Unreal Engine capabilities

[Major Lee]

UnReal Engine is simply amazing! It looks like when we're strafing in the weeds, we'll be able to see individual weeds... The level of detail is unreal! 

 

[ArgonV]

I want to see what it looks like from 10000ft up! ;)

[IckyAtlas]

It is impressive however it lacks natural dynamics. 

If we take all the demos where we have vegetation, not one leave moves in a gentle breeze. The jungle environment is photorealistic and impressive, however not one grass moves. It seems like all vegetation is completely frozen. We do see some dynamics like birds flying, flames, smoke, waterfall, leaves falling on the ground but the vegetation, trees, bushes environment is as static as rocks. I will be totally impressed when I will see all this vegetation have some movement according to wind strength and direction.

[Mysticpuma]

Maybe this helps to show scale? Skip forward to the 1 min 36 second mark. 

Or this one to see how many objects can be seen (excuse his cape rippling on the moon 😍) 

 

Edited April 25 by Mysticpuma

[Aapje]

4 hours ago, IckyAtlas said:

It is impressive however it lacks natural dynamics. 

If we take all the demos where we have vegetation, not one leave moves in a gentle breeze. The jungle environment is photorealistic and impressive, however not one grass moves. It seems like all vegetation is completely frozen.

There are ways to create wind effects, but the result is never truly realistic. The effects of wind are pretty complicated, with leaves moving easier than branches, light branches moving more than heavy branches, and each grass blade being affected differently.

It all gets computationally expensive very quickly and thus anything that can actually be run at high FPS is heavily simplified.

I don't see good reason to implement this for a flight sim where you are typically quite far from the vegetation.

 

 

[DaveP63]

Not to mention that unless UE5 does something different with shadows, they are...problematic...with UE4 to be kind. Especially with racing sims they are not good. 

[IckyAtlas]

2 hours ago, Aapje said:

There are ways to create wind effects, but the result is never truly realistic. The effects of wind are pretty complicated, with leaves moving easier than branches, light branches moving more than heavy branches, and each grass blade being affected differently.

Correct but this is connected to physics or to how materials behave upon a given force.

I read about new type of Grafene transistors that will work in the terahertz range and consume a tenth of todays power or even less.

When we have that kind of CPU and GPU then all this will not be a topic and completely dynamic environment with all the physics will be come the standard, a given.

We may see that in about 10 years from now.

[ÆþelrædUnræd]

11 hours ago, Major Lee said:

UnReal Engine is simply amazing! It looks like when we're strafing in the weeds, we'll be able to see individual weeds... The level of detail is unreal!

I think one should be very careful with statements such as "we will be able to" see certain things. Especially when comparing to demo videos that are designed to impress rather than run realistic game loops on a low or mid-range PC.

It's nice to see what Unreal is capable of. However, all of this also needs to be implemented in the game, as well as 3d models made. This takes time and money, not to mention that it eats away at the framerate budget. Given the nature of the game, it may very well be that development effort will be allocated elsewhere.