would those even be? And what would the better, more modern, solution be? Forward rendering?
"Also, forcing developers to come up with their own AA solution, when the engine should in this day and age already natively support it, isn't a good thing and if that's the future then I'd rather live in the past with better tech."
Fully deferred rendering makes hardware AA obsolete, but that's nothing new or surprising since programmable AA has been pushed by ATi/NVidia since at least 2004 and they're pushing lots of resources into it and is also doing lots of R&D/white papers on new and better ways to use AA in conjunction with deferred rendering.
Realtime graphics has been moving away from fixed hardware functions to programmable solutions for a long time now, and AA is just a part of that.
Given choice and flexibility versus no choice and zero flexibility, I'd take the former and you the latter. Seems weird to me. Why force developers to program their own shaders with the GeForce 3 when they could be fixed function like in the GeForce 2? That's pretty much what you're saying.
I'll have to concede that we've been talking about two different forms of temporal AA. ATi had a poorly named, and quickly abandoned, scheme that used that name but had no relation to what's always been known as temporal aliasing and temporal anti-aliasing.